10 Movies That Used Your Imagination Against You
6. The Searchers
John Ford’s iconic Western is both one of the best, and one of the most divisive, films ever made. A later addition to the Western genre, the film is notorious for its depiction of the Comanche people as bloodthirsty monsters, but it’s also a landmark in film history for its masterful staging and near perfect pacing.
These two conflicting views of the film never coalesce more dramatically than in the early unseen raid around which the rest of the plot pivots. Here, the audience is privy to a family preparing for an attack they know they can’t possibly survive, but the raid itself, and all of the murder and worse fates implied therein are never actually seen onscreen.
Many critics and academics have argued that the memory of the Comanche people deserved better than this vilification, but there’s no way to deny how effectively unsettling the raid is. In showing almost nothing, the scene makes for harder viewing than any number of comparable sanitised scenes of PG-rated bloodshed which the genre was then infamous for.