10 Horrific Horror Movie Scenes You Can’t Unsee

For a horror movie to be a classified as a ‘Horror’ movie, is has to be, well, ‘horrific’. However, some film-makers love to push that envelope and create horror so shocking, so vile, that the term ‘horrific’ becomes a grand understatement.

‘Gory’ cinema goes back as far as the 1960s, with George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead being the first mainstream horror film to feature copious amounts of gore, as well as copious amounts of terror. Since then, the niche market of gory horror movies has flourished to this day, dominating the market in the1980s with the popularity of teen slasher movies.

However, in more recent years, gore cinema has really forced the line of ‘tasteful’ thanks to the advent of better and more realistic special effects, and the phenomenon of people walking out of cinemas because of a gory film has become much more of a commonplace.

Following is a list of some of the more grotesque scenes that exist in horror media. Reader beware: these scenes shock, repulse, and, once seen, cannot be unseen.

Takashi Miike’s 1999 horror film Audition is quite an odd specimen. Based upon the 1997 novel by Ryu Murakami, Audition is an incredibly slow burn as far as horror movies go. The story about a middle-aged widower, Shigeharu Aoyama, holding fake auditions to find a new partner starts off as a black comedy, but as the film goes along, it descends more and more into the dark, depraved world of horror.

However, the climax is all that anybody really talks about when Audition comes up in discussions; where Aoyama is paralyzed by the psychotic woman he falls in love with, Asami. Asami, dressed in a rubber apron, tortures Aoyama in very graphic detail when she finds out that Aoyama has a son. This begins with Asami forcing needles underneath Aoyama’s eyes, and climaxing with her cutting off Aoyama’s leg slowly with piano wire. To this day, the scene is incredibly hard to get through.

What makes this scene worse, however, is the fact that Aoyama is fully awake and, thanks to the drug that Asami slipped him, feels every little thing that happens to him in an excruciatingly intense way. This was enough to inspire a whole new genre of horror: ‘torture porn’, and Audition became incredibly popular in the west because of it. However, its climax is still incredibly hard to watch to this day.