The most disgusting scene in cinema history, according to science
As an eminently malleable art form, cinema has a thousand ways to generate a thousand different emotions in an audience. One of the least desirable is disgust, and thanks to the benefits of science, the most stomach-churning sequence in celluloid history was named and shamed.
Everyone has at least one scene that’s burned into their memory as being so horrific that they never want to see it ever again for as long as they live. In this writer’s case, it’s when Carla Gugino degloves herself in Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation Gerald’s Game, because it’s fucking horrendous and bogging.
However, it doesn’t have to be restricted to horror. Sure, there are plenty of deaths, dismemberments, and decapitations capable of turning stomachs, but there are just as many queasy moments from other genres worthy of consideration.
Whether it’s whatever the fuck is going on in Titane, Solomon eating spaghetti in the bath in Gummo, James Franco hacking his own arm off in 127 Hours, Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, or a bunch of oblivious frat bros wolfing down dog spunk in Van Wilder, the medium is hardly shy of awful, awful things that your eyes will regret ever seeing.
To separate the off-putting wheat from the retch-inducing chaff, science decided to intervene. To do so, an intrepid band of researchers spent five years evaluating over 250 features, showing select footage to a sample size of almost 500 people, and then gauging their responses to the intensity of each sequence.
It takes a brave soul to sign up for that kind of study, especially when they’re almost literally being fed shit. Almost, because it’s not as if the boffins were playing the aeroplane game with a turd on a spoon, but close enough, since John Waters’ Pink Flamingos took the crown for the most disgusting scene in cinema history.
After staring at a blank screen for 30 seconds, so the subjects could “clear your minds of all thoughts, feelings, and memories,” they were shown a further 30 seconds of Divine eating a freshly laid dog jobby, and then when the screen mercifully cut to black, they were asked to rate what they’d seen on from one to eight on a scale of disgust.
With an average rating of 6.45, and with 84.9% of those who witnessed the shit-eating declaring that it disgusted them more than once, Pink Flamingos took the cack-scented cake for being the most disgusting slice of silver screen schlock they’d ever seen.
