The 25 Most Shocking Moments in Movie History (spoilers)

[j7wild]

We watch movies for plenty of reasons: to laugh, to cry, to learn new things. But often what we want most is a mind-blowing jolt to the system — whether it be a revealing line of dialogue, an horrific act of violence or simply a star playing against type.

1_The Crying Game
(1992, dir. Neil Jordan)
Best Seen: Artisan DVD
Time Code: Chapter 18, 63:57
What started as a fairly routine political thriller takes a jaw-dropping turn into the unknown when former IRA member Fergus (Stephen Rea) goes home with his girlfriend, Dil (Jaye Davidson). Dil changes into a robe, and then, standing before Fergus, lets it slide off her shoulders. The camera pans down . . . and she has a penis. “An awful lot of red-blooded Irishmen were very shocked because they really fancied this girl,” Rea says. The unveiling abruptly jerks the film into a no-man’s land of genre; it’s now an odd hybrid of romance, politics, and sexual declaration, but what most people remember is that infamous shot. “There’s only one penis moment,” Rea says. “Once it’s been done, really, you can’t do it again.”

2_The Public Enemy
(1931, dir. William Wellman)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 23, 81:23
Titular gangster Tom Powers is coming home from the hospital where he’d been treated after a gun battle. So says the call received at the Powers household, and that call sets the household buzzing. While the phonograph blares “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” there is a knock on the door, and suddenly there’s James Cagney’s corpse wrapped in a blanket, his eyes still open in horror, standing rigid in the doorway, as his killers placed him. He falls with an ungodly slam into the foyer, the phonograph still merrily crackling.

3_Alien
(1979, dir. Ridley Scott)
Best Seen: Twentieth Century Fox DVD
Time Code: Chapter 10, 54:27
Forever linking extraterrestrials and indigestion, Scott proved how truly sickening science fiction can be: The crew of the space hauler Nostromo are having dinner. Kane (John Hurt)—who just survived an attack from a face-sucking crustacean—starts choking, then whips into seizures as his comrades lay him out on the table. Suddenly, a small, phallic creature with glinting silver teeth bursts out of his chest, spewing blood and viscera everywhere. It surveys the room with a squawk and runs off into the depths of the ship. Pepto-Bismol stockholders are still singing this film’s praises.

4_Psycho
(1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Best Seen: Universal DVD
Time Code: Chapter 24, 100:25
By killing off his star (Janet Leigh) in the first 50 minutes, Hitchcock made it clear he couldn’t care less about our expectations. Then he made it even more evident that he wasn’t too concerned about our heart rates or mental health, either. While investigating her sister’s disappearance, Lila Crane (Vera Miles) stumbles upon an elderly woman in a fruit cellar sitting in a chair, staring at the wall. The chair slowly turns, revealing a corpse more prune than person. As Miles lets out a piercing screech, the iconic Bernard Herrmann score returns and a swinging lightbulb throws jagged shadows on the ghoulish scene.

5_Bonnie and Clyde
(1967, dir. Arthur Penn)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 34, 106:37
Having just avoided yet another run-in with the law, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde are enjoying a sunny day, blissfully ignorant of the local police lying in wait to ambush them. We think we know what’s in store, but the savagery of the final shootout is worse than moviegoers of the time could have ever imagined. In a surge of unprecedented violence, the cops riddle the freewheeling duo with bullets from head to toe. The spareness of the setup—a flock of birds taking flight, the look exchanged by the lovers—and the awful silence of the aftermath make it all that much more unsettling.

6_Reservoir Dogs
(1992, dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Best Seen: Artisan DVD
Time Code: Chapter 13, 54:50
After a jewel heist goes terribly wrong, would-be thief and grade-A psychopath Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) is not happy. And that’s very bad news for the young L.A. police officer he has taken hostage. Left alone at a deserted warehouse, Blonde turns on the radio, which is playing the ’70s Stealers Wheel hit “Stuck in the Middle With You.” While grooving to the music, he cuts the cop’s ear off with a razor and douses his victim with gasoline. “[After the film was released], a lot of people would hesitate to get in an elevator with me,” Madsen says. “Parents would grab their children and go, ‘No! Don’t go near that guy! I’ll explain when you grow up.’ ”

7_Deliverance
(1972, dir. John Boorman)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 13, 42:00
Few fears tear deeper into the fragile fabric of being a man than this: getting anally raped by a hillbilly in the woods. And Deliverance, largely, is to blame. This cautionary tale about four friends who venture into the Georgia backwoods for a canoe trip reaches fever pitch when Ned Beatty is forced, at gunpoint, to “squeal like a pig” by the gnarliest mountain men imaginable. Boorman and writer James Dickey get credit for crushing the cushy, protected world of the white-collar professional. But it’s Beatty whose *** is on the line; it’s his pink, dirt-slathered flesh and wails of anguish that leave a lasting, disturbing impression.

8_Carrie
(1976, dir. Brian De Palma)
Best Seen: MGM DVD
Time Code: Chapter 31, 94:20
Okay, so there’s no doubt that seeing Carrie doused in pig’s blood at the prom by her bitchy classmates, and the telekinetic massacre that follows, is enough to make you wish you never made fun of that mousy girl in math class. They may have all laughed at poor Sissy Spacek, but the real joke was on prissy Amy Irving, whose character is grabbed from beyond the grave by the disgraced prom queen at the end of the film. Granted, the touch from beyond was only a nightmare, but it’s undoubtedly one that she, and everyone who has ever seen this movie, has had more than once.

9_The Exorcist
(1973, dir. William Friedkin)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 15, 73:20
Spinning heads, projectile green vomit, and endless obscenities—no one ever said demonic possession was pretty. But when 12-year-old Regan (Linda Blair) stabs herself in the crotch repeatedly with a bloody crucifix, shrieking in a voice that is half grown man, half rabid dog, “Let Jesus **** you,” it’s no wonder that audience members were passing out in the aisles. Yet the most disturbing thing about the scene—which is disrespectful at best, blasphemous at worst—is the image of such a young girl performing an act that combines self-torture and child abuse.

10_Un Chien Andalou
(1929, dir. Luis Buńuel)
Best Seen: Translux Films DVD
Time Code: Chapter 1, 1:27
A brutishly handsome young man—Buńuel himself—sharpens a razor on a strop while a lovely young woman sits patiently in a chair. From the balcony of their room, he spies a cloud sliver slicing across a full moon, and inspiration strikes. Holding open the unresisting woman’s lid, he slashes her eyeball in unsparing closeup. (It’s actually a calf’s eye and socket.) Pretty much contextless and utterly disquieting, this scenario kicks off the galvanic Buńuel–Salvador Dali short, a self-described “passionate appeal to murder,” which continues to inspire épater-le-bourgeois types and freak out film students.

11_Saving Private Ryan
(1998, dir. Steven Spielberg)
Best Seen: DreamWorks DVD
Time Code: Chapter 2, 9:43
D-Day, 1944, Normandy. Nazi machine guns mow down American GIs like cardboard cutouts at a shooting range. Yet even in the midst of such carnage, one image stands out: A soldier, seemingly unaware of the chaos surrounding him, searches for something on the ground. It soon becomes horrifically clear what it is he seeks—his own severed arm. “I’m sure it [really] happened,” says cinematographer Janusz Kaminski of the soldier’s gory task (an apparent homage to Kurosawa’s Ran). “But our aim was not to shock the viewers through violence. It was to accomplish a sense of reality that would allow them to understand what the war must have been like.”

12_The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(1974, dir. Tobe Hooper)
Best Seen: Pioneer DVD
Time Code: Chapter 8, 39:22
Say what you will about psychological terror and fear of the unseen, but when Gunnar Hansen, as the hulking Leatherface, hangs hapless Teri McMinn on a meat hook while she screams like someone who has, well, just been skewered by a cannibal in a raggedy mask, it’s one of the most chilling moments in the screw-subtlety-go-for-the-grisly horror genre. We thought it couldn’t get any more gruesome than when Leatherface first appeared and sledge-hammered William Vail’s head with a sickening wet thwack. Oh, we were so wrong.

13_The Usual Suspects
(1995, dir. Bryan Singer)
Best Seen: MGM DVD
Time Code: Chapter 31, 97:35
Possibly the most cerebral shock in cinema history, the revelation that pathetic con man Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) has masterminded the whole convoluted Kobayashi–Keyser Soze–Dean Keaton swindle comes as a slowly unraveling stunner. Verbal has finished his tale, which has taken more twists than Mulholland Drive, and detective Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) disparagingly dismisses him. Verbal collects his belongings and limps out of the police station. And then he transforms—his stride becomes the confident swagger of the sociopath who engineered it all.

[j7wild]

14_The Godfather
(1972, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
Best Seen: Paramount DVD
Time Code: Chapter 4, 32:30
When hotshot Hollywood producer Jack Woltz (John Marley) refuses to give the Don’s Sinatraesque godson a juicy movie role, you know he’s facing some hard-core retribution. Ignoring the cardinal rule that says don’t mess with a man’s animal, the Corleones strike with vicious creativity. Woltz awakens to something warm and wet drenching his sheets. When he discovers that it’s blood from his prized thoroughbred’s severed head, which is lying at his feet, his scream shatters the quiet California morning and sends shivers down the spine of any pet-loving viewer.

15_Don’t Look Now
(1973, dir. Nicolas Roeg)
Best Seen: Paramount DVD
Time Code: Chapter 15, 104:15
Roeg’s tale of an art restorer and his wife (played by Donald Sutherland and the supremely sexy Julie Christie) who lose their way and their minds in a maze of Venetian canals and churches after the drowning death of their daughter contains some truly frightening moments. None, though, approach Sutherland’s character’s death at the hand of a mysterious red-hooded, knife-wielding dwarf. You see his demise coming, thanks to some heavy-handed foreshadowing; still, nothing can prepare you for that creepy, craggy face, or the gnomish killer’s baffling head shake just before knife slashes throat.

16_Pink Flamingos
(1972, dir. John Waters)
Best Seen: New Line DVD
Time Code: Chapter 26, 90:47“Other people set out to make movies; we wanted to commit a crime,” says Waters of his masterpiece of filth. And though most folks would consider a mother-son oral sex scene disgusting, it was the infamous munching of fresh dog feces by trailer park tranny and all-purpose Waters antihero Divine that revolted many during midnight screenings. “People would send us ****,” Waters says. “They would meet us at theaters with floral arrangements made of turds.” Waters calls Flamingos “worse today than it was then,” and says, “It hasn’t gotten even the slightest bit more politically correct. If anything, it’s gotten more shocking.”

17_Star Wars: Episode V— The Empire Strikes Back
(1980, dir. Irvin Kershner)
Best Seen: Twentieth Century Fox DVD
Time Code: Chapter 46, 110:00
Four movies later, Luke Skywalker’s paternity is old news. But when Darth Vader announced in that end-of-days baritone, “I am your father,” he upended the entire Star Wars canon. How could Luke’s innocence and heroism have come from the evil that is Vader? Crouching in fear and pain, Luke doesn’t believe it. We can only wonder what’s going through his mind (“Dude, how about a blood test,” maybe?), but apparently he accepts the fact and begins to howl “Noooooo!” And just like that, Lucas’s seemingly simple morality tale transforms into something much more complex and gloomy.

18_Planet of the Apes
(1968, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner)
Best Seen: Twentieth Century Fox DVD
Time Code: Chapter 27, 108:23
It’s the quintessential twist ending, a moment so iconic that you needn’t have seen the movie to be familiar with it. And any Simpsons fan can attest to its parodistic possibilities (Homer [thinking]: “Wait a minute: Statue of Liberty . . . that was our planet!”). So it takes a little empathy to appreciate the mind**** in store for Apes’s original audiences as Charlton Heston rides up that beach to find a time-ravaged Lady Liberty poking out of the earth, a relic of a nuclear-fried New York. Still, the image today remains spine-tingling, and Heston’s overly dramatic yet apt reaction—“You maniacs!” etc.—sure sells the scene.

19. Once Upon a Time in the West
(1969, dir. Sergio Leone)
Best Seen: Paramount DVD
Time Code: Chapter 4, 21.30
The young boy is terrified. Unseen gunmen have just picked off his family, and as he stands helpless and alone, shadowy figures in long overcoats emerge from the surrounding brush. The camera zeroes in on the lead overcoat and reveals the face of a man who looks just like Henry Fonda, but who can't be, because Fonda doesn't slaughter innocents, right? This is the guy who played Abe Lincoln, for God's sake. Yet those piercing blue eyes look like Henry's...but they can't be, because his never looked so cold, reptilian. Now he smiles slightly and raises his gun: He's going to kill the kid, and he's relishing it. That's not really Henry Fonda. Is it?

20_The Shining
(1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 28, 100:57

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
The reason the Torrance family has stranded itself at the isolated but not-quite-empty Overlook Hotel is so patriarch Jack (Jack Nicholson) can finish his book and rebuild his career. Which is why it’s such a crushing blow to Wendy (Shelley Duvall) when she finally takes a look at her increasingly unstable husband’s manuscript—page after page of a single sentence, repeated over and over again in various typographical permutations. Dull boy? Try world-class loon.

21_ Audition
(2001, dir. Takashi Miike)
Best Seen: Lions Gate DVD
Time Code: Chapter 9, 45:38
A beautiful young Japanese woman (Eihi Shiina) sits in her apartment while her phone rings. A large, tightly sealed sack rests a few feet away. As the ringing continues, she raises her head, her long hair parting to reveal a slight smile. Suddenly the heretofore dormant sack comes alive and violently throws itself against the wall, while a sound that can best be described as the roar of an extremely perturbed lion accompanies the action. Self-propelled bags are freaky enough but what makes this even more startling is that up until now, Audition has been a romantic drama.

22_The Sixth Sense
(1999, dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
Best Seen: Buena Vista DVD
Time Code: Chapter 18, 95:55
Six minutes before the credits roll, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) returns home to find his lovely wife, Anna (Olivia Williams), asleep in front of a TV playing their wedding video. She murmurs, “Why did you leave me?” She drops his wedding ring and sends it rolling across the floor. Crowe examines his left hand, confused as to why he’s not wearing the ring. Cut to a previous scene of Crowe treating his clairvoyant young patient, Cole (Haley Joel Osment), who utters, “I see people. They don’t know they’re dead.” Wait, so Bruce is . . . whoa. We see shocked people.

23_ S.O.B.
(1981, dir. Blake Edwards)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 20, 80:50
After this summer’s Jude Law debacle, naughty nannies seem almost de rigueur. But when Julie Andrews, everyone’s favorite G-rated cinematic child care professional (The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins) bares her breasts, it’s scandalous. Andrews (as wholesome actress Sally Miles, a.k.a. “Smiles”) pulls the top of her red dress down and pauses almost triumphantly, knowing that she’s changing her own image—as well as her character’s—forever. “I’m going to show my boobies,” Sally says to Dr. Finegarten (Robert Preston). “Do you think they’re worth showing?” He replies, “In my humble opinion, you’ve got a terrific pair of knockers.” And when we were finally able to catch our breath, we realized he was right.

24_ Jaws
(1975, dir. Steven Spielberg)
Best Seen: Universal DVD
Time Code: Chapter 14, 80:47
We already knew the shark was big—just look at the poster, for crying out loud. Even so, when Spielberg finally showed all 25 feet of his prize fish, it was scary enough to keep America out of the water that summer. Roy Scheider’s Sheriff Brody is shoveling chum into the drink, muttering resentfully, when, without so much as a threatening da-dum, the monster emerges, maw gaping. Stunned, Brody leaps back and just stares at the frothing water. He then heads toward Robert Shaw’s Quint, and numbly proclaims, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” Maybe an aircraft carrier.

25_Where’s Poppa?
(1970, dir. Carl Reiner)
Best Seen: MGM DVD
Time Code: Chapter 10, 55:57
Never mind that Where’s Poppa? was the first American film to use the word “cocksucker,” or that it contained a character charmingly named “Mutha****a.” No, the true shocker in Carl Reiner’s black comedy comes when Ruth Gordon, playing a batty old widow, in a moment of overwhelming affection for her son Gordon (George Segal), rips down his trousers and kisses him on the lower cheeks in front of his love interest, a nubile young nurse (Trish Van Devere) hired to take care of the old wacko. “You expected her to just give a little peck, not for her to nuzzle and rub her cheek against it like she did,” says Segal. “By that time in the process, I was completely numb. It seemed like just another warm moment in the film.”

source: premiere magazine online

[Jedi Master]

Hmm.. knew Star Wars was going to be in there

[Movieman]

Hmm, there are particular scenes from Irreversible and Serenity which are not there.

[chernabog_ca]

Hmm, there are particular scenes from Irreversible and Serenity which are not there.

Okay Irreversiable is kind of a given but I've seen Serenity and can't think of anything that was shocking. What part are you thinking about?

[j7wild]

Hmm... Some very interesting and excellent choices j7wild. I'm sure there are more but can't think of any right now.

I didn't make these, they were taken from Premiere magazine online...

I would had added Last Tango In Paris famous 'butter' scene and the rape scene from the movie 'kids'...

and several others I can't think of now...

[radstar]

I really like who typed that. S/He's funny. "Dude, how about a blood test?"

There are other movies that shocked the frak outta me. Like... Harrison Ford in What Lies Beneath...

or..

the girl in Pitch Black..

or...

the ending of Secret Window..

or...

how about when Titanic sank? That was a huge shocker.

[jmcc]

I remember An Innocent Man (1989, IMDb), a movie with Tom Selleck and David Rasche...

One of the most shocking and hard movies I have seen...

[j7wild]

how the heck do you dig up these old threads, Jmcc?



do you go down the forum page by page, 1 thread at a time going back 2 1/2 years, looking at each and every thread until you find one that you want to resurrect?



wow!! that must had taken some time to do!!

[jmcc]

I located this one when searching the forums looking for info about the upcoming Young People F*cking movie... and An Innocent Man comes into my memory...

It was one of the more shocking moments and scenes on my movie memories...

Also, I usually found the other old threads in the same way, when searching for info on the forums...

[MovieHaven]

What about "Identity"...I was just as surprised as John Cusak, when he comes to realize he is but one of many personalities in a psychos mind. If you haven't seen that movie...sorry for the spoiler!