People Are Reportedly Passing Out After Watching This Scene In 'Gerald's Game'
One of the main complaints of Stephen King's box-office smash adaptation of IT was that the 12-rated movie just wasn't frightening enough. With its lack of gore, the film perhaps belonged more in the adventure genre than horror.
Not a complaint you're likely to hear about his next film, the Netflix adaptation of Gerald's Game which is now streaming on the site.
The movie stars Bruce Greenwood and Carla Gugino as a couple headed to a romantic retreat that suddenly becomes somewhat soured when Gerald drops dead, leaving his wife handcuffed to the bed in the middle of nowhere.
The scene quickly turns grotesque when Gugino's character Jessie has to smash the glass from a shelf above her and cut her wrists to peel back the skin from her hands up to her fingers in order to lose enough blood to free her hands.
As you can imagine, not one for the faint hearted and a scene in Stephen King's original book which turned readers stomachs. In fact, according to the director one person passed out while watching it. He said: "Someone fainted at the Fantastic Fest screening which is the coolest thing I've ever heard."
Speaking about he horrific scene director Mike Flanagan (Ouija: Origin of Evil, Before I Wake) told Slash Film how they were able to add the trauma of the book by including a new element.
"The principle difference is the sound," he explained. "I think that's the only difference... Because we weren't really using music in the film almost ever, all that sound design is just front and center. That's kind of what makes it so intense. Even when I would look away while we were shooting it and when we were editing, you can't get away from the sound. It's some of the most uncomfortable noise and we just crank it right up. We just wanted to hear every little squish and pop and stretch. It's gnarly stuff."
That said, Flanagan did comment that he thinks the book is still more horrifying,
"When I was reading [Gerald's Game] for the first time, I had to put the book down. It turned my stomach just reading it. Visually, I don't think we even took it as far as he took it in the book. I think the hand/glove came just about completely off. For us we had it kind of flop back down afterwards because it was just too grizzly. I heard people say, "Oh my God, it's even worse than described." I don't think it actually is."
Suddenly a clown holding a balloon doesn't sound so bad.
