10 God-Awful Scenes In Otherwise Perfect Horror Movies

Fede Alvarez's stunning sophomore feature Don't Breathe is, for the most part, a brilliant piece of minimalist horror.

It takes an incredibly simplistic premise - three thieves burgle a blind man only to discover that he's in fact a ruthless and dangerous killer - and uses it to deliver a stomach-knottingly tense thrill ride filled with outstanding set-pieces that largely avoids unnecessary elaboration and narrative dead-weight.

There is one distracting exception though.

During the film, it turns out that the blind killer (Stephen Lang) is holding a young woman captive in his basement and it's later revealed that he's forcibly impregnated her in order to get a replacement baby after the woman accidentally ran over his daughter. This captive woman (Franciska Torocsik) is accidentally killed by the Blind Man, who later takes protagonist Rocky (Jane Levy) captive in her place and prepares to impregnate her using a turkey baster filled with his essence before one of the other thieves (Dylan Minnette) saves her.

This entire subplot should've been cut. Throwing sexual violence into a film without justification is never a good idea and not only was this whole sequence overly distasteful, it was also a jarring narrative left-turn in what was otherwise an impressively grounded film.

The film also shows viewers an entirely unwated close-up of the Blind Man's semen in the baster, and Rocky using the baster to fill his mouth with it after she's set free - did we really need to see that? Mostly definitely not.