Misc
Eye Scream, You Scream: The Best of Eyeball Horror
As humans, we pick up important information about our physical and social environment from the eyes we encounter. Brains respond to pupil changes, blinking patterns, and so on. It stands to reason that seeing another person’s eyeball not faring well could trigger the brain to respond unfavorably. In Shudder’s 101 Scariest Movie Moments of All Time, Rebekah McKendry weighed in on the science behind eye screams, explaining that pain involving the eyes is imaginable. Getting a limb cut off is inconceivable to most, but we’ve all been poked in the eye before. Because of this, we can empathize with that pain even when we see it depicted on a larger, more devastating scale in scary movies.
“But here, we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves.” -Virginia Woolf, 1927. Street Haunting: A London Adventure
Did you know that the brain’s amygdala is triggered whenever it sees someone with more whites in their eyes than usual?
Your amygdala is the part of your brain that fires up when it’s time to be alert. The whites of the eyes (sclera) tend to be more noticeable when someone is afraid (e.g., their eyes are wider)
So, your brain is hardwired to respond when it sees a change in someone else’s eyes to help keep you alert in case of danger.
The sudden change in eyes could be one of the things that gives people the ultimate ick when someone’s eyeball is ripped out in a horror movie. That’s an awful lot of sclera; the amygdala must go wild.
In all seriousness, extreme eye horror (otherwise known as eye screams) can make even the most hardcore horror fans wince, and it could have something to do with the value our brains put on others’ eyes.
As humans, we pick up important information about our physical and social environment from the eyes we encounter. Brains respond to pupil changes, blinking patterns, and so on. It stands to reason that seeing another person’s eyeball not faring well could trigger the brain to respond unfavorably.
In Shudder’s 101 Scariest Movie Moments of All Time, Rebekah McKendry weighed in on the science behind eye screams, explaining that pain involving the eyes is imaginable. Getting a limb cut off is inconceivable to most, but we’ve all been poked in the eye before. Because of this, we can empathize with that pain even when we see it depicted on a larger, more devastating scale in scary movies.
How devastating can eye horror get? I’m so glad you asked!
In honor of our gore-filled theme this month, I bring you the best of eyeball horror. These are some of the most disturbing eye screams in scary movies.
The Best of Eyeball Horror in Scary Movies
A Razor to the Eye: Un Chien Andalou
We are coming out of the gate with one of the first to do it: Luis Buñel’s collaboration project with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (also known as An Andalusian Dog). This 1929 French-Spanish surrealist horror is a silent black-and-white film with a 16-minute runtime. The most notable moment occurs when a razor blade is dragged across a woman’s eye. The shot cuts to a close-up of an eyeball being cut with a razor. Un Chien Andalou used an actual sheep’s eye, making the gooey result one of the most haunting moments in eyeball horror.
The New York Ripper would present a similar scene in 1982, though arguably not to the same squirm-inducing effect of its predecessor, opting for a bloody show rather than a gooey one.
That’s far from the last time we’d see the old razor to the eyeball, with it being one of the required dares in Would You Rather and the key to surviving the Death Mask trap in Saw 2.
But eyeball horror doesn’t always have to be about a brutal direct attack on the eye to be horrifying.
Forced Viewing: Fire in the Sky
One of the luxuries that anyone who watches a horror movie can afford is the ability to look away from what they see. At any point, no matter how bad it gets, we can shut our eyes, turn away, or turn it off at any time.
When we see that taken away from a character on screen, not only are we appalled by imagining the physical sensation of having our eyes clamped open like in A Clockwork Orange, but we also relate to the psychological aspect of being forced to watch something that we don’t want to see.
We saw a similar notion in Opera when a woman’s eyes are held open with pins, and she’s forced to watch her boyfriend get murdered. Also, in Bird Box, when the grubby man holds someone’s eyes open to make them see the horror that was driving everyone crazy. Bird Box has the added haunting factor of leaving us to wonder where those hands had been.
Yet, dirty hands or old-fashioned brainwashing are no comparison to the eye-clamp scene from Fire in the Sky. Talk about nightmares upon nightmares. The various slimes the alien abductee is subjected to are horrible enough without the machines that follow them, all while his eye is held open, forced to watch all of it.
The concept of being forced to watch your demise is haunting beyond words. Final Destination 5 most certainly got the memo on that and decided to up the scare factor.
Eye Surgery: Final Destination 5
While the Final Destination franchise went for the eyes more than once (here’s looking at you and your fire escape ladder, Final Destination 2), Final Destination 5’s take on laser eye surgery ensured some people would be in glasses for life.
Final Destination 5 showed us a patient about to undergo corrective eye surgery. She ends up left alone in a room where her head is locked down, her eyes are clamped open, and there is a giant laser beam shooting directly into her eyeball.
While films like Minority Report and The Eye could give anyone the jitters about eye surgery, they are no match for a high-powered laser to the eye.
As a friendly aside, you can take solace in knowing that eye surgery doctors have gone out of their way to point out all the inaccuracies in Final Destination 5.
Intraocular Foreign Bodies: Zombi 2
We all know the feeling of having something stuck in our eye, but I think most of us cannot relate to the level of impalement we see in films like Brightburn’s shard of glass, The Beyond‘s finger, or Demonia’s cat’s paw.
But amongst all those foreign bodies that ended up in the eyeball, the girl on Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 had it the worst. Unluckily for her, she ran into a pre-Return of the Living Dead era zombie. Before zombies were explicitly known for craving blood and flesh, sometimes zombies were just assholes for no reason. What else would possess a zombie to drag a person, eyeball first, towards a shard of wood? The agonizing slow motion of the shot, coupled with the payoff after the splinter hits paydirt and continues to nestle further into her skull, makes this list incomplete without it.
Feast (on) your Eyes: Naked Blood
When you think eye screams can’t get any worse, they become dessert. We’ve already gone over some of the intricacies of why we don’t like to see things happen to the eyes. But to see them being eaten is violating on an entirely different level.
Once you see an eyeball being eaten, it takes on a new texture. I can picture the veiny slimeball from here. Plus, there’s the whole added insult of not only having your eyeball taken from you but eaten as well. There’s no nutritional value in that! This is me casting an extra-large side eye to the cannibals in Green Inferno.
But worse than having someone else doing it is becoming so disconnected from reality that you do it to yourself. For that, Splatter: Naked Blood receives the ultimate award for serving eyeball in the worst possible way. When an experimental drug makes the pain feel like pleasure, Naked Blood showed us that one of life’s most sumptuous delicacies could be your eyeball.
Two Thumbs Up: The Descent
Going for the eyes is one of our best defenses if attacked. The Descent gives a solid two thumbs up to this idea because we see it successfully used against one of the Crawlers. Of course, we’ve seen someone get the double thumb treatment in films like Evil Dead, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, and Rob Zombie’s Halloween, to name a few. But of all the double-thumb eye gouges in horror movies, The Descent has one of the best.
As much as going for the eyes should be a go-to against villains, it isn’t often enough that we get protagonist-initiated eyeball horror. Topple that with the depth of the knuckles and the ensuing ooze – perfect execution. She had to have tickled that man-bat’s brainstem for how deep her thumbs went into his orbits.
A Plucking Good Time: My Bloody Valentine
As the length of this list should show, there’s no shortage of assaults on the eyes in horror. One of the most common assaults comes in the form of watching the eye be removed from the skull. We can look at the Eye Vacuum Trap in Saw X to see how creative horror has gotten with this idea. However, of all the ways an eye can come out of its socket, the pickaxe through the jaw in My Bloody Valentine will always be an eye-popping good time.
We will also give an honorable mention to the eyeball rip in Kill Bill: Volume 2. Not only was her eye plucked out, but it was also her last remaining eye, and it got squished under bare toes into carpet fibers. There are so many layers of things to be unsettled about.
Speaking of unsettling, I saved my personal most disturbing eyeball horror moment for last.
Don’t Run with Scissors: Hostel
While I can’t go through every weapon or various item that has found a way to end up in someone’s eyeball in a horror movie or two, I must make a notable exception when it comes to scissors. We’ve seen scissors to the eye before, with Unhinged coming immediately to mind.
Yet no scissor-to-eye stabbing offers quite the unique scissor-to-the-eyeball that Hostel does, as Hostel gave us a double scoop of eye screams. First, as audience members, we had to contend that her eyeball had melted out of its socket via blowtorch and was now hanging there, flapping about.
But then, in one of the most questionable moves ever presented in a horror movie, our protagonist decided to use scissors and cut off the hanging, half-melted, flapping eye. I’m still trying to figure out in what world he thought this would help.
The ensuing yellow pus that oozed out of the severed optic nerve was the cherry on top of a sundae that absolutely zero persons ordered – yet it will forever go down in infamy as one of the most ick-inducing eye screams of all time. (Well done!)
One of the childhood stories I frequently heard growing up was the time I gouged out part of my dad’s eyeball. Apparently, as a baby, I took a scoop out of his sclera with my little toddler fingernail. Does this make me an expert on all things eyeball horror? Of course not! If there are any fantastic eye screams you think are missing from this list, let us know @HORRORPRESSLLC on Twitter and Instagram.
Misc
HORROR 101: What is The New French Extremity Movement?
What is New French Extremity? The term New French Extremity originated in film journalist James Quandt’s article “Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema”. The bulk of the article addresses a rash of more violent films that were coming out of French cinema in the late 90s and early 2000s; the article sites Bruno Dumont’s 2003 art film Twentynine Palms as inciting the criticism, seeing it as the latest in a long line of, to him, unimpressive French films at the turning point of a century.
Welcome back to Horror 101, a series of articles where we explain horror movie legends and their lore. For beginners, the confused, or just those who need a refresher, these articles are for you.
It is certainly ironic to be close-minded as a horror fan. What do you mean you’ll watch fifteen terribly made movies in a week but then turn your nose up at something 20 minutes longer than your usual runtime? (That one was aimed at me, so if you caught a stray, apologia).
But, I’ve always been particularly averse to one grouping of films: New French Extremity, a genre whose name came from an article deriding the very notion of it. In more recent years, I’ve grown some appreciation for its offerings, though, as I’ve come to understand the commentary it has to share. It’s a genre pockmarked by bleak cinematic landscapes, painted with the pains of human suffering and grotesqueries to reflect the horrors of the real world. A genre that often delves into the surreal, wading knee-high through depravity to get there.
…Assuming you can call it a genre.
Like German Expressionism, or Dadaism, it’s a style with some major tenets, but no concrete trappings; debated and shaped by its watchers, and now brought to you here. It’s sometimes hard to grasp, but today’s article will try its hardest to answer the question…
WHAT IS NEW FRENCH EXTREMITY?
The term New French Extremity originated in film journalist James Quandt’s article “Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema”. The bulk of the article addresses a rash of more violent films that were coming out of French cinema in the late 90s and early 2000s; the article sites Bruno Dumont’s 2003 art film Twentynine Palms as inciting the criticism, seeing it as the latest in a long line of, to him, unimpressive French films at the turning point of a century.
Quandt generally writes them off, indicating that they utilize their debauchery as a blunt tool in a clumsy attempt to evoke some sort of philosophical or political message about the human condition, as opposed to the artistic movements of centuries prior like the French Decadent Movement and Dadaism that inspired it. Ironically, the term New French Extremity erupted from this article as the main takeaway for film scholars and critics, because Quandt caps off the article by saying that the grouping of films are too varied in their vision to be considered a proper genre:
The New French Extremity sometimes looks like a latter-day version of the hussards, those Céline-loving, right-wing anarchists of the ’50s determined to rock the pieties of bourgeois culture; but for all their connections (shared actors, screenwriters, etc.), the recent provocateurs are too disparate in purpose and vision to be classified as a movement. […] it appears to be the last gasp of Gallic libertinism.
And so, New French Extremity was minted as a piece of the cinematic lexicon. Jargon meant to describe not only grotesque thriller and horror films coming out of France from the 90s onward, but films whose whole cinematography (both by visuals and by narrative) is rooted in being transgressive. No matter how horrible you think a concept is, New French Extreme will depict it, and no matter how sacred you think something is, expect it to be trampled on with some extremely profane filmmaking. It’s about being so grotesque that they evoke raw and pure disgust, often to reflect the film’s themes or philosophical ideas.
Then, you might ask…
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NEW FRENCH EXTREMITY AND SPLATTER FILMS?
Surely, films like Saw, Hostel, and Human Centipede have political messages underpinned by their violence. And yes, the Saw franchise in particular can at turns be very meanspirited and violent while being bluntly political; it is what I’d call the most politically American horror film series of all time, and its traps and the major bodily dysfunction they cause are a big part of that.
But in the end, it’s not being an American film that separates it from the genre, as even if it were a French film it wouldn’t fit either. Part of the horror of New French Extreme films is how the violence is presented; it is served as real, raw, and uncut as possible. It is unflinchingly (and unhappily) violent, and grounded in a level of uncomfortable reality. So, there goes another tenet of the movement: it has to crank up the meanspirited energy in its violence, and it can’t really be “fun” in how it displays its extremity.
WHO ARE THE DIRECTORS OF THE NEW FRENCH EXTREMITY MOVEMENT?
As critical as Quandt was of the idea, he did provide a very handy list of names to focus on as the most prominent voices of the movement:
“François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux—and now, alas, [Bruno] Dumont”.
Names missing from that list, but which crop up later in the article and in the scene in general include Alexandre Aja (director of High Tension), Virginie Despentes (the mind behind the very controversial Baise-moi), Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury (the duo behind Inside and this years The Soul Eater), and Pascal Laugier (of Martyrs and Incident in a Ghostland fame). And though Xavier Gens was a bit late to the party with his 2007 film Frontier(s), he is an important director in terms of where the movement went and where it’s going with its politics. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but a good starting point for you if you’re interested in the genre.
WHO IS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL NEW FRENCH EXTREMITY DIRECTOR?
The short answer? Michael Haneke. The long answer? Technically, Haneke popularized the use of transgressive elements to shock and disquiet the audience among his contemporaries. Still, Gaspar Noé is the genre codifier and the most dominant voice in the space creatively.
Despite the extreme nature of films like Funny Games and The Seventh Continent (both brutal and genuinely terrifying), I personally find myself in the camp that his movies are not New French Extreme. We can debate the limits of how messed up something has to be before it’s considered extreme until the cows come home. But the fact is, if you put Haneke’s work alongside all of the films I’ve listed above in the previous segment, he would be the odd man out. He is, simply put, considerably more restrained in terms of showing gore and sexual violence, and the majority of his films’ horror and anxiety come from psychological aspects rather than physical consequences.
The material world is the battleground of the New French Extreme, and the nauseating nature of the films is the tool that Quandt named as the hallmark of the movement. With that in mind, I believe that Gaspar Noé, instead, should be considered the godfather of the genre. Given his films are the most well-known and commercially successful of the New French Extreme “movement”, he is more than worthy of the title; not to mention, he’s the most extreme in all regards. I would consider Irreversible’s directing and presentation to be the peak of the New French Extreme, since its nausea-inducing and sickening content comes with plenty of disorienting directing and editing; and for people with better sound setups than mine, you’ll find the little sound design trick that Noé placed in the film to make it as disturbing as possible.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF NEW FRENCH EXTREMITY?
A question that is much less definitional, and much more philosophical. Why the bleak landscapes? Why the hopeless endings? Why so much violence against women, especially THAT kind of violence? And there is no clear answer, as every filmmaker has a different motivation. However, there is an undeniably political slant running through most of these movies that can all generally be applied to the rise of the right-wing and alt-right in French politics from the 1990s onward.
Film scholars like Alice Haylett Bryan and Marc Olivier have pointed to films like Inside, Sheitan, and Frontiers as coinciding with and commentating on the rise of politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy, politicians running on strong anti-immigration platforms and blaming the immigrant populations of France for its ills like the 2005 riots. Though it is less easy to see on the surface level, the Mademoiselle of Martyrs and her secret society are a group of wealthy, white French aristocrats who find purpose through the suffering of others, depicted as the impoverished and WOC; they even describe the process of torturing their martyrs as something they do “systematically”, akin to the policies of a government.
Like the trend of the nuclear monster reflecting our Cold War anxieties in the 50s and 60s, and the spike of home invasion films that took place in the 70s, New French Extreme directors have political engines built into their movies. The shocking parts of New French Extremity punctuate what many of these films are supposed to be: countercultural art meant to attack and depict the dangerous political ideologies that spends the lifeblood and livelihood of underserviced people as currency; ideologies that could very well pose a threat to the existence of a democratic France itself.
New French Extremity’s horrifying sights are not only made effective through the verisimilitude of their directing and production; they are made to remind you of the world’s much more realistic terrors, here right now and possibly yet to come.
DO YOU HAVE NEW FRENCH EXTREMITY RECOMMENDATIONS?
So, now for your required reading from this lecture.
Needless to say, all of the films mentioned in this article bear a massive and profoundly long list of trigger warnings (seriously), primarily for their intense violence, depictions of sexual violence, and depictions of pretty much every terrible thing you can imagine. Please make sure to do your research before watching any of these, and don’t skimp on the self care.
Martyrs (2008) has some of my favorite reveals in any horror movie, and an unforgettable ending you won’t want spoiled, so watch this one first. High Tension is a favorite of many Horror Press readers and writers for a reason. It’s an unrelenting, pulse-pounding film that earns its controversial reputation, and you don’t really feel safe until it’s over (if that). Trouble Every Day gets a lot of flak from Quandt in his original article (what doesn’t?), but I went in blind and was completely caught off guard by what the movie turns into, so avoid any spoilers if you want to see something interesting. Sheitan is a head trip of a film, with recurring face-of-the-genre Vincent Cassel cranking up the madness dial on his performance to an 11. Calvaire, likewise, has a very demented villain on par with the main antagonist of Inside, so they would make for a very interesting double feature if you can stomach two at a time. And while I said Haneke is not New French Extreme, if you want something a little quieter but with an ending that will shake you to your core, I suggest watching The Seventh Continent.
That brings me to the one very big question I had writing this:
Should I even recommend Irreversible? It may be the one film that embodies New French Extremity the most, given how far it pushes the envelope. But do I like it?
No.
It personally is just too much for me. It’s bleak, horrific, it will disturb you entirely and might very well ruin your week, and I can’t stand to watch it. Which is the whole point, but there’s a limit to what I can tolerate. I find Noe is unflinching in his determination to make you run from the theatre and abandon the film altogether, especially in its most infamous and cruel sequence.
From a film history perspective, it is undeniably a piece that has carved itself into French cinema indelibly (for better and for worse), and if you want to plumb the depths of human horror, you’ll be hard-pressed to find as difficult of a watch. So, when you ask me, “Should I watch Irreversible?”, I can only meet you with one honest response: you can certainly try to.
Good luck with that, horror fan.
***
And that will be it for today’s Horror 101 lesson. See you in the next class and stay tuned to Horror Press’s social media feeds for more content on horror movies, television, and everything in between.
I’ve talked about Frogman from writer/director Anthony Cousins ad nauseam. It even made my Favorite 3 Horror Movies of 2023 list. Hearing that Frogman was getting a physical release from Terror Vision was music to my ears. And, honestly, how crazy was it that it was also getting shelf space at Walmart?! Very rarely can you find a film that killed on the festival circuit and then was readily available on physical media at both a boutique distribution online store as well as a big box retailer.
August 10th, 2024, would be a day that changed my life; Terror Vision was releasing a deluxe edition Blu-ray bundle with a limit of 100 copies. Typically, boutique labels will do limited edition slipcases for films, limiting them between 1,000 and 2,500 copies. The Frogman Deluxe Edition bundle was different. For $68 bucks, you could get one of the most unique and visually stunning releases of my lifetime. So I purchased it. After preordering this majestic bundle, I waited patiently for two and a half months…and then it arrived.
The purpose of this piece isn’t to rub my one (hundred) of a kind purchase in anyone’s face, instead, it’s to highlight the care and beauty behind this release. Simply put, if you love a movie and find it being released by Terror Vision, you should pick it up. Here is the physical side of what came with this bundle:
- A black MILF (Man I Love Frogman) shirt
- A double-sided foldout poster
- A Frogman-themed brochure of Loveland, Ohio/Frogman Point (With a 15% off coupon for Sticky Tongue Gifts & Collectibles)
- A Loveland, Ohio postcard
- A sticker set
- The Fortune Teller Miracle Fish (not listed on the bundle’s itinerary, but a happy inclusion)
- A Frogman mug
- A bound film-supplement book
- A limited rigid box that perfectly fits over the embossed slipcase
- AND A CD full of frog sounds!
In all honesty, I initially thought $68 was a steep price. As the minutes passed, I knew my chance of picking one up was dwindling. Once I opened the box, put on the shirt, read the book, and drank some lukewarm coffee out of my mug…
I realized it was beyond worth the price.
Terror Vision has set the bar for labels like Shout! Factory, Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow Video, and many more. I do not know who runs the program behind the scenes, but it’s clear they are some of the deepest fans of physical media out there. If I had to nitpick, there was one issue I have with the Blu-ray. The title screen. It’s a flat image with a play, subtitles, and special features option. These options are overlaid over a thick blue bar and it doesn’t feel very in theme. Even though the title screen felt a bit bland, the special features surely made up for it.
All of this is to say, if you’re a physical media nut like myself and you haven’t picked anything up from Terror Vision, then what are you doing?! They have excellent releases like WNUF Halloween Special, Malum, Door, and so much more. And thanks to Terror Vision for all they’ve done, we can’t wait to see what you release next.
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[REVIEW] My First Ever New French Extremity Film Was ‘Inside’ (2007)
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