There's A Scene So Grim In 'Gerald's Game' That It's 'Making People Pass Out'
If you didn't know Stephen King from his novels, then you'll presumably know him now from the extensive promotional campaigns around the latest adaptation of It.
The campaigns did their job in alerting people to the brilliance of King's work, which also led to people's curiosity over Gerald's Game, the Netflix adaptation of another of the author's books.
The story is about a couple who head out to a remote part of New England in search of relaxation, recuperation and kinky fun times.
Based on the book of the same name, the film sees Jessie and Gerald Burlingame head to a retreat in Maine to spice up their once-much-spicier s*x-life. Gerald, already bearing some aggressive tendencies, decides the best way to do this is to handcuff his wife to the bed, with not just one, but two sets of handcuffs.
As you'd expect though, the s*x-life of this couple isn't the most intense thing in the film.
There's one scene in particular that reportedly made at least one viewer pass out because of how gruesome it is.
After Gerald securely handcuffs his missus to the bed post, and takes a steady amount of Viagra, he has a heart attack and dies on top of her.
As if that happening, plus him having the key to her restraints wasn't bad enough for Jessie, a stray dog eventually wanders in and begins eating her fella's corpse. This, as it would with anyone, sends her into a frenzy and forces her to take drastic measures to free herself.
In a Saw inspired sequence, Jessie reaches for a glass, smashes it and then uses a shard to slice her skin off so it's easy to slide her hand out of the cuff.
Reaching for the glass she smashes it on a shelf above the bed. She discards the majority of the broken pieces, leaving the largest.
She pushes it into the side of the shelf so that it's there for her to run the bottom of her hand across it, using it almost like a saw.
When she's done enough she slips it through the handcuff, which peels back the skin like a glove, revealing the bones and tendons. It's really, really not for the faint hearted.
It'll come as no surprise that to film this sort of stuff it's not easy.
The film's director, Mike Flanagan (not to be confused with working class cockney comedian Micky Flanagan) said that he actually had to refrain from reading bits of the book.
"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," he told Slash Film.
"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."
