H.P. Lovecraft once famously wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” which he certainly backed up with his now iconic (if not a bit, um, racially outdated) works of cosmic horror. The imagination is a powerful thing, and when utilized properly, can unsettle and scare audiences far more than any movie’s most gratuitous scenes of violence and degeneracy.
…But all that said, we humbly submit a counterpoint: Remember that scalping scene in S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk? Goddamn, that was a rough one.
Yesterday afternoon, comedian Jonah Ray tweeted the question “What’s your favorite gory sequence in a horror movie?” along with his respectably tasteless choice—the autopsied zombie from George Romero’s Day of the Dead.