“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.