10 Horror Movie Scenes You Didn’t Realise Were Tricking You

Of all the tricks horror films play on you, few will make you feel the level of physical discomfort you experience in Irreversible’s half an hour bombardment. We all know horror is a psychological endeavour; filmmakers can’t reach through the screen and punch us in the face, so how much can they actually do to get a physical reaction out of us?

Obviously there are plenty of parts of the film that may make you physically recoil because of the mental discomfort you experience (and yes, there’s a whole god damn lot of that). Apart from this though, director Gaspar Noe admitted in an interview that he utilised sub-bass sound in the nightclub scene in order to induce physical discomfort in the audience.

As you watch, you likely won’t realise that you’re being tricked into feeling a deep sense of dread, even making your body shake autonomically. The reason for this is that the scene features a continuous frequency of 27Hz, a frequency that elicits such a reaction from humans that police use it to break up riots.

Even with all my contempt for the film and for Gaspar Noe in general, I have to admit that employing that little trick to make a bad scene even worse (in terms of discomfort, of course) was pure genius.