Horror buffs are discussing their limits when it comes to the extremes of the genre, whether that's because of body horror, torture, or animal abuse.
"Animal abuse, hard no from me," said one user as part of a discussion on Reddit. "Yeah; even fairly quick deaths are hard," agreed someone else. "Such a bummer Flanagan seems to be so dead-set on punishing felines." Mike Flanagan, the helmer of shows like The Haunting of Hill House and movies like Doctor Sleep, is infamous for making feline characters reach an untimely end.
"I'm really bad with body horror like The Substance," said another user. "I thought I was gonna be sick watching that. Also The Human Centipede. I couldn't finish the first or second one."
"I Spit On Your Grave and Last House On The Left made me realize my limits," wrote another user, referring to two controversial '70s "video nasties".
"Anything that involves a lot of bugs (I have a really bad phobia of large insects)," another chimed in. "Show me something like that and I'll spend the rest of the day/night feeling little buggy legs crawling all over me and being paranoid my house is infested."
"Honestly, I'm not super interested in pushing myself to see how much I can take for its own sake," said someone else. "Extreme gore and torture don't do much for me, so I'm not really going to seek them out in my free time. That's not what I like about horror, I'm more about the atmosphere, buildup of tension, folklore and mythology, weird uncanny imagery, etc."
However, multiple people who said they couldn't stomach extreme gore said they still enjoyed or wanted to watch Martyrs, a 2008 French psychological horror movie that got an American remake in 2015. "I keep trying to steel myself to see Martyrs because I'm really curious about it and it sounds like there's more to it than just torture," one person said.
For more on scary movies, check out our guide to the best upcoming horror movies still to come in 2025.
