9 Hardest To Watch Horror Movie Moments

With so many truly grim horror films out there, and with more being made all the time

there are innumerable scenes designed to leave audiences kinda wanting less. And while many of them do get off from one-upping the level of blood and violence of their predecessors

this doesn't mean that every hard-to-watch moment comes from the bloodiest flicks

In fact, the most horrifying scene often requires a nuanced touch. And also, just as a content warning, before we begin this one in particular

With a title like this, this one is going to feature some heavy violence of all kinds and descriptions of it

so please, please bear that in mind. So just when you thought it was safe to go back in the living room, I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com

and these are the hardest-to-watch horror movie moments. A Stone's Throw Speak No Evil

One of 2022's best horrors, pretty much every second of Speak No Evil is difficult to watch

Not because of violence either, no, but because this tale of a Danish couple accepting to stay at the home of a Dutch couple that they briefly met on holiday leans heavily on awkward situations that are just unbearable

As their hosts start to act increasingly strange, aggressive, and imposing, the horror initially comes from the awkwardness of asking them to tone it down without pissing them off or making them angry

Of course, this is all set dressing for a gut punch final reveal, where it turns out that this Dutch couple are actually a pair of psychopaths who go from country to country killing lovers and stealing their children

And when they finally put this grand plan into motion here, we get the movie's most stomach-churning scene

Powerless to their fate, the couple are driven out to the middle of nowhere, stripped naked, and forced to stand still

Then the Dutch pair stoned them to death, with the impact of each rock being more brutal than the last

The powerlessness of the situation combined with the frankness of the violence

not to mention the understanding that they're not just dying but that their killers will then steal their child

just makes this a traumatizing ending for even horror veterans. A helping hand, Gerald's Game

Gerald's game hasn't quite stood the test of time as an all-time great like so much of

Mike Flanagan's work, but it is an excellent little chamber piece about a woman who gets

handcuffed to a bed and left there, after her and her husband's frisky night ends with

the latter having a heart attack After days spent stuck to the bed with her escape attempts failing things start to get a little bit drastic With her wrists cut from struggling to free herself from the cuffs it becomes clear that

there's no way out of them without inflicting some harm on herself

And here's where the famous degloving moment comes in, and honestly even just writing that

down and saying it out loud makes my tummy feel a little bit dodgy

As you might be able to tell from that creative moniker though, in order to free herself

she needs to rip her hand through the cuff and in doing so, she pulls all the skin off

it in the process, leaving her with a mangled appendage. There's almost certainly no way we can show this in the video, but trust me, they pull

no punches in showing just how brutal and painful this is. A great pain, Evil Dead Rise

Dead Rise did not disappoint when it came to the violent heritage of the franchise, even if it did

lean a little bit too heavily on CGI here and there. Still, there are plenty of watch-behind-your-fingers

moments, but of course the one we're talking about today is the now infamous cheese grater shot. Now

despite all the hype, this moment is quite short in the finished flick. In this scene, a possessed

Bridget goes full ham and attacks Beth with a cheese grater as she tries to crawl away, scraping

the skin off of her back leg with it. It's quick, it's nasty, and leaves everyone thinking

God, I'd hate it if that happened to me. Face off, Dagon. We've had a scene of degloving on this list so far, but you know what's worse than that

Well, defacing. Alright, admittedly, it's not quite as catchy or as memorable, but the

most insane scene in the otherwise rather pulpy and B-movie-inspired lovecraftian horror Dagon

comes towards the end, where our heroes are caught by the cult that worships the titular deity

Protagonist Paul and reluctant helper Ezekiel find themselves at the mercy of the villains

who have a painful fate for both of them prepared should they refuse to give themselves to the cult

Ezekiel is the first on the chopping block, and both Paul and the audience have to watch

as the cult start the process of flaying him alive, starting by cutting and peeling the skin directly off the guy's face

While Dagon does have an issue with some dodgy effects and a kind of wonky tone, this is

a scene where the filmmakers absolutely commit to the bit, doubling down on visceral violence

and a truly harrowing tone No place like home Eden Lake The British horror cult classic sees a couple terrorized by violent youths while on an idyllic holiday at a lake With the man tortured and

killed and the woman, Jenny, chased through the woods and barely making it out alive

it initially looks like this bleak, bleak movie might actually get a happy ending

Oh, how naive we were to believe that, because after stealing a car from one of the young boys

his brothers, it seems as though Jenny has escaped. In her delirium, she ends up crashing the car

but fortunately, it's in a nearby town, where she's taken in by a group of adults having a party

Only, it turns out that she's actually crashed into the house of one of the boys who was trying

to kill her, and once their parents find out what's happened, they decide to protect their own

and get rid of the evidence. The final flashback, The Tortured. In The Tortured, a distraught and

heartbroken couple hatch a twisted plan to exact vengeance upon a serial killer called John

Kozlowski. It's personal for the couple as well as Kozlowski took their son away

so in turn they hatch a plan to catch and torture him to give him a taste of his own medicine

And as the title and premise suggest, the tortured is torture porn at its very worst

And while there are many truly shocking and hard to watch scenes throughout

the hardest of all is actually one where no acts of violence are committed

See, towards the end of the film, after the couple have done everything within their power to torment an apparently amnesiac killer

a flashback then reveals that there were actually two men being transported in the prison van the day that Kozlowski was taken after it crashed

And it's actually the other man, some guy called Patrick, who was serving time for tax evasion

who this couple actually kidnapped and as such have been torturing for most of the movie

and were left knowing that they didn't even torture the right culprit

Happy birthday, men. Writer-director Alex Garland put another notch in the folk horror belt with the divisive men

giving the city dwellers among us a hundred reasons to stay out of the countryside

In this flick, we follow hero Harper as she heads to the countryside

to try and process the death of her abusive husband James. However, it seems that all of the villagers' inhabitants are rather intimidating

disgusting, and quite unfriendly men, or to be more precise, man, as they're all played by actor Rory Kinnear. At the film's

conclusion the boundaries between superstition and reality break down as the men all lead a surreal and physics assault on the house where Harper is staying This ends in one of the queasiest sequences put to film in

recent memory as the men give birth to each other in sequence with their bodies contorting and

self-mutilating as their bellies swell and each one crawls out of the bloodied orifices of the

last, concluding in the birthing of Harper's dead husband James. It goes on forever and leaves

nothing to the imagination to the point where you might have forgot what film you were even watching

in the first place. The Eye, The Sadness. Director Rob Jabaz may not be a big name on the horror

circuit, but his Taiwanese body horror blood fest The Sadness is shot for shot one of the most

disturbing projects put to film in recent years. With a population succumbing to a viral pandemic

that turns them into killers who thrive on receiving and distributing pain

there are few places the sadness won't go to torture its cast

But we have to pick just one. And that singular scene arises from the sadistic whims

of the closest thing the film has to a consistent antagonist, the businessman

Having taken young Molly's eye out with an umbrella already, this guy pursues her to a hospital and, well

I literally can't even say what happens to Molly in this scene

The movie itself thankfully doesn't show what's happening in this scene either

only the reactions to it. But when people call the sadness exploitative and pushing too hard on its sexual violence

well, you can't really argue after watching this scene in particular. A permanent family vacation, Midsommar

Few films are so bold as to go full tilt in their opening scene

and yet that's precisely what Ari Aster does with Midsommar. Though this flick doesn't go quite as hard on the horror as Asta's Hereditary, you don't know that from the beginning, which depicts the murder and suicide of lead Danny's parents and sister respectively

Initially, we don't know what's happening in the scene, as the camera slowly moves around a darkened house with a scar building to elicit a sense of dread

And then we see them, the pipes connected to a running car and the three dead

particularly Danny's sister's haunted lifeless face and the tube duct taped to her mouth

It's an absolute jolt, but the camera lingers, so you're forced to reckon with the horror on display

It's supposed to stay with you throughout the rest of the movie as a reminder of the trauma that Danny endured, and oh boy, does it accomplish just that