Editorials
Trace Picks Horror’s 10 Most Disturbing Moments of the Year!
2015 has seen movies released that may not have been of the best quality, but damn did they know how to gross us out. There have been plenty of movies to see release that feature some of the most disturbing scenes audiences have seen in a long time. Many of these involve gore, but some rely on just visceral imagery and tension to disturb. Out of the roughly 70 genre films I’ve seen this year, these are the 10 most disturbing moments I’ve seen this year.*
*For the sake of not letting readers feel left out, I opted not to include films that only screened at festivals this year. Those will all go on my 2016 lists (should they actually get a release in 2016). Also, I was not able to see every genre film that came out this year, but I did see most of them. For a list of what films were considered for this list, take a look at everything I watched here.
***NSFW AND MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ALL FILMS LISTED BELOW***
Penis Split – I Spit On Your Grave III: Vengeance is Mine
I Spit on Your Grave III features what is probably the most graphic scene in the entire franchise. That’s saying something for a franchise that includes scenes where a man’s testicles are squeezed out of his scrotum and another where a man is raped in the ass with a shotgun. In this scene, Jennifer (Sarah Butler, who returns to the franchise after sitting out the second installment) is forced to perform fellatio on a man, so she does what any woman would do: split his penis in half with a knife and pull it apart. Ouch.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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