Ah, the good old days... Glenn Whipp mourns the current state of mainstream horror - movies that try to scares us or at least gross us out, but fail miserably at either objective. (He must not have been introduced to Takashi Miike yet.) Though some may find his assessment of modern shocking cinema to be pessimistic, no one can argue that he picked a few good creepies in his list of Top 12 Cinematic Gross-Outs:

The Andalusian Dog (1928)
Put Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali together and you know you're in for a freak show. The movie contains the earliest - and probably most horrifying - stomach churner: a man slicing a woman's eye with a razor. It remains one of the most shocking images in film history.

Deliverance (1972)
Ned Beatty, playing a city businessman, squeals like a pig as he's abused by vengeful Appalachian mountain men, and I can still hear that godawful cry sometimes. You know what gets it out of my head? Duelling Banjos. (But how do I get that out of my head?)

Pink Flamingos (1972)
There's all sorts of "fun" here - castration, bestiality, cannibalism - much of it really happening, but the scene everyone remembers comes when transvestite Divine eats dog poo. Billed as the "most disgusting picture of all time" and, for once, the truth matched the hype.

The Exorcist (1973)
The head on the girl goes round and round, round and round, round and round. The head on the girl goes round and round and pea soup gushes forth!

Jaws (1975)
Sure there's the skinny-dipper's severed hand and Ben Gardner's head floating out of his boat, but the real stomach-churner here is watching Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) being bitten in half and that shark's eyes, those "lifeless eyes, black eyes" rolling over white and you hear his terrible high-pitched screaming and the ocean turns red.

Marathon Man (1976)
An obvious choice, not so much for what we see, but for what we hear, that horrible whirring drill as it grinds against Dustin Hoffman's teeth as Laurence Olivier's Szell - a Nazi war criminal on the lam - keeps asking if it's "safe". Legend has it that director John Schlesinger shortened the scene after test audiences started streaming for the exits.

1900 (1976)
Bernardo Bertolucci's greatest stomach-churning achievement came when peasants revolt and pelt an evil fascist (played bravely by Donald Sutherland) with horse manure. What tips the scales is the shot of the angry man prodding his horse to produce a fresh batch, which is then shoved in Sutherland's face with gusto.

Scanners (1981)
It's hard to pick just one moment from a David Cronenberg movie for a list like this. Let's face it, we could fill all 12 slots here with films from the Cronenberg oeuvre, from Jeremy Irons's gynaecological exploits in Dead Ringers to Rosanna Arquette's leg-brace-fetish sex scene in Crash. But we'll go with the one when a bad psychic makes a lesser's head go ka-blooey in Scanners, which was very cool if you were, like, 16 at the time.

Misery (1990)
Kathy Bates does what any No 1 fan would do to an unappreciative dirty-bird writer: she picks up a sledgehammer, takes a swing and shatters James Caan's ankle into a thousand little pieces.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Quentin Tarantino's jaunty little torture scene, which is made completely surreal through the use of the Stealers Wheel song Stuck in the Middle With You.

Braindead (aka Dead Alive) (1992)
In this breakneck Peter Jackson splatter flick, the film's hero defeats a room full of zombies by grabbing a lawn mower and slicing and dicing the undead, coating the walls with red and green zombie blood in a collage that Jackson Pollock would have envied.

Se7en (1995)
David Fincher's relentlessly assaulting movie in which a serial killer dispatches his victims in a grotesque version of their particular "deadly sin" is a veritable stomach-turning smorgasbord. We'll take the sloth scene simply for its sick shock value.

Source: SMH [1]