Most mentally traumatising movie experience.

[Alex]

What show you've watched has messed you up the most? I'd imagine a lot of people would say something like A Serbian Story, Salo, Megan is Missing, Human Centipede. The usual sort of suspects. For me, though 'I am Santa Clause' did it for me.

We used to fill a jar with suggestions of things we could do together and every night of December (or other times of the year when we felt like it), we'd draw a piece of paper out and do whatever it suggested. This night we got "Watch I am Santa Clause", which was advertised as being all about Mick Foley learning how to play the role of Santa. We like Mick Foley. Big fans of his books. He seems to be a nice and funny guy. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to be in the show as much as was advertised. What we got instead was what the men who play Santa do for the rest of the year. Seeing someone who worked as a department store Santa, who was a naked fat man posing in an empty bath for a nude Santa calendar or the next guy who worked in Ron Jeremy's bar and was showing you where you could watch people having sex made me decide right on the spot, that any child of mine would never, ever sit on a Santa's lap.

Anyway, we put the show off before I think it was even halfway through and unlike other stuff I've put off when Kristi was around, I have never gone back to watch the rest.

[pacman000]

Probably the "Little Shop of Horrors" remake. Made me afraid of plants for weeks or months as a kid.

[claws]

Human Centipede? 

The Last Man on Earth (1964) was traumatizing for me. It gave me nightmares for weeks. Like, I would wake up screaming. I was 5 years old back then.

[indianasmith]

When I was in high school, about 17 years old, I went to see NECROPHAGUS (THE GRIM REAPER was its American title).  That movie creeped me out so bad I left the theater halfway through!  Saw it again about 15 years later, as an adult, and it didn't bother me at all.

Now when I was about 7 or 8, my brother took me to see THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK.  The scene where the swamp ape reaches through the window and grabs at the man while he's on the toilet scared me so bad I didn't poop for a week!!   

[Allhallowsday]

ISADORA DUNCAN, THE BIGGEST DANCER IN THE WORLD (1966) 
KEN RUSSELL made for BBC film was broadcast out of NYC probably on PBS 1969.  I wasn't yet 8.  Terrifying.  Transformative. 

[Trevor]

I was invited to the 2010 premiere of Uncle Uwe Boll's Darfur in Cape Town which was where it was filmed. I was left emotionally drained and stunned by the movie, as were the rest of the people there and it has haunted me since. Once seen, never forgotten and it will stay with you for a very long time.

The audience - for some reason, I remember being sat in seat A1, right next to the wall - was transfixed by the film from the start: the violence was so horrific that the people in the seats next to me got up and left halfway through and the film ended in total silence. The producer Chris Roland was in attendance and he apologized to us "if you thought you were coming here tonight to be entertained as Uwe and myself didn't set out to entertain anyone"  

Amazing to think that the dude who made horrible things like Alone In The Dark, House of The Dead and Blubberella made this wonderful movie.

This is it: but please be aware that it is very, very disturbing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tmYOSCKI4

[Trevor]

An honorable mention: I remember watching Nicholas Meyer's The Day After in my hometown theater in 1984. When the Russian nuclear strikes hit the USA, I remember screaming out loud and then crying. That could so easily have happened back then and even now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2aJyIFrA

[ER]

I guess I have always been able to separate reality from fantasy to the point I can't recall being genuinely traumatized by something shown in a fictional medium. Is that a flaw in me that I have never been immersed in the experience? In a way I envy some of you your apparent capacity to be so invested in a narrative.

But then again I've seen enough horrific s**t in real life to want to seek it out in my free time.

I think a difference in cinema in, say, India, and the west is that in India people often live difficult lives and wish escapism into a nicer place, so Indian movies have those silly happy song and dance numbers, while in the west people sit in air-conditioned houses and cars, work fairly easy jobs, go through life with with fat bellies, bored, and so they want to go see someone get an arm ripped off while a house burns down.

Maybe.

[RCMerchant]

I have never been traumatized by a movie.
Movies were always escapism. I found many scary or weird- but traumatizing ?
How does that happen? Are you taken out of a theater in a straight jacket?



Well- John Austin Frazier was, I suppose...

http://youtu.be/SeFsnAio6oU

[Allhallowsday]

I have never been traumatized by a movie.
Movies were always escapism. I found many scary or weird- but traumatizing ?
How does that happen? Are you taken out of a theater in a straight jacket?



Well- John Austin Frazier was, I suppose...

http://youtu.be/SeFsnAio6oU

ORGY OF THE LIVING DEAD?     For a moment I thought John Austin Frazier had gone crazy sitting through Orgy of the Dead starring CRISPIN...

[RCMerchant]

That may drive you crazy too, I reckon!  

By the way...it's CRISWELL.

[Allhallowsday]

That may drive you crazy too, I reckon!  

By the way...it's CRISWELL.

Of course!  Thank you! 

[Paquita]

Not really traumatizing in a clinical sense, but somewhat disturbing, even though it was also interesting was "The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia". This is a documentary about a year in the life of the "Whites" as in the family of Jesco White who became a locally famous/infamous mountain dancer.  I think this was produced by Johnny Knoxville which should tell you something about it. 

What really troubles me about this movie is not so much that people like this exist, I knew that already, but that this lifestyle has a fandom and is celebrated by some as kind of a subculture encouraging others to emulate it.  I am less bothered when you have some wayward cousin or uncle like this that you tell stories about, but there are women here having and raising children.  I know you can't always blame parents for how children turn out as adults, but how does any child born into a family like this, living this lifestyle of addiction and depravity have a chance to grow up to be anything but a low-life, criminal, or worse?

I don't know, maybe I'm making more out of it than it is and I'm just being an overbearing mom.  I think about kids being born in families with drug problems, abuse, negligence, with creeps and criminals as their babysitters all the time and it just makes me so sad to know they are probably shamed and bullied out of their sweet toddler innocence into being hard-core scumbags by the time they're in grade school.

Other than that, I've mentioned this before but "Black Candles" traumatized me pretty good.  Never again will I just blindly agree to watch a movie without checking the keywords on IMDB.

Alex – I'd been wanting to see the Mick Foley Santa Claus movie for a while (I am fans of them both) but now I'm totally not going to see it!  Ha!

ER – My husband's co-worker from India told him that those song and dance numbers are supposed to be symbolic for "intimacy".  Apparently, there are strict rules about showing certain romantic activities on-screen so this is how they get around it.   I don't know if that's true, just what I heard.

[ER]

Cool to know, Paquita!

[FatFreddysCat]

Henry: Portait of a Serial Killer

... the first time I ever saw a movie where, after it ended, I said "That was really, really good... but I don't ever want to see it again."