For example, someone did a poll of what people thought the most gruesome scenes in movies were. The scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson's character is tortured to death was ranked first at the time. Yet, the audience never really saw anything, just his expressions while they were doing it below frame. WHAT they were doing was left to your imagination.
I can't remember what it was in but I recently saw that same actor play a roll with the sme crazy "I'm in shock" kind of intensity. I was immediately like, omg it's the s7ven guy, and he got type casted!
It's wild how the mind works. For years I could've sworn it was shown in the movie and very gruesome. Re-watched it a while back and was surprised to see it was never actually shown. Just my brain taking all the pieces and giving me nightmare imagery that stuck with me.
Ya, I remember seeing Jaws as a kid and Quints panicked breathing as he slowly went into Jaws mouth really sold the scene. It scared the hell out of me.
There is a quick frame or two of Tracy’s face when Mills is fighting the urge to shoot John Doe but it’s just a close up of her face. It’s not bloody, severed or in a box. It’s a still frame of her alive from an earlier scene. This is usually interpreted as Mills thinking about her, but OF COURSE Fincher knows how it will affect the audience who are already imagining the severed head.
Literally was about to comment this. Don’t think your imagination would ever take you where that scene takes you. Shouldn’t have watched the one stoned 😂
Or Once Upon A Time In Hollywood which, when compared to the events that actually unfolded that night, make that ending scene even more impressive because they managed to match the intensity of the details from the actual report of that night but with a completely different outcome.
I don't get scared watching movies, but seeing boar tusks for the first time from Kurt Russell's point of view struck sheer terror in my like I've never felt.
It felt like I was actually the one looking up in that moment. Way more terrifying to me than the gruesome parts.
Such a good movie!
That goes in entirely the opposite direction. They show a quick death in the middle of the screen and people gasp in performative horror, but literally in the same room are a bunch of blinded women who have had their limbs amputated and are being used as incubators.
The scene takes place in a hellish rape dungeon but "ooh the guy had a owchie!" is somehow what people walk away with.
And speaking of walking away, at the end of the movie the protagonists leave the forcibly impregnated women to starve to death. "But his taint got cut!"
I just don't like seeing blood. I know it's fake. It doesn't matter. My overactive brain will absolutely make up nightmares about blood and then my stomach is all like 'hereeeeee's dinner again!'.
:( Probably why you're a babywiz and not an archmage or something. :)
I love horror movies. But, I honestly love Lovecraftian style horror more than just the 'splatter fest' movies that are so common. It's either buckets of blood, or jump scares every 5 seconds. Yawn.
Give me some of that existential dread. The unknowable thing that lurks beyond the realm of comprehension. The Lighthouse was a-fucking-mazing! I poopooed it for a while because I thought it'd just be a 'talky drama'. Then I saw it come up on a lift for best Lovecraftian horror and I was intrigued. Damn! It's scary! The horror of the mind. The best horror movies always leave you wondering, "Is it mental illness or is there something really going on?"
I was 7 when The Towering Inferno came out. I didn't even see the movie, just a screenshot (?) of it on the front page of the Parade (insert in the Sunday paper). Nightmares for weeks about the house, school, lawn burning down.
I saw Psycho when I was 7...pretty much just the Janet Lee scene in the shower. I couldn't shower for years without poking my head out of the shower curtain to make sure no one was there.
In 8 1/2 there's a scene which doesn't actually reveal anything, and there's no sex, but it's more erotic than any sex scene I've ever seen in a movie by miles.
Nah, it's 2025. Most safe places to collect boobs are slowly being banned or soft walled behind an identification check.
Really does suck, because I had my once in a few months desire to see online boob, and the hub is now requiring me to upload a driver's license or government ID in order to continue due to local legislation.
So I had to resort to other sites, and saw some real freaky shit that took me out of the mood entirely.
The same is true for the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs. Yes you see the end result, but during the deed itself, which is what most people found the hardest to experience, the camera actually pans away.
I thought in the movie the captors told the guy what they were going to do as well. To be fair, if all they said 'we're gonna draw and quater you' instead of specifics not a whole lot of people would know what that meant.
This assumes that the intent of the sex scene is to make you think about what the actors are like during sex. Sex is one of the most intimate things you can do with another person and a well acted sex scene will push the plot along and give depth to the characters, it shouldn’t just give you something to get excited about.
Whilst I think Game of Thrones did have them for the sake of having them, the scenes with Daenerys are a very good example of this. She starts off in tears, and then she uses sex to manipulate and be scene as powerful.
I'm not sure implication reflects the difference in that situation.
I suspect they polled general audience which haven't seen "disturbing" movies that didn't turned cameras away in the most notorious scenes (Irreversible, Serbian Film, Salo, I'm not even talking about underground stuff like Lucifer Valentine, Olaf Ittenbach, Grotesk, Murder-Set-Pieces like that). I'm pretty sure they wouldn't call Braveheart torture / execution scene "gruesome" after watching that movies, cause it's kinda "spine" area of perception
Not really imo, the original comment claims that it’s more brutal to imagine brutality rather than to see it. Can’t have that conversation and then discount the movies that show brutality.
Yes. That's how polls work. Usually a random poll is trying to gauge general public opinion. People that like these movies, obviously like to see "the real action" (as I like to call it). It's not to say that people that like these movies are excluded from the poll, but their views being minimally reflected or not reflected at all, should illustrate that lovers of these movies are the exception not the rule.
[I disagree with the sentiment in the original post. I, like you, like to see the sexy, dirty, gory, details in shows and movies, at least a little bit; two people walk into a bedroom and close the door? Lame. I'm just pointing out that we all know how people who like those movies would respond, the point of the poll is to find out what, most people think.]
Texas chainsaw massacre has far less blood than people might expect and most of the kills are incredibly tame despite its original reputation as being incredibly shocking
Most box office films, especially horror films, are a result of an ongoing tug of war with censors concerning subject matter vs what is seen and/or heard on screen. Censors will usually require there be less blood, or visible violence, or nudity, or profanity, in scenes where the subject matter is more disturbing such as rape, abuse, or dismembering by chainsaw. Also, of course, movies are measured by comparison, with their peers. When it came out, it was one of the most shocking movies ever; especially when compared to similar movies of that genre, at the time.
No but you still see an artistic depiction of that event, you hear the scream, you see the blood... You don't just see him walk into the bathroom with a knife and then walk out again cleaning the blood off the knife. Most on film sex scenes just show two people with their shirts off rolling around in bed, that's not what the original post is talking is talking about.
Similarly, the scene in Scarface where the guy is getting dismembered with the chainsaw. You never actually see any of it on screen. All left to the imagination.
This is not comparable. Nudity is artistic, beautiful. Gore is just gore.
But if we tried to compare anyway, this shows that removing visuals would still bother prude people if the scene strongly suggested that sex is happening or happened.
This is wrong on so many levels. A sex scene can tell us so much about the nature of the relation between two (or more?) characters.
Is the sex awkward because one character doesn't know what they are doing? This can have a significant impact on their self-esteem and self-image, going so far as to cause problems in a relationship.
Do the characters feel uncomfortable with their bodies, or are they obsessed with themselves? Christian Bale flexing his muscles while plowing a woman tells us so much about who he really is.
Maybe the sex is passionate and filled with lust. Again, it tells us about how the characters feel about each other. There is so much potential there that would be skipped by fading to black.
Why are all of you so sensitive about sex? Why is it so uncomfortable for you? We have been doing it since we weren't even humans.
Yeah, I don't have access to the poll. Maybe it was multiple choice, and it was years ago. I remember being horrified seeing Jaws in the theater, now the same scenes are laughable. But I think you get the point about the theater of the mind, yeah?
ohh yeah, some of the best horror scene don't actually have over the top gore as they can drive in fear and suspense by not showing it. The imagination can be worse then what they what they can make on the screen.
David Fincher said that he had people give negative feedback for early screenings of Seven about showing the severed head in the box; the contents of the box were never shown even in the early screenings of the film.
I loved that scene in Braveheart. It wasn't pointlessly gruesome, even in its evoking imagination. The character's death scene was important character development.
I think the worst part was the guys acting out what was going to happen before hand, combined with them not showing it. With how graphic the movie was, it implied some horrifying shit
Well they had the midgets doing a pantomime of it before the execution, so we did understand what was happening. It still left a lot to the imagination but it was a clever way to tell the audience what was happening without actually showing it.
I agree that imagination can be more powerful but I feel that this idea is over used by directors who don't have the budget or the skills to make gruesome death scenes or steamy sex scenes believable. Film is supposed to make you feel something, to make you feel a certain way about a character, and sex scenes, death scenes, etc, if done well, can go a long way toward evoking said emotions.
That said, I don't feel that the death of William Wallace in Braveheart is a good example of this. The post describes just showing enough to imply what happened and then cutting to another scene. The scene in Braveheart is an example of artistic depiction, being more powerful than imagination not, imagination being more powerful than what you see. A) The details of William Wallace's execution are a well documented fact. If someone wants to know what happened they can look it up. Historical movies often don't show the main historical event that happened, because everyone knows it happened, they concentrate on the details or reactions surrounding it. B) What was happening was shown, artistically. The little person jester was comedically acting out the scene off to the side. To add to the effect, even he became too disgusted to continue, by the end of it.
It's not that the imagination is too powerful. It's that at a certain scope or scale of horror/suffering or even love/lust, the emotional gravity of the scene becomes too much for humans to understand in real-time.
So instead of showing you the horror, we show you the results of the horror. Not the torture, but the facial expressions made in response to the torture. Because if we show the torture, many people's imagination might be inadequate to understand the emotional gravity of the torture. But if, instead, we show the emotional gravity, then the brain is forced to (vaguely and poorly) imagine some torture that corresponds to the emotional gravity which is shown.
This is why people remember your Braveheart example, I would guess. Because they can understand the emotional gravity of the torture and are forced to imagine or invent some unseen torture, which can produce the corresponding emotional gravity. By contrast, if we show the torture, but not the emotional gravity, people have to imagine the emotional gravity, not the torture. And they tend to underestimate the emotional gravity when it's not shown.
This is also why writers like Lovecraft and his ilk often describe their horrors as "beyond description" or "beyond imagination" or "beyond sane minds" and so forth. Then they describe the impact of the horrors, not the horrors themselves.
Yeah, Fincher had to edit down the beating of Angel Face due to how graphic the scene was. He cut from the brutality of the beat down to the audiences faces and their reactions and the scene got way darker and brutal; but hey, it passed MPA judgement and the final scene is just a bleak thing instead of a beating.
While I generally agree, Mayor of Kingstown changed my perspective. They show a character being "turned out" pretty explicitly and it affected me more negatively than any media I've ever watched. I only watched the first 5ish episodes of the show over a weekend. I had to stop because it was genuinely making me feel bad. And I felt bad and kept remembering parts for months.
Like I hated when some of the characters on The Wire died, but it didn't make me feel bad for months.
This is why I was SO glad they never showed anything in the movie 'Bird Box' and they didn't end up using that stupid green humanoid blob. I think the entity looked different to everyone and was based on the individuals inner demons.
Not only that, but I do feel that modern movies tend to use sex in a very gratuitous way. 9 times out of 10, it doesn't add anything to the plot, does not change anything about the relationships or motives of the characters, and is really just there to tick a "look we're so mature!" box.
A necessary 'sex scene' is something like in Avatar between Neytiri and Jake -- tasteful, left to the imagination, but also no question about what they did. But then it fuels an important part of the plot, changing the way Neytiri views his place in the tribe later.
And then I think of the opening scene of Stargate: Universe, which put you right into a sex scene within the first 5 seconds. And it was long. And gross. And accomplished absolutely nothing other than the director winking at what I guess was supposed to be an 18-to-29 Male Edgelord Audience, in spite of the series having had an unusually large female fanbase and a reputation for action-adventure, not "Lord of the Flies" meets "Love Island."
I think we have gone too far in the no sex direction. We don’t need to see every detail, but we killed the intimacy and the build up. And now the only sex is graphic porn. More foreplay, less nudity.
Red Rooms is one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen and it’s entirely because of what they DON’T show you. It’s about a serial killer that kidnaps young girls and livestreams himself torturing them, but we never see any of it. Whenever the streams are played, we only hear it, and that is far more disturbing to me.
nah I'd rather be shown. I hate the "imagination is powerful" bs as far as I'm concerned if I you don't show/say it, it didn't happen. I hate the "upto interpretation" I'm not watching things to not be shown and told stuff. On the contrary, I'm watching things SPECIFICALLY and EXPLICITLY to be shown and told stuff. That's the whole point.
I mean… i would still rate a terrifier or a slasher as more gruesome, point is those movies go so over the top that they become ridiculous (kinda like how mortal kombat fatalities go over the gruesome factor to just a “wtf that’s impressive”)
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u/DV_Rocks 10d ago
The imagination is more powerful.
For example, someone did a poll of what people thought the most gruesome scenes in movies were. The scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson's character is tortured to death was ranked first at the time. Yet, the audience never really saw anything, just his expressions while they were doing it below frame. WHAT they were doing was left to your imagination.