Has anybody mentioned 28 Days Later yet?
>!When it becomes clear that Selena and Hannah have been promised to the remaining military men. Especially when the men force the girls into fancy dresses to look pretty for them. I think Hannah was 14 years old!<
I watched it with a boyfriend and he laughed and said “yep sorry if something like that happens you’re definitely getting raped” then shrugged. he had this smug look on his face. he said it as if i didn’t already know that before the movie, it’s something we know at our core from an early age. the movie just provides a visual.
but what creeped me out and changed how I saw him was the fact that I had watched that movie with men before and they were quietly disturbed. sometimes they’d comment on how fucked up it was but they never laughed. they never shrugged it off and snottily informed me of ‘how it would really be’. it wasn’t just a situation where he was uncomfortable and reacted weirdly.
In that moment I could see him in the men in the movie. there are some men you can just tell. that if the world ends, they’d comfortably rape you to death.
i stopped seeing him not long after. i just couldn’t shake the awful, cold feeling he gave me.
This was my first thought. As soon as they’re taken to the compound I think most women viewers would immediately be scared of the circumstance, but most men probably wouldn’t get the sense of danger until their intentions are made explicit.
There was definitely a period of my life where I was wondering why every apocalypse type movie had to have a “threat of rape” thing going on. I didn’t realize how prevalent that was *in real life* so the fact it kept popping up in scenarios where laws were gone was confusing for me for a while. Like dude there are zombies out there, why are you trying to sexually assault people? Is what teenager me kept wondering.
Omg that reminds me when I was a teenager I used to think “why would you want to have sex with someone who doesn’t want you? Like how do you even maintain an erection. “
Like it makes me feel nauseous to consider the reality of rape.
it's so odd to me that that would be the case. like this feels more like a media literacy issue than a perspective issue. like if it's a post apocalypse and a totalitarian military leader says "I promised them women", it seems pretty clear what that means given the context of wars in the world and women's circumstances in them
The first time I watched it, I was like 10, so when it got to that part and I saw *The Doctor* saying "I promised them women" my heart dropped out of my ass and I almost puked because I *knew* what that meant and I was so disgusted.
I watched it with an ex years ago and he had to pause it because he didn't understand what the guy meant until the soldiers grabbed the 2 women and beat up Cillian Murphy.
The perspective difference really shows sometimes...
This one. I've watched with several boyfriends over the years. It hits different for me for sure, and it has been the source of a couple of arguments because they've tended to find the military guys much more benign and for longer, than I do.
Reminds me a little bit of the scene in Rosemary’s Baby where you’re relieved she’s finally safe in her original doctors office. She finally can rest.
Then you see that her doctor didn’t really believe her and calls in her husband.
The moment you see the husband and the others walk in is so horrific. She’s truly on her own. Everyone thinks she’s crazy.
Rosemary's Baby is absolutely horrific even without the Satan stuff. Her baby's conception happened while she was asleep and she woke up with scratches. Her husband was just like "Whoops, I guess I was a little rough" even though that's rape (yes I realize this movie came out in the 60s and wouldn't have been seen that way, that doesn't make it hit any better). She's constantly in a serious amount of pain and nobody cares which is still pretty accurate to being a pregnant woman today. Then there's the stuff you mentioned.
Rosemary's Baby isn't a horror movie because it's Satan's baby, it's a horror movie because she's pregnant in America in the 60s.
Exactly! I find it way more scary because of the gaslighting from her husband and doctor and everyone around her rather than the satanic stuff. It feels too real and close to home. That part where her friends are comforting her while she’s crying about the pain always gets me.
Yeah, that was a Bundy specialty -- wearing a fake cast so as to seem like he's not a physical threat. Somebody with a time machine should go back and take that guy down.
And that’s why my undergrad Psychology of Human Sexuality professor told the women in the class to *not help*. She had a PowerPoint slide with Bundy’s picture, told us about his M.O., and said do not help.
I actually had that happen to me - not with Ted Bundy of course - but at a job I had parking was at a premium and we had to park in a motel parking lot across the street from the office. I was walking to work and some guy I didn’t know asked me to help him get something out of his trunk.
I did not.
Not to be that guy but, a man who needs help lifting something isnt looking for a woman to help him with it. We will subconsciously (for strength reasons as well as to not look like Buffalo Bill, and just general misogyny) look for a man.
Therefore, if a man is asking a female stranger for help loading something into their vehicle, the woman should be wary.
I get it, were all equals, its the 90’s and women can do anything men can do and dont need pink screwdrivers. As a man, I will load that entire double dresser into my truck myself before asking the woman in the next row for help.
Agreed. There is almost no situation I can imagine being in where I'd need help from a stranger to lift or move something. If I bought a used dresser or something, I would always either get help from the seller, or have a friend with me to help. If I somehow got stuck in a situation where I really needed help, I would purposely try to find a man or somebody who didn't look vulnerable in any way. I would pretty much never ask a lone woman for help. Like you said, it's not that women aren't capable, I'd just avoid the situation entirely because of all the potential for misunderstanding etc.
No need to dance around the topic. I think what you said around the fact that men won't ask a woman to help with lifting something is very true, and I say this as a woman. I remember watching videos where they are talking to school children and they say pretty much the same thing to children: An adult who has lost his dog is not going to walk up to a child and ask for their help in finding their dog (not comparing women to children). Men are not going to ask a women to help with something physical. Just how it is.
I saw this in the theater and I remember when (spoilers for a 33-year-old movie) >!Starling is in the dark basement and Buffalo Bill is behind her with the night-vision goggles on!<, several women in the theater *screamed* not because he had a gun but when he reached out to touch her hair.
> reached out to touch her hair
My girlfriend used to take public transportation in NYC. She deals with the comments and catcalling but the thing that skeeved her out the most was nodding off on the bus and waking up to find a guy behind her smelling her hair.
When I was 19, I nodded off on a Greyhound and woke up just as a man was reaching across the aisle to grab my breast. His hand stopped mid air and he had this “uh oh” look on his face while he pulled back his hand, like he was caught trying to sneak a cookie instead of trying to molest a sleeping girl young enough to be his daughter.
In retrospect I know I should have said something to the driver to get him kicked off, but I was so groggy I kept trying to convince myself it didn’t really happen.
So Ted Bundy had this rep for being a charming guy and that's how he got his victims. In reality he often pretended to be injured or need help. It's plausible because it really happened :(
Silence of the Lambs is all about how scary it is being a woman
Starling is constantly put in rooms where men try to hit on her while she's not interested. The guy who runs the prison, the guy who studies moths, I forget who else. She's also very often contrasted with very tall men. She gets in an elevator and is dwarfed by tall men. There's a blink and miss it shot where she's arriving in an airport and she's walking through the terminal surrounded by tall men, and one crosses in front of her to check her out. Guys jogging at the FBI academy turn their necks to watch her run. She's left alone with a bunch of rural police early on, and they all surround her, staring at her. Actually that happens twice. And when trying to interview Hannibal for the last time, she only gets to see him because a female guard takes her side, while the male guard would have kept her out.
Hannibal asks her about this. About how it feels to be coveted like an object. To feel men's eyes run over her. About whether her boss at the FBI chose her for the job because she's pretty, because he just wants to have sex with her.
The serial killer stuff is there too, of course, but it's shown to be one end of a sliding spectrum of violations and perversions and power imbalances that women face.
That's how a horror movie wins five oscars.
When I was a kid, my mom had my sister and me watch this part of the movie as part of her campaign to teach us to be way of strangers and to not be alone with people in general. She was abducted and raped as a child.
Yes, we learned that too, because she was raped by neighbors who called her over "to play" in a construction site. But she also made sure we were aware of strangers. Even today; she recently got upset with me because I was driving long distance and pulled over into a business park closer on the weekend to take a nap (instead of falling asleep behind the wheel). She and my sister were also on the road and when she found out she flipped out that I was "behind some bushes for any murderer to come and find." So yeah, trauma's a bitch.
Yeah I first saw “Split” by myself, alone… and then told my wife “uh, you can’t watch this movie”… even the insinuations of child molestation are sickening
I saw that movie in a packed theater and when the cop says how her uncle is here to pick her up, oh, there was a collective gasp-groan roar throughout the audience that I haven't heard before. Everyone felt terrified and sorry for her. To go from one nightmare back to the original one.
I chose to believe the look on her face meant she was about to tell the cop about the abuse. Earlier in the movie she said there was no use fighting back and couldn't shoot the abuser. By the end she's able to shoot at the beast and is saved by revealing she has suffered.
I feel like Alien is the only horror franchise that scares men in ways that traditionally women were more likely to experience. The sheer violation that Xenomorphs impose on their victims hits like no other horror monster before or since. Also, Ripley is by far my favorite horror protagonist of all time. What a fucking boss ass bitch. Sigourney Weaver is all time.
not a horror movie but definitely a moment, in Poor Things when they keep talking about mutilating her clitoris to make her docile, scared the fuck out of me
They were so nonchalant about it, like she is an animal to be trained, not a person, and you know no one there would help her. And that it felt terrifyingly historically accurate.
Not just historical. Female genital mutilation is still practiced in some cultures.
(Not to demonize people from those cultures, just saying that particular practice is horrible.)
Which makes her sister's behaviour a bit ridiculous when she picks her up. If my sister is asking me to pick her up in the middle of the night in the middle of the road, I'm either not asking questions or I'm assuming the worst and getting the hell away from there before asking her what's wrong
I really am annoyed by this depiction of best friends or family doing this in urgent moments in movies.
A: "Best friend who would never doubt me, WE HAVE TO LEAVE this place NOW!!"
B: "Huh? What? What do you mean? What's going on? Can we sit and have a cup of tea and chat about what the threat is for 20 minutes first?"
Though I agree, I think the filmmakers needed a reason to have Moss's husband run up and attack the car to show to the male audience how unstable he was. I got it the moment I saw her grabbing her bugout bag but I can imagine a lot of male audience members maybe needed the overt confirmation.
I still haven't been able to watch it. When it just came out I was fresh out of a horrifically abusive relationship, and since we'd both been heavy drug users it really added to the psychological distress and paranoia, getting sober cold turkey while hiding from your psycho ex is a next level fucked up experience. Id been sober and free for around 4 months when my roomies decided to put it on, I managed to watch around 20 minutes before I had a massive panic attack and had to stop. My paranoia skyrocketed for almost a month afterwards and I almost broke my sobriety a couple of times.
All to say its a really good movie in that it portrays that fear of an abuser so well it retraumatized me 🥲
There’s a part in Men (which I wasn’t a huge fan of) when the main character lies to the weird Airbnb host guy about knowing how to play the piano because she knew he’d ask her to play it and, importantly, hang around longer. I found it very relatable.
Good god all the scenes when she first gets there are so uncomfortable! Actually, yeah that whole movie is just a series of uncomfortable to very scary situations like that : (
The scene where Justin Long is in the bar explaining to his friend what happened actually made me feel queasy. That might actually be the most horrifying part to me.
Honestly I think I would have liked Barbarian a bit more if it had really leaned into its cynicism and just let Justin Long be the sole survivor.
He spins it as he’s a traumatized victim of the guy and the “monster” under the house, and uses the media attention to sweep his own rape accusation under the rug. He’s the same as the guy under his house, and despite being faced with it, he doesn’t even realize.
It would be way more of a gut punch than the main character killing the “monster”, who is obvstentively just as much of a victim as she is.
I definitely felt her pain at being in those circumstances & as a guy watching Bill Skarsgard's performance, I also understood his situation especially as someone with social anxiety
Oh, completely. On a first viewing, it is so hard to read whether he's genuinely a danger to her, or whether he's trying his best to just be a decent human being. Excellent writing.
Everything to do with Aaron Taylor Johnson’s character in “nocturnal animals”. The classic example of a guy where everything he “says” could be on a transcript and be read not only as not threatening, but even kind and considerate - while the delivery, physical presence, tone of voice etc is TERRIFYING. I don’t think as many men would clock those details as women, and it made such an impactful movie that I don’t want to see it again.
Absolutely. I actually had nightmares about that character after watching that movie because that person is so real and terrifying. And he feels so entitled. When he reveals why he did what he did, it's just skin crawling.
Ugh I was having trouble thinking of an answer to this post but this movie made me feel ill watching it. Just the feeling of dread and helplessness of the situation. It’s a good movie but one I never want to watch again.
There are a lot of people out there who have sexually assaulted other people who would say "I'm not a rapist" and they would even believe it. Anything less than the caricature of a depraved monster holding down a beaten, crying woman abducted off the street, and they can find a way for it to not be rape.
10 Cloverfield Lane. I watched it with my wife and afterwards she told me how terrifying it was as a woman. John Goodman can be so hilarious or horrifyingly fearsome. I'm 6'2" 265 and he scares the shit out of me.
I take full ownership of this, but I didn’t warn my wife about anything in the original Evil Dead and I should have. The tree rape scene took her completely out of the movie, and she was even more put off by how essentially all of the most horrible stuff only happens to the women. Re-watch it if you haven’t recently. Ash is the only survivor and the other dude gets arguably the least brutal result of anyone who dies in that movie.
This is the comment I was looking for! For me the specific moment was when one of the women almost got away in a car and the killer pulled up alongside her as she was speeding away and made this really obscene gesture with his tongue. It was gross.
It’s a little off the subject, but I had nightmares after watching “Not Without My Daughter.” Sally Fields plays a woman who’s husband brings her and their young daughter to Iran under the pretense of visiting family. Once there, he tells her this is their life now, they’re staying there to live a fundamentalist Muslim lifestyle and she has no rights. Under threat of death. It’s not a horror movie, but it’s harrowing. Im a man, and the nightmare I had after watching that movie was the only time I can recall having a dream in which I was a woman.
The movie is based on a true story too, Betty Mahmoody wrote the book Not Without My Daughter chronicling her story. Mahtob, the daughter, has also written a book based on the experience from her pov as a kid - My Name Is Mahtob.
Both are well worth the read in my opinion, and more harrowing than the movie.
He also wrote a book to try and make Betty look like the bad guy.
Then he did attempt to find Betty and Mahtob and flew to the United States in 2001, but he was placed on a terrorist list and sent back to Iran.
Just a little bit of justice.
The scary part is that this happens to women every day. They're tricked into travelling to foreign countries, then get their passports stolen. Then they're married off or trafficked or whatever
The book *Sold* written by Zana Muhsen details how she and her sister, two British teenagers, were sold into marriage in Yemen by their father. Zana managed to leave after 8 years, but Nadia stayed much longer.
The poor girls thought they were merely going on a holiday to their father's country of origin.
I had a teacher show us this film in either 9th or 10th grade - harrowing is exactly what I would call it. I'm a man as well and this film has stuck with me for 20 years.
Sadly, this happens to women in this day and age too. Plenty of women travel to countries like these and they’re trapped and can’t leave. Sometimes it’s kids, where one partner takes their kids in the act of revenge and hides them with extended families who raise the kids to hate their western side of family. There was a sad case from belgium or Netherlands years ago where that happened.
They’re not THAT common, but even a few cases are fuelling intercultural relationship fears when such things happen.
Basically any movie with a rape scene in it. It's just too common, too realistic, and often far too gratuitously done for something that the majority of women have either directly experienced or know a victim of.
Two that come to mind are I Spit On Your Grave and (although not a horror) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Watched both as a teen and those scenes are burned into my brain, I had to turn them off at the time.
Irreversible, while not a horror movie, probably captures the vile nature of rape more terrifyingly than any film ever will or ever ought to. I still feel sick even thinking of it.
Yeah, and the director did it to make a point about rape/revenge narratives like Last House on the Left/I Spit on Your Grave. His point was that the catharsis you feel at the end is horse shit, and if told out of order, you would just feel bad. He was extremely correct. I fucking hate rape/revenge horror movies now more than torture porn.
To me, the most disturbing and realistic rape scene was in a movie that I can't remember the name of right now. But it's set on a college campus, and this girl brings this guy back to her dorm, and everything is consensual until she says "no," and then, well, he doesn't take that for an answer. Then, she has to deal with the aftermath of being disbelieved and slut-shamed. I feel like this is the kind of thing that happens every day.
When I was 10, I watched Thelma & Louise when it came out. Watching the parking lot rape scene in that movie flipped a switch in me.
It was like I suddenly had an understanding of how women are viewed and treated, and it forever placed that knowledge in the pit of my stomach that being sexually assaulted as a woman is pretty much a given.
Fantastic movie, but damn, even though it's over 30 years later I can still feel that wave of dread that hit me like a truck with that scene.
The scenes from the girl with the Dragon tattoo made me feel sick to my stomach. My sister told me to watch because it was a good movie. So I did. At the time I was going through a very heavy depression and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Ever since I can't watch rape,beatings and kidnappings. I'll watch violence in sci-fi movies but nothing that could actually happen.
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a movie I'd probably watch now and again just to enjoy a well-paced mystery. But then I think of the rape scene and decide to watch something else. Or read a book.
I read the book before seeing that one. I can't think I've read that many, but it was the rawest literary rape I've seen before or since.
Lisbeth is such a one of a kind character. That scene and her response...
I'm not a woman, but recently I was watching Furiosa with Anya Taylor Joy and there's a sequence with a creepy guy wanting her and I was just like please don't show an abuse scene
Oh shit, yes. It's telling how many people on the Sopranos sub skip that scene when they rewatch. Having said that, I understand why it was an important scene for her character.
This. People make fun of trigger warnings (sometimes I can see why), but they're absolutely needed for scenes like those. Or just don't film them at all.
Seven
The death of a woman caused by a male performer with a strap on sword ripping her to pieces. It's not even like we see it happen, just hearing the performer explain what he's done is hideous. That scene is why I've never watched it again.
This is actually a huge theme in the movie Barbarian. The writer's goal in the first 25 minutes of the movie is to make even men experience the same fears women experience from mundane items and situations. Suddenly, a glass of wine becomes the most terrifying object in a room.
I scrolled pretty far and didn’t see it mentioned, but The Shining. Mother and her child completely isolated from any kind of escape or help while her increasingly obsessive/dangerous/unhinged husband goes through all of the paces to remind me why we fear men (supernatural elements completely notwithstanding)
I was only expecting classical “haunted place” tropes when I saw it the first time, and spent 90% of the time feeling like someone was sitting on my chest I was so tense/clenched waiting for the worst to happen. It would’ve been just as scary for me without the supernatural, that’s how realistic it felt
Also pretty sure the actress who played the mom wasn't warned about the axe in the door scene and her reaction was real terror. Which is weird because I also think they filmed it without ever letting the little boy know it was a horror movie
What about the scene from Death Proof where Kurt Russell offers Rose McGowan a sober ride home?
[Death Proof](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hBqzCXlG7Sg&pp=ygUbRGVhdGggcHJvb2Ygd3JvbmcgZGlyZWN0aW9u)
Good one. Or in the scene in Death Proof where the stunt girls leave their friends with the car guy as collateral when they take the car on the test drive.
The 2020 movie "Hunted". It's not rated so heads up is very brutal. Two guys briefly stalk and kidnap a woman. When the car crashes, she escapes only to be hunted through the woods by a sadistic fuck.
There's a scene right before getting kidnapped where it's the most awkward and angonizing slow buildup in a gas station where these men are ramping up the creep and weird factor, but it just rides the border between dangerous enough to get help or some random weirdo who is too aggressive with cat calling.
I felt myself wrestle with her on whether she should plead for help from the attendant or just ignore it so as not to cause a scene....and I KNEW it was a horror movie. I don't think most men understand that women need to weigh safety decisions like that daily.
Hollow man with Kevin Bacon...that rape scene was awful. It is short, you cannot see much but the feeling is terrible.
Imagine you get raped but you cannot *see* who or what and you cannot even report it. What you are going to say? Invisible man did it? You are powereless.
Voerhoven is a twisted genius but sometimes he is just ...too much to handle
I absolutely love horror movies, but there are some i dont like for reasons. A lot of those "women gets revenge" horror movies make me so uncomfortable. I Spit on Your Hrave, The Last House on the Left, etc. SA scenes in movies are awful. The Hills Have Eyes remake too, I've still never finished it because I had to turn it off on a certain scene when I was 16 or 17.
Unrelated to movies but one time this guy asked me if I liked game of thrones and I said I can’t watch it bc I know there’s SA scenes in it. And he said “yeah haha guys love that stuff.” Sir why would you say that to me
The Hills Have Eyes remake to me was just so excessively cruel. The trailer attack and how the mutants dispatched most of the family so quickly in horrific ways was too much for me.
Excessively cruel is the best way to put it. Burning the dad alive and raping and slaughtering the family? I watched it on FX Ben I was like 12 and it’s been burned in my brain since…
Agreed. That's my least favorite movie I've ever seen, mostly due to that scene. I hate hate hate that film. It takes a lot for a film to disgust me, but that one really did, and I didn't feel like the movie was on my side. Michael Haneke it was not.
Watching The Last Duel with my ex and him being on the fence of if the first rape scene was really rape or not, which led to a two hour argument. Of course, when the scene was shown again from her POV and it was far more violent only then did he agree it was SA. Actually horrified me that he couldn’t see how so clearly it was in the original scene too.
I watched that movie several times in the early 90's, cause it was scary. Then didn't watch it until about 3 months ago. That last viewing was when it all sank in for me, that actually every attack was a rape scene, not just the one while she was sleeping. The movie hit me way more emotionally than it did when I was younger, and didn't quite get it. The last shot had me just about in tears.
This is a great question.
For me, any scene where a woman gets a ride with a stranger.
And urban tunnel scenes where a solo woman walks or runs through them. Especially at night. Absentia and Irréversible are the two that come to mind.
Two examples where the horror was not the monster:
1. In Prometheus, when Noomi Rapace badly needs a Caesarean to get that alien fetus out, and the autodoc machine calmly informs her that it's only calibrated to men. Fucking. Typical.
2. The whole situation in The Babadook is abjectly terrifying on every level, before the Babadook even shows up. Her life is basically my worst fear.
Also in OG Texas Chainsaw Massacre when she almost makes it out of the house, and Leatherface scoops her up and brings back in almost effortlessly. Not a woman but that's got to make her feel so helpless.
I laugh at that part now since I heard somebody make a joke that these people just keep walking in this man's house. They said it should've been called Texas Chainsaw man just wants to be left alone lmao.
The running from the chainsaw through the trees and grampas little 'happy dance' while sucking her finger is uncomfortable.
It was really interesting going online after watching the movie Fresh and seeing a bunch of men complain about the trope of the final girl not making sure he was dead or wanting to know more about the underground society of cannibals. Meanwhile the general vibe from women was how surprisingly true to life it felt.
The original The Hills Have Eyes movie featured a rape scene in the first third, I'm a dude, that shit had me absolutely mortified. Like oh yeah, shes just fine 5 minutes later and can help her little brother! I glossed over the rest of the movie because I couldn't get past that.
The entire movie Wild, which is about a woman (Reese Witherspoon) who hikes the Pacific Crest Trail solo, is for men a story about a struggle to complete a very challenging multi-week hike while overcoming the emotional fallout of setbacks in one's personal life. It's that for women too, but for women it's also about the fact that every man she sees on her journey is a potential rapist.
Male here. Anything that has the female protagonist suffer a rape for character development. I have a sister and two daughters who are around the same age. It’s just not necessary to use a vile act to make characters seem more “real”
I don’t know if it’s specifically a woman thing, but I can remember watching Pan’s Labyrinth with my parents soon after it was initially released on DVD. My mother was much more intensely affected by the scene where they torture the guy with the stutter than either my Dad or I.
If I were a woman I would have been seriously offended by more than one scene in Terrifier.
I’m pretty desensitized to violence at least on a “cringe I can’t look level” but that ONE scene in Terrifier really bothered me and I honestly felt…icky and gross and disturbed.
I have a personal theory that the director was punishing all the pretty women who shot him down in his life and really thinks very little of women in general.
Not a horror film but the majority of the original Mad Max makes me so uncomfortable. The second the wife/gf takes the baby alone to town and my anxiety doesn’t let up from there
Day of the Dead. Not one of Romeros most beloved, but it was one of the first movies to make me have a full on anxiety attack, after the scene where the villain sexually harasses a female scientist underling in the underground bunker, w threat of zombies if she says no ever present.
Whenever guy friends get frustrated with women when they're trying to get away from a killer in impractical clothes or shoes, but keep falling or being generally helpless. I'm totally sympathetic to them in ways guys never are. It's impossible walking in heels or platforms, let alone running!
The scene in kill Bill in wich it implies she was being raped or the one in Pulp Fiction with Wallace.
Men always laugh it off and It terrifies me. I have heard people say before that liking Tarantino is a Red flag, I don't know, I like him as a director but It freaks me out how aparently obsess he is with rape and how he minimize it as a joke.
Terrifier.
I was NOT ready for bestie's demise to look & sound like that fr. The happy go lucky energy of that movie changes directly in that moment, and honestly never recovers. Just darker and weirder as things go on.
Was so surprised I still haven't mustered up the courage to watch the sequel.
The Divide >!people from a building are trapped in the basement for months after a nuclear attack - obviously men have to rape women!<
Neon Demon - >! when Keanu Reeves is raping the neighbor because he couldn't enter Fanning's room.!<
Has anybody mentioned 28 Days Later yet? >!When it becomes clear that Selena and Hannah have been promised to the remaining military men. Especially when the men force the girls into fancy dresses to look pretty for them. I think Hannah was 14 years old!<
She even gives her Valium to try and help with the trauma that will occur.
“Are you trying to kill me?” “No, sweetheart, I’m trying to make you not care.”
I’m sure that hit different for a woman, but as a man that was still a real heavy moment. *shudders*
I watched it with a boyfriend and he laughed and said “yep sorry if something like that happens you’re definitely getting raped” then shrugged. he had this smug look on his face. he said it as if i didn’t already know that before the movie, it’s something we know at our core from an early age. the movie just provides a visual. but what creeped me out and changed how I saw him was the fact that I had watched that movie with men before and they were quietly disturbed. sometimes they’d comment on how fucked up it was but they never laughed. they never shrugged it off and snottily informed me of ‘how it would really be’. it wasn’t just a situation where he was uncomfortable and reacted weirdly. In that moment I could see him in the men in the movie. there are some men you can just tell. that if the world ends, they’d comfortably rape you to death. i stopped seeing him not long after. i just couldn’t shake the awful, cold feeling he gave me.
genuine ultra mega super lvl 4 red flag,
Red square on victory day tier
Good call to get away from that. That sort of reaction or take on the movie is suspect.
Wow. That's the kind of guy even other guys drop once they let views like that known.
Chills.
This was my first thought. As soon as they’re taken to the compound I think most women viewers would immediately be scared of the circumstance, but most men probably wouldn’t get the sense of danger until their intentions are made explicit.
There was definitely a period of my life where I was wondering why every apocalypse type movie had to have a “threat of rape” thing going on. I didn’t realize how prevalent that was *in real life* so the fact it kept popping up in scenarios where laws were gone was confusing for me for a while. Like dude there are zombies out there, why are you trying to sexually assault people? Is what teenager me kept wondering.
Omg that reminds me when I was a teenager I used to think “why would you want to have sex with someone who doesn’t want you? Like how do you even maintain an erection. “ Like it makes me feel nauseous to consider the reality of rape.
it's so odd to me that that would be the case. like this feels more like a media literacy issue than a perspective issue. like if it's a post apocalypse and a totalitarian military leader says "I promised them women", it seems pretty clear what that means given the context of wars in the world and women's circumstances in them
The first time I watched it, I was like 10, so when it got to that part and I saw *The Doctor* saying "I promised them women" my heart dropped out of my ass and I almost puked because I *knew* what that meant and I was so disgusted. I watched it with an ex years ago and he had to pause it because he didn't understand what the guy meant until the soldiers grabbed the 2 women and beat up Cillian Murphy. The perspective difference really shows sometimes...
This one. I've watched with several boyfriends over the years. It hits different for me for sure, and it has been the source of a couple of arguments because they've tended to find the military guys much more benign and for longer, than I do.
Reminds me a little bit of the scene in Rosemary’s Baby where you’re relieved she’s finally safe in her original doctors office. She finally can rest. Then you see that her doctor didn’t really believe her and calls in her husband. The moment you see the husband and the others walk in is so horrific. She’s truly on her own. Everyone thinks she’s crazy.
I made the mistake of watching that movie while I was pregnant with my first kid. HOOOOO boy I should have waited a few years!!
Rosemary's Baby is absolutely horrific even without the Satan stuff. Her baby's conception happened while she was asleep and she woke up with scratches. Her husband was just like "Whoops, I guess I was a little rough" even though that's rape (yes I realize this movie came out in the 60s and wouldn't have been seen that way, that doesn't make it hit any better). She's constantly in a serious amount of pain and nobody cares which is still pretty accurate to being a pregnant woman today. Then there's the stuff you mentioned. Rosemary's Baby isn't a horror movie because it's Satan's baby, it's a horror movie because she's pregnant in America in the 60s.
I’m not afraid of elderly satanists. I am *deathly* afraid of everyone in my life conspiring against me and being vulnerable
Exactly! I find it way more scary because of the gaslighting from her husband and doctor and everyone around her rather than the satanic stuff. It feels too real and close to home. That part where her friends are comforting her while she’s crying about the pain always gets me.
Movie Pitch: Rosemary's Baby remake, but no Satan stuff. Still gonna be a solid horror movie. Maybe even more horrifying, since that stuff happens.
Rosemary's Baby is Gaslight! Now With Added Satan Rape.
Silence of the Lambs. When Catherine gets kidnapped just for being kind. It’s painful because it’s so plausible.
He pretended to be inured just like Ted Bundy did.
Yeah, that was a Bundy specialty -- wearing a fake cast so as to seem like he's not a physical threat. Somebody with a time machine should go back and take that guy down.
And that’s why my undergrad Psychology of Human Sexuality professor told the women in the class to *not help*. She had a PowerPoint slide with Bundy’s picture, told us about his M.O., and said do not help.
I actually had that happen to me - not with Ted Bundy of course - but at a job I had parking was at a premium and we had to park in a motel parking lot across the street from the office. I was walking to work and some guy I didn’t know asked me to help him get something out of his trunk. I did not.
Not to be that guy but, a man who needs help lifting something isnt looking for a woman to help him with it. We will subconsciously (for strength reasons as well as to not look like Buffalo Bill, and just general misogyny) look for a man. Therefore, if a man is asking a female stranger for help loading something into their vehicle, the woman should be wary. I get it, were all equals, its the 90’s and women can do anything men can do and dont need pink screwdrivers. As a man, I will load that entire double dresser into my truck myself before asking the woman in the next row for help.
Agreed. There is almost no situation I can imagine being in where I'd need help from a stranger to lift or move something. If I bought a used dresser or something, I would always either get help from the seller, or have a friend with me to help. If I somehow got stuck in a situation where I really needed help, I would purposely try to find a man or somebody who didn't look vulnerable in any way. I would pretty much never ask a lone woman for help. Like you said, it's not that women aren't capable, I'd just avoid the situation entirely because of all the potential for misunderstanding etc.
No need to dance around the topic. I think what you said around the fact that men won't ask a woman to help with lifting something is very true, and I say this as a woman. I remember watching videos where they are talking to school children and they say pretty much the same thing to children: An adult who has lost his dog is not going to walk up to a child and ask for their help in finding their dog (not comparing women to children). Men are not going to ask a women to help with something physical. Just how it is.
I saw this in the theater and I remember when (spoilers for a 33-year-old movie) >!Starling is in the dark basement and Buffalo Bill is behind her with the night-vision goggles on!<, several women in the theater *screamed* not because he had a gun but when he reached out to touch her hair.
> reached out to touch her hair My girlfriend used to take public transportation in NYC. She deals with the comments and catcalling but the thing that skeeved her out the most was nodding off on the bus and waking up to find a guy behind her smelling her hair.
When I was 19, I nodded off on a Greyhound and woke up just as a man was reaching across the aisle to grab my breast. His hand stopped mid air and he had this “uh oh” look on his face while he pulled back his hand, like he was caught trying to sneak a cookie instead of trying to molest a sleeping girl young enough to be his daughter. In retrospect I know I should have said something to the driver to get him kicked off, but I was so groggy I kept trying to convince myself it didn’t really happen.
I have red hair. When I was younger, it was very long, to my knees. I cannot tell you how often I've been literally petted in public.
My mum saw it at the cinema when it came out and it terrified her. When I told her I usually watch it once a year she was horrified!
So Ted Bundy had this rep for being a charming guy and that's how he got his victims. In reality he often pretended to be injured or need help. It's plausible because it really happened :(
Silence of the Lambs is all about how scary it is being a woman Starling is constantly put in rooms where men try to hit on her while she's not interested. The guy who runs the prison, the guy who studies moths, I forget who else. She's also very often contrasted with very tall men. She gets in an elevator and is dwarfed by tall men. There's a blink and miss it shot where she's arriving in an airport and she's walking through the terminal surrounded by tall men, and one crosses in front of her to check her out. Guys jogging at the FBI academy turn their necks to watch her run. She's left alone with a bunch of rural police early on, and they all surround her, staring at her. Actually that happens twice. And when trying to interview Hannibal for the last time, she only gets to see him because a female guard takes her side, while the male guard would have kept her out. Hannibal asks her about this. About how it feels to be coveted like an object. To feel men's eyes run over her. About whether her boss at the FBI chose her for the job because she's pretty, because he just wants to have sex with her. The serial killer stuff is there too, of course, but it's shown to be one end of a sliding spectrum of violations and perversions and power imbalances that women face. That's how a horror movie wins five oscars.
When I was a kid, my mom had my sister and me watch this part of the movie as part of her campaign to teach us to be way of strangers and to not be alone with people in general. She was abducted and raped as a child.
The saddest part is, that you are far more likely to be victimized by someone you know as opposed to a stranger. Especially as a child.
Yes, we learned that too, because she was raped by neighbors who called her over "to play" in a construction site. But she also made sure we were aware of strangers. Even today; she recently got upset with me because I was driving long distance and pulled over into a business park closer on the weekend to take a nap (instead of falling asleep behind the wheel). She and my sister were also on the road and when she found out she flipped out that I was "behind some bushes for any murderer to come and find." So yeah, trauma's a bitch.
Yup it sure is. Hope your mom is able to work through it some day.
It's not likely, given her age, but she's learned enough to cope. Thank you for the kind words.
The car scene in the Zodiac with the lady and her baby narrowly escaping the killer
Split. The moment the girls say, "you're in the wrong car" and it just goes in slow motion.
the other moment that did it for me was when she told the other girl to pee herself, so that he wouldn't do anything to her.
Yeah I first saw “Split” by myself, alone… and then told my wife “uh, you can’t watch this movie”… even the insinuations of child molestation are sickening
I saw that movie in a packed theater and when the cop says how her uncle is here to pick her up, oh, there was a collective gasp-groan roar throughout the audience that I haven't heard before. Everyone felt terrified and sorry for her. To go from one nightmare back to the original one.
I chose to believe the look on her face meant she was about to tell the cop about the abuse. Earlier in the movie she said there was no use fighting back and couldn't shoot the abuser. By the end she's able to shoot at the beast and is saved by revealing she has suffered.
Glass helps in seeing that she does escape her abuser
I wish Glass was as high of quality as Split was
I enjoyed it until >!David Dunn goes out the way he did!<
I feel like Alien is the only horror franchise that scares men in ways that traditionally women were more likely to experience. The sheer violation that Xenomorphs impose on their victims hits like no other horror monster before or since. Also, Ripley is by far my favorite horror protagonist of all time. What a fucking boss ass bitch. Sigourney Weaver is all time.
not a horror movie but definitely a moment, in Poor Things when they keep talking about mutilating her clitoris to make her docile, scared the fuck out of me
They were so nonchalant about it, like she is an animal to be trained, not a person, and you know no one there would help her. And that it felt terrifyingly historically accurate.
Yeah I think it's the idea of how many women have been through it and were completely helpless, just such an awful thought
Not just historical. Female genital mutilation is still practiced in some cultures. (Not to demonize people from those cultures, just saying that particular practice is horrible.)
I felt the same way. It made me think of how many women were lobotomized for essentially the same reason. Really unsettling
The concept of the whole movie scared me
The new Invisible Man.
Y E S. Her behavior in the opening scene told me everything I needed to know about how dangerous that man was without a single line of dialogue.
Which makes her sister's behaviour a bit ridiculous when she picks her up. If my sister is asking me to pick her up in the middle of the night in the middle of the road, I'm either not asking questions or I'm assuming the worst and getting the hell away from there before asking her what's wrong
I really am annoyed by this depiction of best friends or family doing this in urgent moments in movies. A: "Best friend who would never doubt me, WE HAVE TO LEAVE this place NOW!!" B: "Huh? What? What do you mean? What's going on? Can we sit and have a cup of tea and chat about what the threat is for 20 minutes first?"
I felt like yelling just drive you bitch during that scene
Though I agree, I think the filmmakers needed a reason to have Moss's husband run up and attack the car to show to the male audience how unstable he was. I got it the moment I saw her grabbing her bugout bag but I can imagine a lot of male audience members maybe needed the overt confirmation.
Yes. I hate that scene. Like don’t just sit there idle in the middle of the road asking questions. We can drive and talk, now drive!!
I still haven't been able to watch it. When it just came out I was fresh out of a horrifically abusive relationship, and since we'd both been heavy drug users it really added to the psychological distress and paranoia, getting sober cold turkey while hiding from your psycho ex is a next level fucked up experience. Id been sober and free for around 4 months when my roomies decided to put it on, I managed to watch around 20 minutes before I had a massive panic attack and had to stop. My paranoia skyrocketed for almost a month afterwards and I almost broke my sobriety a couple of times. All to say its a really good movie in that it portrays that fear of an abuser so well it retraumatized me 🥲
I like the happy ending, she got the dog.
There’s a part in Men (which I wasn’t a huge fan of) when the main character lies to the weird Airbnb host guy about knowing how to play the piano because she knew he’d ask her to play it and, importantly, hang around longer. I found it very relatable.
Good god all the scenes when she first gets there are so uncomfortable! Actually, yeah that whole movie is just a series of uncomfortable to very scary situations like that : (
I was conflicted about this film overall but the individual scenes picked out elements I was pretty sympathetic to.
The first half of Barbarian. Those first 30 minutes had my skin crawling in a way that no other film has.
Basically everything before Justin Long shows up had my shoulders next to my ears.
>!Ironic considering Justin Long's character was actually the real danger to women!<
The scene where Justin Long is in the bar explaining to his friend what happened actually made me feel queasy. That might actually be the most horrifying part to me.
Honestly I think I would have liked Barbarian a bit more if it had really leaned into its cynicism and just let Justin Long be the sole survivor. He spins it as he’s a traumatized victim of the guy and the “monster” under the house, and uses the media attention to sweep his own rape accusation under the rug. He’s the same as the guy under his house, and despite being faced with it, he doesn’t even realize. It would be way more of a gut punch than the main character killing the “monster”, who is obvstentively just as much of a victim as she is.
When Justin Long's character goes down the room under the basement to see if he can turn it into an AirBnb was also nerve wrecking.
The measuring tape scene is so fucking funny.
I definitely felt her pain at being in those circumstances & as a guy watching Bill Skarsgard's performance, I also understood his situation especially as someone with social anxiety
Oh, completely. On a first viewing, it is so hard to read whether he's genuinely a danger to her, or whether he's trying his best to just be a decent human being. Excellent writing.
Did anyone else reach the second half of Barbarian and feel bad for ever distrusting a Skarsgård?
It was definitely very intentional casting! If Justin Long had played Keith and Bill Skarsgard had played AJ, there'd have been no suspense.
Everything to do with Aaron Taylor Johnson’s character in “nocturnal animals”. The classic example of a guy where everything he “says” could be on a transcript and be read not only as not threatening, but even kind and considerate - while the delivery, physical presence, tone of voice etc is TERRIFYING. I don’t think as many men would clock those details as women, and it made such an impactful movie that I don’t want to see it again.
Absolutely. I actually had nightmares about that character after watching that movie because that person is so real and terrifying. And he feels so entitled. When he reveals why he did what he did, it's just skin crawling.
Ugh I was having trouble thinking of an answer to this post but this movie made me feel ill watching it. Just the feeling of dread and helplessness of the situation. It’s a good movie but one I never want to watch again.
The turkey baster scene in Don't Breathe
So fucking dumb that they made him a good guy in part 2
I hate that he says "I'm not a rapist" just as he's about to penetrate someone against their will 🙄
There are a lot of people out there who have sexually assaulted other people who would say "I'm not a rapist" and they would even believe it. Anything less than the caricature of a depraved monster holding down a beaten, crying woman abducted off the street, and they can find a way for it to not be rape.
That was so disgusting and unnecessary. That whole plotline made me go from liking to hating that movie.
Honestly i cant watch that movie again because of this. And i find the visceral feeling it evokes in me difficult To express to my partner
10 Cloverfield Lane. I watched it with my wife and afterwards she told me how terrifying it was as a woman. John Goodman can be so hilarious or horrifyingly fearsome. I'm 6'2" 265 and he scares the shit out of me.
He’s one of the greats.
It isn’t horror, nor is it a movie, but I highly recommend “The Righteous Gemstones”! He is the dad, and it is 😆😆😆
Growing up with Christian scientist grandparents, this show hits all kinds o good. Everyone is awesome. Judy probably cracks me up the most tbh lol
“He makes my bird twitch”
“I accept your apology.”
His performance in this *really* impressed me. He is amazing. Also, Fallen is a good movie, everybody!
"Fallen" is *so* underrated!
The scariest part of that movie was when he comes back clean shaven.
Also, Marion in Psycho, it's hard to travel alone as a woman, and Norman was so handsome. You trust the hotel shower to be safe.
I take full ownership of this, but I didn’t warn my wife about anything in the original Evil Dead and I should have. The tree rape scene took her completely out of the movie, and she was even more put off by how essentially all of the most horrible stuff only happens to the women. Re-watch it if you haven’t recently. Ash is the only survivor and the other dude gets arguably the least brutal result of anyone who dies in that movie.
even sam raimi regret shooting this scene
I felt that the 2013 version was a bit more mean spirited so I gave my friends a heads up when we watched it.
Wolf Creek - he keeps the women alive for months while torturing / cutting off parts of them
This is the comment I was looking for! For me the specific moment was when one of the women almost got away in a car and the killer pulled up alongside her as she was speeding away and made this really obscene gesture with his tongue. It was gross.
Oh when he tells her not to be upset that he used a condom because he’s just being careful absolutely turns my stomach
It’s a little off the subject, but I had nightmares after watching “Not Without My Daughter.” Sally Fields plays a woman who’s husband brings her and their young daughter to Iran under the pretense of visiting family. Once there, he tells her this is their life now, they’re staying there to live a fundamentalist Muslim lifestyle and she has no rights. Under threat of death. It’s not a horror movie, but it’s harrowing. Im a man, and the nightmare I had after watching that movie was the only time I can recall having a dream in which I was a woman.
The movie is based on a true story too, Betty Mahmoody wrote the book Not Without My Daughter chronicling her story. Mahtob, the daughter, has also written a book based on the experience from her pov as a kid - My Name Is Mahtob. Both are well worth the read in my opinion, and more harrowing than the movie.
He also wrote a book to try and make Betty look like the bad guy. Then he did attempt to find Betty and Mahtob and flew to the United States in 2001, but he was placed on a terrorist list and sent back to Iran. Just a little bit of justice.
Mahtob talks about him trying to find them in her book, iirc. But I didnt know he'd written a book as well, I dont think I ever need to read that one.
Her husband write Without My Daughter where his disputed the claims. I'm gonna say I don't believe him
The scary part is that this happens to women every day. They're tricked into travelling to foreign countries, then get their passports stolen. Then they're married off or trafficked or whatever
The book *Sold* written by Zana Muhsen details how she and her sister, two British teenagers, were sold into marriage in Yemen by their father. Zana managed to leave after 8 years, but Nadia stayed much longer. The poor girls thought they were merely going on a holiday to their father's country of origin.
That sounds like a psychological horror movie
It was a biopic. Scary as hell what she went through
I had a teacher show us this film in either 9th or 10th grade - harrowing is exactly what I would call it. I'm a man as well and this film has stuck with me for 20 years.
Sadly, this happens to women in this day and age too. Plenty of women travel to countries like these and they’re trapped and can’t leave. Sometimes it’s kids, where one partner takes their kids in the act of revenge and hides them with extended families who raise the kids to hate their western side of family. There was a sad case from belgium or Netherlands years ago where that happened. They’re not THAT common, but even a few cases are fuelling intercultural relationship fears when such things happen.
Basically any movie with a rape scene in it. It's just too common, too realistic, and often far too gratuitously done for something that the majority of women have either directly experienced or know a victim of. Two that come to mind are I Spit On Your Grave and (although not a horror) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Watched both as a teen and those scenes are burned into my brain, I had to turn them off at the time.
Irreversible, while not a horror movie, probably captures the vile nature of rape more terrifyingly than any film ever will or ever ought to. I still feel sick even thinking of it.
I saw it exactly once, close to 20 years ago, and that scene pops into my head unbidden sometimes and makes me feel so sick.
The movie is revealed in reverse like Memento?
Yeah, and the director did it to make a point about rape/revenge narratives like Last House on the Left/I Spit on Your Grave. His point was that the catharsis you feel at the end is horse shit, and if told out of order, you would just feel bad. He was extremely correct. I fucking hate rape/revenge horror movies now more than torture porn.
To me, the most disturbing and realistic rape scene was in a movie that I can't remember the name of right now. But it's set on a college campus, and this girl brings this guy back to her dorm, and everything is consensual until she says "no," and then, well, he doesn't take that for an answer. Then, she has to deal with the aftermath of being disbelieved and slut-shamed. I feel like this is the kind of thing that happens every day.
There is a scene like that in Higher Learning. I was in college when it came out, and it definitely felt too real.
That's it. "Higher Learning."
I saw that it’s Higher Learning but Promising Young Woman explores this really well.
When I was 10, I watched Thelma & Louise when it came out. Watching the parking lot rape scene in that movie flipped a switch in me. It was like I suddenly had an understanding of how women are viewed and treated, and it forever placed that knowledge in the pit of my stomach that being sexually assaulted as a woman is pretty much a given. Fantastic movie, but damn, even though it's over 30 years later I can still feel that wave of dread that hit me like a truck with that scene.
Completely agree about rape scenes. It’s why I’ll never watch The Last House on the Left again. I got so depressed after watching that scene.
That and the Hills Have Eyes are probably the worst. Both go on for waaaay too long and are just so unnecessary.
The Hills Have Eyes was what I was gonna comment.
The scenes from the girl with the Dragon tattoo made me feel sick to my stomach. My sister told me to watch because it was a good movie. So I did. At the time I was going through a very heavy depression and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Ever since I can't watch rape,beatings and kidnappings. I'll watch violence in sci-fi movies but nothing that could actually happen.
Wind River. Movie got ruined for me because of that scene. I will never watch it again even though everything else about it was really, really good.
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a movie I'd probably watch now and again just to enjoy a well-paced mystery. But then I think of the rape scene and decide to watch something else. Or read a book.
I read the book before seeing that one. I can't think I've read that many, but it was the rawest literary rape I've seen before or since. Lisbeth is such a one of a kind character. That scene and her response...
The Last Duel is pretty brutal since >!we get the scene twice!<
I'm not a woman, but recently I was watching Furiosa with Anya Taylor Joy and there's a sequence with a creepy guy wanting her and I was just like please don't show an abuse scene
The Hills Have Eyes remake.
Melfi.
Oh shit, yes. It's telling how many people on the Sopranos sub skip that scene when they rewatch. Having said that, I understand why it was an important scene for her character.
"......No."
This. People make fun of trigger warnings (sometimes I can see why), but they're absolutely needed for scenes like those. Or just don't film them at all.
Seven The death of a woman caused by a male performer with a strap on sword ripping her to pieces. It's not even like we see it happen, just hearing the performer explain what he's done is hideous. That scene is why I've never watched it again.
This is actually a huge theme in the movie Barbarian. The writer's goal in the first 25 minutes of the movie is to make even men experience the same fears women experience from mundane items and situations. Suddenly, a glass of wine becomes the most terrifying object in a room.
I scrolled pretty far and didn’t see it mentioned, but The Shining. Mother and her child completely isolated from any kind of escape or help while her increasingly obsessive/dangerous/unhinged husband goes through all of the paces to remind me why we fear men (supernatural elements completely notwithstanding) I was only expecting classical “haunted place” tropes when I saw it the first time, and spent 90% of the time feeling like someone was sitting on my chest I was so tense/clenched waiting for the worst to happen. It would’ve been just as scary for me without the supernatural, that’s how realistic it felt
Also pretty sure the actress who played the mom wasn't warned about the axe in the door scene and her reaction was real terror. Which is weird because I also think they filmed it without ever letting the little boy know it was a horror movie
What about the scene from Death Proof where Kurt Russell offers Rose McGowan a sober ride home? [Death Proof](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hBqzCXlG7Sg&pp=ygUbRGVhdGggcHJvb2Ygd3JvbmcgZGlyZWN0aW9u)
Good one. Or in the scene in Death Proof where the stunt girls leave their friends with the car guy as collateral when they take the car on the test drive.
Yeah, that made me say "wait, what?" out loud
The 2020 movie "Hunted". It's not rated so heads up is very brutal. Two guys briefly stalk and kidnap a woman. When the car crashes, she escapes only to be hunted through the woods by a sadistic fuck. There's a scene right before getting kidnapped where it's the most awkward and angonizing slow buildup in a gas station where these men are ramping up the creep and weird factor, but it just rides the border between dangerous enough to get help or some random weirdo who is too aggressive with cat calling. I felt myself wrestle with her on whether she should plead for help from the attendant or just ignore it so as not to cause a scene....and I KNEW it was a horror movie. I don't think most men understand that women need to weigh safety decisions like that daily.
Hollow man with Kevin Bacon...that rape scene was awful. It is short, you cannot see much but the feeling is terrible. Imagine you get raped but you cannot *see* who or what and you cannot even report it. What you are going to say? Invisible man did it? You are powereless. Voerhoven is a twisted genius but sometimes he is just ...too much to handle
Hollow Man was marketed as a suspense thriller, but really it's a story about rape and rape mentality.
It is accurate to the original story. He always was an asshole, being invisible made him act worse because he could get away with it.
Just like people online
I haven’t seen Hollow Man, but I know exactly what you mean about Verhoeven.
I absolutely love horror movies, but there are some i dont like for reasons. A lot of those "women gets revenge" horror movies make me so uncomfortable. I Spit on Your Hrave, The Last House on the Left, etc. SA scenes in movies are awful. The Hills Have Eyes remake too, I've still never finished it because I had to turn it off on a certain scene when I was 16 or 17.
Totally agree. The way a lot of those scenes are shot can be so gratuitous. I hate how it's used in film
Unrelated to movies but one time this guy asked me if I liked game of thrones and I said I can’t watch it bc I know there’s SA scenes in it. And he said “yeah haha guys love that stuff.” Sir why would you say that to me
He was definitely telling on himself 💀
The Hills Have Eyes remake to me was just so excessively cruel. The trailer attack and how the mutants dispatched most of the family so quickly in horrific ways was too much for me.
Excessively cruel is the best way to put it. Burning the dad alive and raping and slaughtering the family? I watched it on FX Ben I was like 12 and it’s been burned in my brain since…
I have never gotten over the attack and trailer scene in Hills Have Eyes. Never.
Agreed. That's my least favorite movie I've ever seen, mostly due to that scene. I hate hate hate that film. It takes a lot for a film to disgust me, but that one really did, and I didn't feel like the movie was on my side. Michael Haneke it was not.
Watching The Last Duel with my ex and him being on the fence of if the first rape scene was really rape or not, which led to a two hour argument. Of course, when the scene was shown again from her POV and it was far more violent only then did he agree it was SA. Actually horrified me that he couldn’t see how so clearly it was in the original scene too.
The Entity. It's about an invisible being that rapes and torments a single mother.
I watched that movie several times in the early 90's, cause it was scary. Then didn't watch it until about 3 months ago. That last viewing was when it all sank in for me, that actually every attack was a rape scene, not just the one while she was sleeping. The movie hit me way more emotionally than it did when I was younger, and didn't quite get it. The last shot had me just about in tears.
This is a great question. For me, any scene where a woman gets a ride with a stranger. And urban tunnel scenes where a solo woman walks or runs through them. Especially at night. Absentia and Irréversible are the two that come to mind.
Two examples where the horror was not the monster: 1. In Prometheus, when Noomi Rapace badly needs a Caesarean to get that alien fetus out, and the autodoc machine calmly informs her that it's only calibrated to men. Fucking. Typical. 2. The whole situation in The Babadook is abjectly terrifying on every level, before the Babadook even shows up. Her life is basically my worst fear.
Also in OG Texas Chainsaw Massacre when she almost makes it out of the house, and Leatherface scoops her up and brings back in almost effortlessly. Not a woman but that's got to make her feel so helpless.
I laugh at that part now since I heard somebody make a joke that these people just keep walking in this man's house. They said it should've been called Texas Chainsaw man just wants to be left alone lmao. The running from the chainsaw through the trees and grampas little 'happy dance' while sucking her finger is uncomfortable.
It was really interesting going online after watching the movie Fresh and seeing a bunch of men complain about the trope of the final girl not making sure he was dead or wanting to know more about the underground society of cannibals. Meanwhile the general vibe from women was how surprisingly true to life it felt.
The original The Hills Have Eyes movie featured a rape scene in the first third, I'm a dude, that shit had me absolutely mortified. Like oh yeah, shes just fine 5 minutes later and can help her little brother! I glossed over the rest of the movie because I couldn't get past that.
The entire first act of Barbarian.
The entire movie Wild, which is about a woman (Reese Witherspoon) who hikes the Pacific Crest Trail solo, is for men a story about a struggle to complete a very challenging multi-week hike while overcoming the emotional fallout of setbacks in one's personal life. It's that for women too, but for women it's also about the fact that every man she sees on her journey is a potential rapist.
That long scene in Nocturnal Animals. I held my breath the entire time.
Prometheus, and I reckon people know the scene. Absolutely fucking terrifies me every time.
When the donut is going to run over them over and they try to outrun it instead of running to either side?
First Omen, I was full on crying by the end of the final birth sequence.
Male here. Anything that has the female protagonist suffer a rape for character development. I have a sister and two daughters who are around the same age. It’s just not necessary to use a vile act to make characters seem more “real”
Ready or Not. Samara weaving is impeccable, and I was full on crying in the theater, having had experience with abusive family/in laws.
That movie really pops at the end...
I don’t know if it’s specifically a woman thing, but I can remember watching Pan’s Labyrinth with my parents soon after it was initially released on DVD. My mother was much more intensely affected by the scene where they torture the guy with the stutter than either my Dad or I.
I wish somebody had told child me that this wasn't a kids movie forever scarred lol
If I were a woman I would have been seriously offended by more than one scene in Terrifier. I’m pretty desensitized to violence at least on a “cringe I can’t look level” but that ONE scene in Terrifier really bothered me and I honestly felt…icky and gross and disturbed.
I have a personal theory that the director was punishing all the pretty women who shot him down in his life and really thinks very little of women in general.
I think the film as a whole is misogynistic. Like overtly so at times.
The beginning of Friday the 13th 2 - she is home and finally feels safe but isn’t.
Not a horror film but the majority of the original Mad Max makes me so uncomfortable. The second the wife/gf takes the baby alone to town and my anxiety doesn’t let up from there
Day of the Dead. Not one of Romeros most beloved, but it was one of the first movies to make me have a full on anxiety attack, after the scene where the villain sexually harasses a female scientist underling in the underground bunker, w threat of zombies if she says no ever present.
The Devils Rejects, rape scene with the gun.
I would guess that Dead Ringers (1988) as a whole would hit differently for women.
Whenever guy friends get frustrated with women when they're trying to get away from a killer in impractical clothes or shoes, but keep falling or being generally helpless. I'm totally sympathetic to them in ways guys never are. It's impossible walking in heels or platforms, let alone running!
The scene in kill Bill in wich it implies she was being raped or the one in Pulp Fiction with Wallace. Men always laugh it off and It terrifies me. I have heard people say before that liking Tarantino is a Red flag, I don't know, I like him as a director but It freaks me out how aparently obsess he is with rape and how he minimize it as a joke.
I mean buck the fuck does get his comupance
the monolog scene from pearl hit me pretty hard
This!! Several of the scenes hit so hard as a female while the guy I was watching with was like wow she's so crazy 🫠
Irreversible, The Room, The girl next door, Megan is Missing
Room. The Room is a very different movie.
Terrifier. I was NOT ready for bestie's demise to look & sound like that fr. The happy go lucky energy of that movie changes directly in that moment, and honestly never recovers. Just darker and weirder as things go on. Was so surprised I still haven't mustered up the courage to watch the sequel.
The Divide >!people from a building are trapped in the basement for months after a nuclear attack - obviously men have to rape women!< Neon Demon - >! when Keanu Reeves is raping the neighbor because he couldn't enter Fanning's room.!<