The 8 Most Painful Steps Ever Taken On Screen, According to Reddit [Watch]
Nina Nesseth’s Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films should be mandatory reading. Once a guest columnist at Dread Central (check out this incisive insight into Teeth), Nesseth’s book broadly tackles what makes a scary movie scary while probing deeper into the science of why that is, whether that’s how our bodies react to something scary or why some things, like squishy eyeballs, trigger some audience members more than others.
I was thinking of Nesseth’s work a lot while reading this Reddit thread on nails and glass in horror movies, principally when one unlucky characters step on either without realizing it. In other words, the most queasy kind of body horror.
Fans in the thread were cheekily pointing out Home Alone as a common example, and the original poster was looking for movies where, in classic Hitchcock fashion, the nail/glass/sharp object is teased long before the character is fated to (gulp) step on it.
In Nightmare Fuel, Nesseth broadly points out the familiarity and intimacy of some extremities (especially eyes) as reasons they trigger such profound, I-have-to-look-away disgust. Darren Aronofsky’s award-winning Black Swan is packed with memorable moments, though the one squeamish fans best remember is likely the mid-movie beat where Natalie Portman’s character unsuccessfully tries to remove a hangnail, tearing her skin from cuticle to knuckle.
As an audience, our metric for disgust is met when a character’s eyes, fingers, or feet are fileted and sliced in ways both exaggerated and familiar. We’ve all stepped on an errant Lego piece before. The body horror works because while few of us have had our entrails spill out of our chests, we’ve all cut our fingers or stepped on something painful.
First up was a surprising yet universal classic Home Alone. This is torture porn, and no one can tell me otherwise.
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Some fans pointed out the “squelching” terror of Saint Maud’s take on ritualized self-harm when its protagonist fills her shoes with glass and later walks around with them.
One of the more common examples was John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, a Hitchcockian monster movie if there ever was one. Early in the film, Emily Blunt’s Evelyn accidentally pulls a nail from the basement steps when it catches on a laundry bag. She doesn’t realize it at first, and for the next thirty minutes, audience members are waiting for her to finally step on Chekov’s nail.
Not a foot, yet Ready or Not still got itself a well-earned shoutout. If you don’t recall, Samara Weaving’s Grace suffers a gunshot wound through the hand, and later must hook the wound through a nail to climb to safety. It is the best bit of gore the gore-loving Radio Silence have managed to do. I still get chills thinking about it. Final Destination 5’s gymnast death, a prelude to A Quiet Place, was also unbearably tense, and I’ll never scoff at a thread shouting Oculus out. Remember the apple-but-it’s-a-lightbulb scene? Painful stuff.
Saw II’s needle pit, the glass removal in Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, and even Haunt all got a shoutout. Body horror endures, and if you’re looking to test your own mettle for familiar, painful horror injuries, that’s the thread for you.
What do you think? Which beat of body horror, especially hands and feet, hit you the hardest? If they don’t bother you, what’s your body horror line? Let me know over on Twitter @ChadisCollins.
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