This weekend, I introduced my kid to the work of art that is Otomo’s 1988 opus, Akira. They spent much of the film engrossed, while occasionally asking what the hell was going on, but during Tetsuo’s epic hallucination in the hospital, there was complete silence. (This, in my house, is the sincerest form of flattery for a movie or program.) I’m glad we waited until the kid was 17 to see this one, as well, since I had forgotten just how disturbing this film’s visuals could be. Still, it’s nothing compared to the Pink Elephants scene from Dumbo, leading us to today’s bone-chilling query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) was also scarred for life by the mirror sequcnce in Poltergeist (if you don’t know, you don’t want to), asking: What visual sequence is the most skin-crawling hallucinatory nightmare in all pop culture?
3 Comments
Time Bandits had several, from being chased by the face of God down a dark corridor revealed by pushing back the bedroom wall, to hanging in skeleton-filled cages in a black void in the Time of Legends, there’s bound to be something to twig you out at least a little.
The “Safe Haven” segment from VHS 2, once the protagonists start walking down the stairs in Baskin, or basically once things kick off in The Void.
Absolute dream logic horror, nothing makes sense, nothing is supposed to make sense, and it’s all disgusting and terrifying.
You can probably find bits of each sequence on youtube, but being horror films, they’re extremely NSFW, so ya takes your chances.
Junji Ito’s manga are full of nightmare fuel.