Image via Complex Original
Why do people watch horror movies? There's certainly a sick pleasure from scaring the shit out of yourself, shaking nervously for an hour and a half, and coming to a cathartic release by the time credits roll at the end. But sometimes horror movies will go the extra mile, push the envelope to the next level, and take, not just the scary, but the gross-out factor to 11. Bodies will be mutilated in unimaginable ways, poor horror victims meeting their ends via all sort of depraved and creative methods. Sometimes you get your tongue bitten off while having sex with your cannibalistic lover, other times you find yourself sewn ass-to-mouth to a bunch of strangers—and by that point you're probably just begging for death. Even for the most horror-loving, desensitized viewer, these deaths will incite some sort of gag reflex (be warned while reading about them, too). Below we've compiled horror's most vomit-inducing deaths, because apparently a mere stab with a knife doesn't cut it anymore.
Southbound (2015)
Director: Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath, Radio Silence
Starring: Chad Villella, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Kristina Pesic, Fabianne Therese
Gross-Out Rating: 😷 😷 😷 /5
Where to Watch It (If You Want to Puke): Amazon Prime
Operation was a cute board game when you were a kid, but it’s terrifying and super-not-chill if you think about it for more than two seconds. That’s the entire premise for this scene in Southbound, when a guy tries to revive a woman he hit with his car in an abandoned hospital by trusting the demonic voices on the other end of a 911 call. Overall, Southbound is a surprisingly good horror anthology but of the five stories in it, the hospital one is by far the best, both for its masterfully crafted, crippling tension and unrelenting gore. It’s immediately obvious this isn’t the day for a miracle, but as you’re forced to watch what spews out of every shaky incision and hear every bone crack, the scene reaches truly innovative levels of grimness. —Julia Pimentel
The Green Inferno (2013)
Director: Eli Roth
Starring: Lorenzo Izzo, Ariel Levy, Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Beacon
Gross-Out Rating: 😷 😷 😷 😷 /5
Where to Watch It (If You Want to Puke): Amazon Video, iTunes
Don’t watch this while eating sushi. Unless, of course, you don’t mind how much the human tongue, when removed from the mouth, looks like tuna sashimi. The Green Inferno is a pretty straightforward cannibal story: a group of Columbia students fly to Peru to fulfill their deepest white savior dreams but are captured by an indigenous tribe that would literally rather eat them than learn anything (#same, in every math class I’ve ever been in). The director, Eli Roth, is a true master of gore; he forces you to watch the tribe leader slicing into his first victim in excruciating detail, leaving you more than a little violated, but also disturbingly invested in the rest of the movie. —Julia Pimentel
The Human Centipede (2009)
Director: Tom Six
Starring: Dieter Laser, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, Akihiro Kitamura
Gross-Out Rating: 😷 😷 😷 😷 😷 /5
Where to Watch It (If You Want to Puke): Hulu, Amazon Video
Let me just begin by saying that if you haven’t seen The Human Centipede, you’re doing alright for yourself. Any willing participant who can sit through this film without puking, openly weeping, and/or at the very least gagging is a person with whom you should probably reevaluate your relationship. The TL;DR version goes something like this: a sadistic surgeon kidnaps a handful of unsuspecting victims, drugs them, and sews them together ass-to-mouth to create—you guessed it—a human centipede. In one of the film’s most unwatchable scenes, Dr. Heiter forces the frontmost victim to eat out of a dog bowl following prolonged starvation. “Feed her!” he screams, attempting to domesticate his new "pet." Things start looking dire for the two woman attached to the man at the front of Heiter’s godless abomination. And look fam, if you haven’t figured out how this torture porn ends for these poor souls by now, I’m sure you can use your imagination. —Catie Keck
Trouble Every Day (2003)
Director: Claire Denis
Starring: Béatrice Dalle, Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey
Gross-Out Rating: 😷 😷 😷 😷 😷 /5
Where to Watch It (If You Want to Puke): iTunes, Amazon Prime
2000s French horror films were a bloody, shocking bunch, and the bloodiest, most shocking of the bunch may be Trouble Every Day, Claire Denis' blood-drenched cannibalistic film starring Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle. Gallo plays Dr. Shane Brown, a troubled scientist who has his wife Coré (Dalle) boarded up away from society—because she'll hunt down men and eat them. There are two really gross death scenes in this movie, the first when Coré seduces a man into her lair, has sex with him, and bites his tongue out and pokes her finger through his cheek, eventually painting the entire room with his blood. It's truly messy and terrifying. The second may be even worse, though—after killing his wife, the doc has sex with a hotel maid and brutally bites her too—while going down on her. Shudder. —Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Inside (2007)
Director: Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo
Starring: Béatrice Dalle, Alysson Paradis, Nathalie Roussel
Gross-Out Rating: 😷 😷 😷 😷 😷 /5
Where to Watch It (If You Want to Puke): iTunes, Amazon Video
I lied. Inside is maybe even more shocking than the aforementioned Trouble Every Day, and it shares a star in New French Extremist queen Béatrice Dalle, who was perhaps the only actress willing to act out such depraved actions. In Inside, she stalks a widowed, pregnant woman and stabs her in the stomach with scissors because she wants the baby for herself (violence against pregnant women is up there in the ABSOLUTE WORST category). After a series of grave misunderstandings with the police, the mother, and the employer, the poor pregnant lady gets her stomach literally cut open with scissors and her fetus ripped out. Literally no one deserves that. —Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Director: S. Craig Zahler
Starring: Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Lili Simmons, Richard Jenkins, Mathew Fox
Gross-Out Rating: 😷 😷 😷 😷 😷 /5
Where to Watch It (If You Want to Puke): iTunes, Amazon Prime
The best Western of 2015 (sorry, Hateful Eight) turned out to be the best horror movie of the year as well. Bone Tomahawk was super slept on, but its next-level kills should wake any viewer the fuck up. In what might be the most brutally disgusting dispatching of human life I’ve seen on film the last decade, the cannibalistic Troglodyte clan—who have been terrorizing the local community—has one of their captives viciously scalped, then held upside down naked as they split him from stem to sternum with a blunt rock. Zahler’s camera never budges, forcing us to see, hear and feel every crunching blow, until the victim is graphically pulled apart like a wishbone —with gallons of blood, internal organs and whatever is left of his genitals emptying out of his lifeless body hole in one soupy mess.
BRB need to go throw up again. —Erik Abriss
High Tension (2003)
Director: Alexandre Aja
Starring: Cécile de France, Maïwenn, Philippe Nahon
Gross-Out Rating: 😷 😷 😷 😷 😷 /5
Where to Watch It (If You Want to Puke): iTunes, Amazon Video
There are several apalling moments in this French cult horror film (how could you ever forget that scene where the killer gets a BJ from a decapitated head in his truck??), but nothing prepares you for the first senselessly violent killing. In High Tension, a home invasion film turns into a kidnapper-killer on the run horror, it all starts when a mysterious trucker visits a family in the middle of the night and kills each member off brutally (save for the daughter, who he kidnaps instead). The first victim? The poor father who answers the door. After getting struck in the face with a knife after opening the door, he gets dragged up the stairs by the killer, who then squeezes his head through the staircase and rams heavy furniture against it, completely ripping his head off. If that wasn't already awful enough, he also kills the dog that tries to help his owner. —Kristen Yoonsoo Kim