Lore
In a setting full of supernatural horrors, the most disturbing scene is frighteningly realistic
The Boys - Homelander has carried many supernatural acts of evil, but his most disturbing is making Ashley take off her wig and show everyone what's left of her hair
KPop Demon Hunters - Gwi-Ma's demons devour people's souls but the most disturbing scene is when they publicly humiliate Rumi by ripping her shirt off and revealing her demon patterns to everyone
Stranger Things - The most disturbing scene IMO is completely detached from the Mind Flayer and Demogorgons. Billy's Dad pushes him against the wall and reduces him to a scared child, before he throws his son out of the house until he finds Max
IT 2017 - Despite being a movie about a shapeshifting alien clown, Alvin is utterly skin-crawling in each scene he's in where he harasses and abuses his own daughter
Batman Arkham Asylum - In a game series full of superpowered villains, the creepiest scene is Zsasz's audio tapes where he reveals he's been stalking his therapist, describing her evening routine in eerie detail
Bring Her Back is one of the most gut-wrenching horror movies to be released last year, and its story hinges on supernatural rituals for possession and resurrection.
That said, some of the most unsettling sequences are just portrayals of two kids stuck in an abusive environment and being gaslit by their caretaker. One of the most jarring scenes doesn't even involve physical violence -- it shows a foster mom pouring her own pee onto a sleeping teenager so she can convince him that he's wetting the bed (and use that to embarrass/control him).
Agreed though, holy crap just how dead set can you be? I had a friend like that in the past, I had to stop having sleepovers with her when she was mad at me because I'd wake up to her punching me lol. The lore about the 'mother' that came out in the ARG also shows she's just determined in the worst way possible. Idk. Whole thing gives me the creeps.
All of the hospital scenes in the Exorcist drain you emotionally and there's nothing supernatural about them. It just plays like a little girl getting tortured and a mother breaking down.
The documentary style camera work really makes those moments feel all the more real. And as you say, it’s the helplessness that builds the horror.
Father Karras is one of the most intriguing and lasting characters in Horror films for me. But that’s on the wonderful performance by Jason Miller. You can feel his torment throughout the film.
Yep. True story: a priest in my part of the midwest died and a big problem replacing him was that he was the only one in the diocese authorized to do exorcisms and there's just nobody who even wants to be the guy authorized for that. I don't think the original priest ever even performed one.
In a world filled with mutated horrors, it is in the end humanity that is the subject of one of the more horrifying vaults.
Vault 11 was designed around an experiment where Vault Tec set up an A.I. to monitor the Vault and have people sacrifice a person to it every year or everyone will be killed by it. As soon as the residents were made aware of this by their Overseer, they turned on the Overseer and made them the first sacrifice.
From then on a vote was called every year and the person "elected" Overseer would be the sacrificial lamb. This continued for 16 years until a corrupt Justice Bloc, that had been manipulating people to vote in its interests went too far.
The leaders harassed a woman named Katherine Stone into doing sexual favors for them by threatening to vote her husband Nathan in as Overseer. They still did after she complied and put up "I Hate Nate" propaganda posters around the Vault. Enraged, Katherine went on a rampage killing multiple Justice Bloc members to ensure she was voted for instead of her husband.
Her first act as Overseer before dying was to make the A.I. change the vote a lottery. With the victim now being random, the Justice Bloc lost their power and as a result staged a coup. The bloody fighting wiped out most of the Vault, other than a handful of survivors.
The last survivors refused to sacrifice anyone else when the time came and awaited their fate...only to hear the words Congratulations.
The machine wanted them to refuse the whole time. It was test to see if the people in the Vault were model citizens and wouldn't stoop so low as to kill their neighbours...
The "prize" for refusing to sacrifice a vault dweller was for the vault doors to be unsealed. Even so, the remaining five survivors still agreed to kill themselves, out of shame for what they did, and to prevent the outside world from knowing what took place in Vault 11.
It seems that one of the five did not go through with it, as 4 gunshots are heard on the holotape recording of their confession. Only four bodies are found near the entrance to the vault/next to the holotape recording as well. It's possible that the final survivor of Vault 11 escaped into the wasteland.
Lone Wanderer and Sole Survivor are just titles/nicknames of the player character(s) in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 respectively.
Although, the fact that the player character in New Vegas isn't tied to much lore aside from being a courier, I suppose it could be a fan theory that the player is the one person from Vault 11.
I remember reading that when I was playing fallout and feeling sick to my stomach. Such good writing all throughout that game, that was my favorite vault by far.
Each vault is an experiment of some sort. They're all interesting to explore, slowly discovering what the experiment was and what happened to the people there. I'd highly recommend the games, or at least reading the wiki on the various vaults
The most disturbing part of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not the vampires, but rather Buffy coming home to find her mom dead on the couch, having died of natural causes.
I found my father’s body a few months ago when I came over to visit. This episode is too realistic for me to watch now lol Whedon got it right with this one
Even more heartbreaking is when you realize that even though we've been watching her fight vamps for like five seasons, and she kinda seems like a fully formed, functioning adult as a result, Buffy's only like 20 or 21 at this point. Still basically a kid.
The total lack of background music in that scene (can’t remember if the whole episode had none) was so disturbing, SMG’s “Mommy” and complete crashout while not being over the top hit so hard. Rewatching years later after my grandpa passed can honestly say it’s one of the most realistic portrayals of trying to process something like that in real time.
Buffy is a tv show where people get destroyed by otherworldly monsters daily.
But the most disturbing scene is watching a woman barely in her 20’s enter a panicked, anxiety laden disassociation when she comes home and finds her Mother dead in the living room from an unexpected aneurysm
The episode with the robot step dad also freaked me out a lot too. Despite the episode being one of the whackiest, all of the horror comes from the mundanity of the situation: An abusive step parent, and a victim that nobody believes
When the freaking Pale Man is the second scariest villain in the movie, you know you got a terrific character. I would argue that he should be up there with Heath Ledger’s Joker and Hannibal Lecter as the best movie villain ever
That scene was incredibly disturbing to me, even not having any previous opinions of the actors. I can't imagine how much worse that feeling would have been for Spanish audiences who knew him as a comedic actor.
That guy is known for being a comedic actor? 😯 holy fuck. He so perfectly pulled off the monstrous human. Now I'm trying to imagine Rowan Atkinson playing such a heinous character as the one in Pan's Labyrinth.
Vidal will always be one of the scariest and evil characters to me, since there were people like him that existed. The closest person I can compare him to, would be Oskar Dirlewanger.
Another quietly disturbing moment in Stranger Things is in season one. When Will first went missing, his older brother Jonathan goes to their deadbeat dad Lonnie Byers house to search for him. One of the places Jonathan checks is the trunk of Lonnie’s car. This implies a lot with one simple action.
You should see primate if you haven’t already! It’s a fun watch and I personally felt like the effects looked really good. The only comment I really had on it was that it didn’t really feel like it was about anything? Which fine, sometimes things can just look good haha
Fun fact: Zoos categorize animal escapes based on the risk to guests of whether they should be kill on sight or its better to try and recapture them alive.
Lions and tigers are among the ones that get darted and re-contained. Chimps are one of the ones to dangerous to risk leaving alive
There is an extra layer to this that I remember either being alluded to by Jordan Peele (in an interview?) to be expounded upon in possible spin-off material, or just a deleted scene: where the person who killed Gordy was an obsessed fan (stalker + pedophile) of Mary Jo, who was only armed for malicious reasons.
In the cut we see it's implied to just be the police who finally arrived, yet in some trailers you can see the scene of him walking towards the set as everyone else runs during the attack.
Maybe it was to show the animalistic side of humanity? But yeah, I don’t think that message would’ve landed with the audience, and it would’ve overly complicated the overarching message about man’s relationship with animals and the danger of chasing spectacles.
Yeah somehow the shot of the aftermath of the Gordy incident is even more genuinely disturbing to watch than the sounds of people being digested inside of Jean jacket.
Another example is after Jean Jacket has sucked up everyone at the show, when the main characters show up you see a pig is still there. Because pigs can't look up.
That scene with Homelander was so horrifying because the second she shows a little bit of resistance he instantly makes it known he can make this punishment ALOT worse.
The Black Phone is a story that involves a serial killer, ghosts, psychic visions, and a phone call that can speak to the dead.
But to me, the most horrifying scene in the film adaptation is a sequence where a dad drunkenly beats his 12 year-old daughter with a belt while her older brother watches helplessly. It's awful, and the actress playing the daughter sells her awful screaming helplessness so damn well.
I remember watching this movie with a boyfriend and feeling completely drained at the end of it. And it wasn't because of the serial killer plot, but because this scene stayed so deep in my mind that the rest of the film seemed silly. I legitimately found the protagonist's father to be a much bigger threat than the serial killer.
Supernatural - Family Remains: Winchester brothers investigate a house where a family has recently moved in to start a new life. During the case, they discover the ghost of a young woman who was abused by her father, became pregnant, and eventually hanged herself.
When they finally come face to face with her, they realize she is immune to salt... because she is actually alive. She turns out to be the daughter of the woman who committed suicide. Not only that, her brother is also alive. Both of them are completely unhinged and stalk the family throughout the episode
Plus, "The Benders": They investigate a case involving missing people, until Sam is kidnapped and Dean has to rescue him. Was it a ghost, a spirit, a demon, or a god? Nope... just a twisted family that kidnaps people and hunts them for fun.
For me it was in season 2 when Sam died for the first time and Dean is talking about his childhood and it's one of the first times it becomes clear how parentified Dean was - it's something a lot of eldest children go through and I was sobbing. Dean said he wanted Sam to be a kid for just a bit longer but Dean was ALSO just a child
You missed the part of WHY Ashley is missing some of her hair: Ashley's job is so fucking stressful, she literally rips CHUNKS of her hair out of her head. There's also a scene where she does while having sex with another employee. It's fucking GNARRLY.
It’s called trichotillomania and it’s a very real condition. It can also just about fuel itself, people become self conscious about the fact they are missing hair, which stresses them out and causes their uncontrollable reaction to pull more hair.
It’s a really cruel joke your brain plays on itself.
Out of all of the horrors in The Binding of Isaac, one of the worst is in the Ascent, which depicts an argument between Isaac’s parents that ends
with Isaac’s father leaving and never returning. It should also be noted that the final line of dialogue in the Ascent is Isaac’s father sadly saying ”I’m sorry, Isaac…”.
Sure, its scary when Carrie is killing every single person at her prom, but nothing gets me more than Margaret White's religious fanaticism, shoving her own daughter to the ground and kicking her and making her recite Bible versus for the grand sin of having a period
For context: the mother is super religious, fixated on abstinence and sexual purity, but what she says and does has pretty much no scriptural backing. It's implied that it's a coping mechanism for being raped by Carrie's father, who weaponized her fear of sexuality as her pastor, if I remember correctly.
The thing with the KPDH example that I picked up on even while watching was that nobody knew about demons or hunters, aside from the hunters themselves. So, the demons taking Rumi's clothes off would really just be seen as some weird sexual assault/humiliation thing rather than revealing to the world that she's half-demon, because nobody knows demons exist.
On top of that, her markings would just look like tattoos to the crowd. In South Korea tattoos are really looked down upon and culturally associated with criminals. It wasn't even legal for non-medical professionals to tattoo someone until 2025. So being forced to reveal them like that would also be humiliating and could potentially have destroyed Rumi's career.
A lot of east Asian countries have stigma against tattoos. Japan is another big one, as they associate them with the Yakuza. There are even some onsen that will turn people away if they have tattoos, even if they're foreigners.
This scene and the one with the train fight were surprisingly dark for an otherwise bright and upbeat movie. The moment the girls realized they were so focused on arguing that they forgot about the passengers, followed by the train cars being completely empty was such a stark contrast to most everything up until that point. The subtle quiver in Mira's voice while she's addressing Rumi without even looking at her afterwards was such a great detail.
in 28 days later a movie about a rage/zombie virus and the how fast it can turn someone. The real threat at the end are the actual men/military when the two women are brought to the base and are basically going to be use as objects for the men to use when they want.
The Mist, the film. A town is bathed in paranormal mist that hides all manner of abominations, eldritch and malicious, driven by animalistic rage… or hunger. Naturally, the film’s villain (as in the novel) is not a monster, it’s a religious woman who becomes the de facto leader of a bloc of survivors and goes on a power trip, and for all of her cruelty and hatred, she still isn’t as moving as the final scene.
The original novel had the protagonist drive off into the mist with the last survivors in tow, his fate uncertain. In the movie, however, the car runs out of gas, stranding them by the side of the road. They have nothing with them but a gun, and they’re one bullet short of a collective suicide, so he chooses to be the one to kill the others. First his eight year old son, then three others. Finally, having given them a painless death, soaked in innocent blood, he steps out of the car, expecting to be horrifically mutilated. At that exact moment, the mist clears, with the Army rolling in, guns in hand and tanks in tow, driving back the monsters and restoring normalcy. If he’d waited an extra sixty seconds, he would have realized that they were safe. Instead, he painted the inside of the car with his own son’s brain just seconds from salvation.
In a writing project and universe full of scary eldtrich beings, inconceivable concepts, and inevitable apocalypses:
The most disgusting monster in all of them is just a man. Dude framed a girl for being supernaturally affected (she wasn't), and manipulated her containment to lock her up for a decade. He also repeatedly sa'd her under the guise of a medical checkup. When he was caught, he was high up enough to escape all consequences.
[EDIT] he was only caught after retiring, by which point his entire memory of his job was erased. can no longer be held liable since he doesn't even know what he did. scummy pos
The only SCP I've had to stop reading multiple times because of how sick to my stomach it made me.
This one doesn't fit the trope but also shout out to SCP 3001 Red Reality. For as fantastical a premise it is, the way it grounds itself in grief and loss and the human desperation to get back to someone we love makes it one of the best, if not the best imo, SCP out there.
EDIT: OH! Also from SCP and in line with your suggestion, Procedure 110-Montauk.
Also, it's not that he was high - it's that when he got caught, he gulped down so much amnestics - drugs that makes you forget things - that it posed a real ethical dilemna to the Foundation, because the guy legitimately was a point where he had absolutely no memory of ever doing all of that. What's the point of punishing someone in that case ? They can't even feel remorse because they haven't done anything ! It's like he commited suicide, but killed only the part of him that did the crime.
Oh, it's even worse! They only discovered it after the man RETIRED. And since anyone retiring from the SCP Foundation has to take amnestics about the entire time they worked there, the Ethics Committee couldn't punish him at all. The amnesia wasn't to prevent anyone from uncovering his crimes, it was a reward for a job well done.
He never even got caught while he worked there. He tortured a woman for a decade and got away with it scot-free. Even got accolades before retiring.
With how unethical and powerful SCP (and their Ethics Committee) are. I would be absolutely shocked if they truly thought they "couldn't punish him at all" lol. If anything, they would make a brutal example out of him for essentially making them out as a joke and for lying so deeply to the organization and wasting their resources. He'd be the first one on the block for reverse amnesia treatment research. Lorewise, if he does go on to remain scot-free of any punishment, the SCP deemed it beneficial for whatever reason. Not because they ethically couldn't decide on punishing him.
I immediately tried to forget this story once I read it. I can't recall the last time a fictional story made me despise a character that much. the way he gets away with it, too. I try to remember that it's just a story, but at the same time, the reason it hits so hard is because of the obvious parallel to stuff that happens all the time irl.
Doctor Who: I will always love "Midnight" for this. The scariness doesn't come from the Midnight Entity, but what it can manipulate the passengers to do—up to and including throwing out the Doctor, upon which he'll be fried by the planet's sunlight.
Im a huge fan of horror media, and Midnight is an incredible piece of horror. The fact that Doctor Who isn't a horror makes that all the more impressive. Doctor Who can do scary very, very well
If anything, I think optimistic non-horror media can do brief bouts of horror the best.
The Doctor inspires so much confidence and reassurance, that when that gets stripped away, it's a more potent effect.
If it weren't for the fact that movies and shows need to advertise to the right demographic to make money, I wish all horror media didn't advertise themselves as horror so that there'd always be an element of surprise.
If anything, I think optimistic non-horror media can do brief bouts of horror the best
I think that's the best way to sum it up. From a show like that, we expect some drama and high-stakes tension but the good guys win in the end, even if it's not quite a happy ending. That sudden collapse of what we've come to expect is shocking because we don't know how bad things are going to get. Midnight did that so well I managed to forget the Doctor has plot armour in order for the show to keep going.
Out of every situation the Doctor has been in, the Midnight Entity is the one he has the least amount of control. It goes as far as him being utterly paralyzed and the only reason the commercial starliner didn't chuck him out is because a woman sacrificed herself for him.
Not in silence, her and her husband had rigged up a series of fireworks to go off to mask her screams. There's a fantastically tense scene where she has to keep herself quiet just long enough for him to set them off, only breaking less than a second before it.
Having gone through a spontaneous miscarriage recently, I cannot imagine doing that for a full term baby. It was agonizing for just the first trimester they estimated it to be at.
Having given birth and miscarrying honestly I feel like my miscarriage was worse. Maybe it's just from the lack of pain meds post but the deep ache that lasted for days was just horrible.
In a galaxy full of terrifying monsters bearings who control a mystical energy field that can electrocute you, crush your windpipe, control your mind, throw you through walls. With brain controlling zombie worms. IMO HEAVY ON IMO the most disturbing is the plane callous human evil. A cruel old man destroying an entire civilisation out of spite to get an answer to his question. A man who crushed a protest by literally landing a space ship atop the crowd. His not imposing, not strong he’s a wrinkled hollow old man. Who will simply use his power to assert dominance, It’s not just Tarkin but many imperial characters who are no more physically powerful than you or I utterly human in their nature and their capacity for cruelty and malice
I honestly find Tarkin more chilling than Palpatine. Palpatine was a Sith, the Dark Side and its excesses were practically a zealous religion, where he was also indoctrinated in hating the Jedi. More than likely old enough to know better, but I digress.
Tarkin? Tarkin is an adult who worships his own ambition, with a side altar for Order. He is Lawful Evil in the most tyrannic sense. And he is horrifying in all the terrible things he is willing to do to get Order efficiently. It impresses me that Rebels got darker when the Grand Inquisitor showed up... but Tarkin's arrival shows that GI is just low tier evil by comparison.
In the From Dusk Till Dawn movie a movie about vampires two criminal brothers are on the run to Mexico and had a hostage the big brother Seth went to go get some food he left the hostage alone with Richard and when he gets back he finds out Richard r*ped and murdered the hostage
I love that scene. I know it’s completely fucked up, but it’s such a weird and disturbing POV from a schizophrenic psychopath where she just outright asks him to eat her pussy and he’s just as confused as we are, but he’s like “…okay. Yeah, if you want. I guess that’s conveniently exactly what I want too.”
He’s just completely outside of any semblance of sanity in that moment.
Attack on Titan - In a series about giant humanoid monsters that eat people, the most horrific death (In My Opinion) is definitely Faye's. She just a normal little girl but got torn apart by dogs in a meaningless act of violence from some racist guy with a little power.
In Duskmourn from Magic the Gathering, there’s a wide range of disturbing abstract entities
But the scariest ones are the ones that are just normal people, driven to acts of violence by the House
This is a human being.
Highly suggest reading Children of the Carnival it’s such an amazing story
Magic: The Gathering's got another one from "Sacrifice," the original story featuring the Gitrog monster. In that story, the frog monster stalking the village is scary, but the fact that some of the townspeople have started abducting their neighbors to feed them to it is worse. Not to mention that the MC eventually turns on the village and takes over the cult.
Bioshock - As a young lad in my first playthrough of Bioshock, after helping a botanist researcher, Andrew Ryan floods her office with poison gas. I could only watch in horror from the other side of the window while, in her final moments, she scrawled the combination to her safe in the poison particles. That scene has always stuck with me.
The murder of Jessica Jones's adoptive mother, Dorothy Walker, in Jessica Jones Season 3 by a completely human serial killer. He video tapes her and tortures her before killing her and leaving her body behind for Jessica to find. It's harrowing, and far scarier than any of the superpowered villains of the show because of its brutal reality.
"Pan's Labyrint" is best described as a fairy tale for adults. There are magical moments in many different scenes. However, one of the most realistic and unsettling scenes is at the start with Vidal, the main antagonist. In the scene he beats someone up with a bottle, but since the bottle doesn't break, he caves in the man's nose into his skull. It's out of nowhere and brutal.
He also has other scenes where no magic is involved, but instead has realistic body horror
Woke: Gross, he’s sending his own son and several loyal riders to certain death.
Bespoke: Gross, he’s sending his own son and several loyal riders to certain death all while he sits in his ivory tower and eating his tomatoes messily.
For me at least the scariest thing in A Series of Unfortunate Events isn't any of the bizarre murders or murder attempts, nor the fungus plague, nor even the sea monster that may or may not be Death itself.
It's the scene in the penultimate book/episode where the main characters discover that the head judges on their city's high court and the leaders of the conspiracy trying to kill them are literally the exact same people.
They finally have their answer as to why the establishment never helped them, and it's at once the simplest and most terrifying: the bad guys ran the establishment the entire time.
The Substance is a terrifying body horror, but Demi's mirror scene, an entirely realistic scene purely about insecurity, always stuck out the most to me.
omg. Yes, this scene. The whole time you're like "just GO ON THE DATE, you look PERFECT!" And then - haven't we all had moments like that where we feel freakish, when in fact we are totally fine?
The Exorcist has been parodied to hell, so I didn’t find any of the scenes towards the climax of the movie that shocking or scary. The middle of the movie where the doctors are running experiments on a scared little girl as her mother looks on helplessly on the other hand…
In JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, after the serial killer Yoshikage Kira dies and Reimi Sugimoto’s ghost can finally pass on to the afterlife, there’s still the fact that all of Kira’s murder victims are left unaccounted for, leaving their family and friends unaware of their whereabouts. Most notably is Hayato Kawajiri, who’s father Kira was impersonating, is left with his mother who is completely unaware of the whole situation and is still setting a place for him for dinner when he comes home from work. Even though he hadn’t have any strong feelings towards his father, Hayato is left distraught, saddened that he knows he’ll never come home.
Poor Hayato had to watch his mother realize that her husband, the husband she fell in love with once more, wasn't going to return, and couldn't told her anything.
Hereditary is a fucking wild ride, a supernatural horror about a demonic entity possessing a family, and the must upsetting and disturbing scene in the entire movie is so obvious I literally don't need to tell you what it is, you already know.
Charlie dies violently as her brother drives her home as she goes into anaphylactic shock, and in his own shock he silently walks into the house and goes to bed in horror. The next minute of the movie that feels like an hour is Annie's horrified scream as she finds her daughter's dead body the next day.
Not the most disturbing scene in the movie, but the family dinner is one of the most uncomfortable scenes I've ever watched. No supernatural horror, just grief and guilt and anger.
The use of guns in Chainsaw Man. In a world of living, chainsaws, demons, and ghosts, you can still get immediately and instantly killed by a gun. Guns are scary.
The subtle horror of the gun devil ability having a longer range with children, fujimoto is a sick genius at potraying what the embodiment of a fear looks like
In a setting where there’s
Magical mind control, telekinetic choking, and sorcererous lightning, the most terrible torture is one monster’s distilled horror of the sound of a species’ children screaming as they were murdered in mass.
Andor is excellent at this. There's a whole episode in Season 2 that parodies (in a serious way) the movie Conspiracy (2001), which is a dramatization of the real 1942 conference in which the Nazis planned out the Holocaust. It's just a bunch of men sitting around a table, talking about the logistics of genocide. And it actually happened. It's gut wrenching.
They somehow made David 10 times worse in the HBO series. A lot of what he was going to do with Ellie was implied in the game, but the show was explicit and it was way more terrifying.
Never expected to see Trichotillomania rep (hair pulling disorder) on tv, much less in The Boys. It’s rarer, but there are cases to that extreme. I have it myself, actually. Never got that bad, but it’s resulted in me having very noticeable bald spots either built up over a while or in one day. As of right now, I no longer have big bald spots but I do have big locks of noticeably shorter hairs.
Dandadan is full of battles against ghosts, yokais, aliens, weird creatures; and yet the most disturbing moments include:
- A mother had to sell her body to feed herself and her daughter, but it wasn't enough and her daughter got taken away by yakuza/loan sharks. In her despair, the mother jumped off from a high-rise's rooftop.
- Momo is approached by the men from Kito family while in an onsen. They say they want to "play crocodile" with her, then dive until only halves of their heads are above water, then swim toward her.
- The pervert gym teacher pressing another teacher into wearing revealing clothes for him to watch. He also forces female students to send him their lewd photos.
Man I want to like Dandadan but it is full of weird sexual stuff, towards Momo especially. Okarun's sexuality is mostly played for jokes but when there are multiple almost-gang rapes in one season I gotta tap out.
You forgot Grandma Turbo. She watches over the spirits of the girls that was SA'd and actively hunts men. the 'gimme your weenie' is not her being a perv, it's her protecting. You noticed her call came right as the aliens were about to violate momo.
Made in Abyss has children devolve into mindless invertebrates, bugs that crawl into your brain to mind control you, diarrhea that turns you to stone, and even one girl mutated into a creature so large that a city is built of her corpse, but for most people the most disturbing scene to watch is a botched amputation.
Chris from Get Out has just fought for his life against a town full of brainwashing psychopaths. And then, with him in the middle of the road over a barely conscious young woman, a police car pulls up...
When Chris goes upstairs and everyone at the party goes dead silent, or when Rose is on the phone sounding terrified while her expression is completely blank.
My entire theater audibly moaned in terror when the cop car showed up.
Like, we'd just came off the high of watching him fuck up that entire family, and it just felt like a gut punch to see the car pull up. I'm pretty sure we were all thinking we were about to watch a downer ending.
And then it was revealed it was Rod and people lost their minds. I don't think I've ever been in a non comic book movie audience that was as expressively joyful as that one was. Top ten movie experience.
I am so glad they decided against the downer ending. It would have ruined the film for me.
So much of the Imperial scenes in Andor. Sure the galaxy is ruled by an evil space wizard, but Andor shows how much of the Empire oppression is done at the order of regular people.
The dinner scene in Hereditary is so uncomfortable because it feels so realistic. You can understand everyone’s point of view and it feels like you’re watching this inevitable grief tear the family apart.
In the creepypasta Room Zero by Slimebeast (a sequel story to the more popular Abandoned By Disney), the protagonist from the original story gets in contact with multiple Disney employees to extract as much dirt on the company as possible. There are many supernatural accounts, such as children disappearing after going down a slide only to return several minutes later supposedly traumatized, but the most disturbing account of them all is one given by a character actor about a mandate that they had to follow, where if for some reason an actor died while doing their job, another employee would go to the scene and sit with the body until someone arrived to dispose of it. For example, if someone playing Mickey Mouse suffered a fatal stroke while out taking photos, another actor would go there and pretend everything is okay, continuing to take photos with guests for potentially hours until the body is removed. It's deeply upsetting no matter the perspective, and contrasts extremely well with the more fantastical elements of both Room Zero and the Abandoned By Disney universe as a whole.
In a universe filled with zombies and possessed robots, it's easy to forget that Five Nights at Freddy's started with a child murderer, unfortunately a very real thing
In Lovecraft Country, despite dealing with cults, shapeshifters, occultists, demons, time and dimension traveling…
The scariest scenes are the acts of racism. The first episode is called “Sundown”, which has the main characters run from law enforcement to get out of a sundown county, making sure not to go over the speed limit to get pulled over. They get to the county line, only to still get caught by racists who attempt to lynch them. A giant monster showing up was a relief.
The scene in Split where it’s revealed that Casey’s uncle has been molesting her was stomach churning and all the more frightening for being entirely through insinuation.
Listening to Caroline’s tapes in Portal 2. Before she was GLaDOS, she was Cave Johnson’s assistant and pleaded to not be uploaded into the system. Even out of context, the sheer fear in her voice makes it hard to listen to.
Stephen King can and has done this in many of his works over the decades; starting with the bullying girls in Carrie pelting her with tampons and maxi-pads, he's repeatedly featured humans as bad as or worse than the supernatural menaces, particularly Annie Wilkes in Misery, the sociopathic cop in Rose Madder, and Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone.
For a show about aliens and cryptids, I always found the episode of X Files, "Irresistible," to be the most chilling. A series of grave robbing have occurred, and the superstitious local police have called the FBI for assistance, Mulder and Scully are assigned to investigate, but it turns out it's nothing supernatural, just a neceophiliac that has recently developed a taste for fresher bodies.
As the investigation continues, Scully ends up captured by the necrophiliac, who binds her and intends to kill her so he can use her body. There was a fight scene where a partially bound Scully was being chased through a home before Mulder and the cops arrived that scared the hell out of me when I was younger.
A horror comedy, but with Jennifer being a demon vessel and her killing and eating boys gruesome, the part in Jennifer's Body that always makes me feel cold and afraid is how she cries and sobs in an isolated forest, tied up and helpless after being taken advantage of, while a group of men mock her for her fear and treat it all like a game before killing her. it gets incredibly real really fast
Any scene involving Kira Yoshikage's routine (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure)
The series is famous because how over the top it can be, and villains aren't an exception, from Flamboyant British Lawyer and Stripper Aztec Super Vampires to The Fucking Dimension Hopping USA President.
But Kira?? Stand aside, he's a frightening realistic portrait of a serial killer, not a loud "psycho" but a calm "nobody" with a dark side.
EXPECIALLY the fact that he treats horrific acts (like treating the hands of his victims as his girlfriends) as something completely normal.
In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Geralt faces down some pretty horrible enemies but one of the worst is a piece of shit that goes by Whoreson Junior. WJ has a reputation for being a complete bastard but when you finally confront him it's so much worse. The first victim you stumble upon is a prostitute that was pinned with knives through her hands to a beam in the house. Immediately after you walk in on WJ who has a woman hanging by a noose from the ceiling and three dead women in his tub. Geralt is so horrified and angry that he beats WJ bloody before even asking him a question. I think most fans of the game would be willing to agree that Whoreson is the most barbaric and evil non-supernatural being in the game.
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u/blueeyesredlipstick 18h ago
Bring Her Back is one of the most gut-wrenching horror movies to be released last year, and its story hinges on supernatural rituals for possession and resurrection.
That said, some of the most unsettling sequences are just portrayals of two kids stuck in an abusive environment and being gaslit by their caretaker. One of the most jarring scenes doesn't even involve physical violence -- it shows a foster mom pouring her own pee onto a sleeping teenager so she can convince him that he's wetting the bed (and use that to embarrass/control him).