Quentin Tarantino Reveals the Two Films That Most Traumatized Him

While he might not have delivered audiences a straightforward horror film over the course of his career, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has offered audiences a variety of unsettling sequences that have left a lasting impact on them, but when it comes to the films that most traumatized him, Tarantino recently noted that Disney’s Bambi and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left were the most unsettling. For decades, the trauma of Bambi’s mother getting killed has left an impact on audiences of all ages, while Craven’s horror film was a bit more abject in its horrors, disturbing genre fans while also establishing Craven’s ambitious cinematic style.

While speaking with the Los Angeles Times, Tarantino recalled asking his mom if they could leave the theater when Bambi’s mother was shot and when the film’s infamous forest fire began.

“I think Bambi is well known for traumatizing children,” the filmmaker recalled to the outlet. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true. The only other movie I couldn’t handle and had to leave was at a drive-in in Tennessee. I was there alone, sitting on the gravel by a speaker, watching Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. So for me, Last House on the Left and Bambi are sitting on the f-cking shelf right next to each other.”

Despite one being a family-oriented animated experience and the other featuring a brutal sexual assault igniting a quest for revenge, Tarantino noted that the two films do actually have something in common, pointing out, “Both take place in the woods. and both had me saying, ‘I gotta get out of here!’”

Tarantino has dabbled with a variety of genres over the years and in 2007 delivered the Death Proof section of Grindhouse, a double-feature experiment with Robert Rodriguez. That film focused on the sadistic Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) pursuing and tormenting victims in his car that he made “death proof,” using it as a weapon to harm others while he could remain safe inside. Some audiences might argue that Death Proof was more of a thriller than a horror film, but Tarantino, who claimed the next film he directed would be his last, previously confirmed he would be open to helming a horror movie as his sendoff to directing.

“If I come up with a terrific horror film story, I will do that as my tenth movie,” Tarantino shared during a 2019 interview. “I love horror movies. I would love to do a horror film. And I do actually think that the Spahn Ranch [in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood] sequence is the closest to a horror sequence, because I do think it’s vaguely terrifying. And I didn’t even quite realize how good we did it, frankly, to tell you the truth, until my editor told me.”

Stay tuned for details on Tarantino’s final directing project.

What do you think of the filmmaker’s remarks? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!