2. David Cronenberg In The Fly
Many a director will make the preposterous claim that making a film is like giving birth, but few have paired the comparisons quite so uncomfortably as Cronenberg. For his 1986 remake of the '50s sci-fi shocker, he mixed the maternal nightmare of Rosemary's Baby with the male anxiety of Alien to produce a scene that, even by his standards, is downright disturbing. It's the scene in which journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), girlfriend of our scientist protagonist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), is, indeed, giving birth. The obstetrician, his spectacles peering above a surgical mask, utters the words that could've become the film's shlocky tagline, ''Wait, there's more in there. A lot more...'', before delivering a writhing, bloody larva into the world. Understandably, Quaife isn't best pleased to see such a creature worm its way out of her nether regions, and so it comes as a relief to learn that it was all just a bad dream. The horror is over - but the obstetrician, with those piercing blue eyes, lingers on. This isn't the first cameo from the Baron of Blood (that'd be the 1975 lurid, low-budget Shivers) but it's by far his most memorable.