20 TERRIFYING Scenes In Non Horror Movies
These movies horrified you totally outta nowhere.
Audiences who want to have the living bajesus scared out of them typically flock to the horror genre for their jollies, but of course, horror doesn't have the market cornered on dread-soaked, bone-chilling moments.
But even so, sometimes a film that in no way belongs to the horror genre serves up a scene so nightmarish, so uncanny, that it's ultimately more terrifying than what we've seen in most actual horror movies.
These moments range from bursts of gnarly body horror to unexpectedly brutal, prolonged death, and even surprise jumpscares that caught us all off-guard.
While some of these scenes are at least featured in horror-adjacent genres like thrillers, many are from more down-the-line adventure films and even family-friendly romps - the last place you'd ever expect to see them, basically.
And so, these 20 blood-curdling scenes caught every one of us by surprise, nobody anticipating their grisly creativity, their shock factor, and their all-around willingness to go there.
The lesson here? Even the most innocuous of movies might end up surprising you with something totally god-forsaken that'll keep you awake at night...
20. Circe Turns Men Into Pigs - The Odyssey
The Odyssey confirmed beyond any doubt that Christopher Nolan could make one hell of a horror movie, because among the several genuinely bone-chilling sequences in the movie, there's the already-legendary pig transformation sequence.
When Odysseus' (Matt Damon) men seek refuge with the witch Circe (a brilliant Samantha Morton), she responds to the uninvited intrusion by feeding the men a laced stew which allows her to turn them into pigs.
The nauseatingly prolonged sequence shows Circe moulding their flesh into a porcine form - a marvel of practical effects combining makeup prosthetics, animatronics, and clay-like props which Samantha Morton was able to manipulate live on set.
That Nolan executed such a strikingly tactile sequence without CGI is absolutely jaw-dropping, and in a film with several memorably unsettling set-pieces - namely the Cyclops escape and battle against the giant Laestrygonians - it's the one that most were left talking about.
Fingers crossed we might see Nolan make an out-and-out horror flick in the future, because he'd clearly knock it out of the park.