10 Movie Scenes WAY More Disturbing Than Intended
When the nightmare fuel goes a little TOO hard.
Establishing and maintaining a consistent tone in a movie is much tougher than it looks, requiring filmmakers to keep their eye firmly on the ball during the editorial process to ensure there's no disconnect between their intent and how viewers may interpret a scene.
Yet there are unavoidably times where directors fail to strike the right balance, and in turn deliver scenes which are so much more disturbing, unsettling, and upsetting than intended.
It of course doesn't meant that these scenes weren't meant to make you a little bit uneasy, but it's nevertheless clear that the filmmakers lost sight of where the line was, and didn't appreciate quite how freaked out viewers would be.
And so, as inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the subject, we come to 10 movie scenes which were way more disturbing than anyone involved with their production ever intended.
Some of these scenes were clearly just supposed to be flippant gags, and yet viewers clung to them and their visual trauma, remembering them years or even decades later despite their apparently "throwaway" nature.
As such, no matter what a filmmaker thinks, they can never be 100% sure which scenes audiences will react most viscerally to...
10. Jack Black's Death - Mars Attacks!
Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! is a film jam-packed with willfully uncanny imagery, even if the edges are softened considerably by its generally campy, B-movie-inspired tone.
And so, when Private Billy-Glenn Norris (Jack Black) gets disintegrated by a Martian with a ray-gun, it's thoroughly silly stuff, the gun quickly melting Norris' flesh away to reveal the skeleton beneath in decidedly cartoonish fashion.
But things get considerably bleaker a few seconds later, when Burton cuts to Billy-Glenn's poor parents, who are watching the massacre unfold on live TV and just saw their son get vaporised before their very eyes.
To really hammer home the trauma of the moment, Billy-Glenn's father Glenn (Joe Don Baker) mutters "No, it didn't happen! No, it didn't happen!" while frantically changing the channel on the TV remote.
It's an unexpectedly "real" moment in such an unapologetically ridiculous film, of a father denying that he just witnessed his son get turned to dust.