Nia DaCosta’s fantastic 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is primarily a character-focused experience. Predominately that focus is on Jack O’Connell’s satanic cult leader Jimmy Crystal and Ralph Fiennes’ kindhearted Dr. Ian Kelson. But we also get a look at a zombie beginning to experience what the zombies of Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead experienced. All of them are interesting, but it’s not as if The Bone Temple forgets to be a horror movie. As it so happens, it’s actually a rather bloody horror movie, with an arterial spray bleeding out scene in the very beginning that got this writer feeling queasy. But DaCosta’s movie isn’t the first super gory flick to hit the big screen. Within the past two decades there have been several movies that got wide or semi-wide releases that are even more blood-soaked, and we’re going to cover those here today. However, we didn’t factor in any movie that got a limited release. Like Hatchet, which played in at most 93 theaters.
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Now, let’s break down the gnarliest stuff to happen in these movies, all of which received theater play. And if you’re looking for more blood and guts, but from movies that didn’t play in a ton of U.S. theaters (or any), consider checking out The Midnight Meat Train, I Spit on Your Grave, High Tension, Martyrs, The Deadly Spawn, and Dead Alive.
5) The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Just because the surprisingly good remake of The Hills Have Eyes is the least bloody movie on this list doesn’t mean it’s not bloody at all. Quite the inverse. Unlike the original, it’s pretty gore-soaked. It was even initially rated NC-17 before being cut down to secure an R.
We see gas station Jeb use a shotgun on himself on-screen, we watch a dog tear out the throat of Goggle, one of the hill people, and see a pickaxe go into the head of a burned-up Papa Jupiter, the patriarch of said hill people. Other grisly deaths include Cyst, who is hit in the face with an axe and stabbed in the eye with a spike and Pluto, who gets a flag through the neck followed by an axe to the head. At least the nastiest stuff happens to the villains.
4) Saw IV
All of the Saw movies are pretty gross, save for the original. Starting with Saw II they were just trying to top each other in the gore and trap elaborateness departments. But without a doubt the most blood-coated installment is the fourth film.
Ivan pulls out one of his own eyes but gets sliced up by scythe blades anyway, a crime scene photographer gets a crossbow bolt through the back of her head so forcefully it emerges out the side of her chin, Rex gets a series of spikes pulled out of him so his fellow trap companion can escape, and Cecil falls into a cage stuffed with razor wire. If that wasn’t enough for you, Detective Eric Matthews has his noggin squished by two big ice cubes.
3) Evil Dead
At the time, Evil Dead set a record for the most fake blood used on a film set. And, yeah, it shows. It literally rains blood in the third act.
That’s not all because, on top of seeing Jane Levy slice her tongue in half, we also get some particularly gross character departures. Eric is stabbed in the stomach with a box cutter, gets a syringe to the eye, and is sliced with a mirror shard. Natalie is shot in the face repeatedly with a nail gun and cuts off her own arm with an electric knife only to then become possessed anyway and have her other arm blasted off with a shotgun. Then there’s the disgusting scene where Olivia cuts off a chunk of her cheek, gets fully possessed, then has her possessed form smashed to bits with a toilet tank lid.
2) The Green Inferno
The Green Inferno is about cannibalism so, yeah, it has a ton of blood. And because cannibalism is something that horrifyingly exists in our reality, it all feels very real, at least more real than a Deadite.
15 people die in Eli Roth’s movie, and very few of them are off-screen. Among the grossest deaths are Jonah, who gets his eyes and tongue yanked out and his head ripped off, an unnamed activist, who gets a plane propeller to the head (and you see some of his brains leaking from the wound), and Daniel, who has ants eat away at his broken legs and begs a little boy to slit his throat.
1) Terrifier 2 (& Terrifier 3)
The Terrifier movies are so gory they’re unrated. In fact, it’s genuinely astonishing that the Christmas-themed Terrifier 3 played in over 2,500 theaters. That’s a wide release, and this movie has someone get a chainsaw shoved up their butt.
But Allie’s infamous death in Terrifier 2 takes the foul-tasting cake. Her face is cut open, she’s scalped, her back is flayed, her arm is ripped off, and so on. We see her skull, her spine, her leg bones…it’s revolting, and honestly makes The Bone Temple look like a bear and a rabbit becoming besties in a Disney movie.
Stream Terrifier 2 and Terrifier 3 on Prime Video.
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