Some movies contain pretty major gross-out scenes that stick in your head long after the credits roll. While you may want to cover your eyes while they’re playing, the behind-the-scenes can actually be pretty interesting.
Here are 30 behind-the-scenes facts about iconic movie gross-out scenes:
1.
According to Variety, in Triangle of Sadness, the “Captain’s Dinner” scene, which ends in an explosion of seasickness, took multiple days to film. The actors had to wear tubes on their faces, and the SFX crew pumped fake vomit — including pieces of octopus and shrimp — out of it. The scene was so complicated to film that it was planned two years before filming began.
2.
In The Substance, Gollum and Monstro were almost completely practical. Prosthetics and makeup effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin told GQ, “Coralie Fargeat, the writer/director] wanted to use practical effects as [much as] possible. I would sometimes suggest we use VFX and she would immediately say no, because she doesn’t like VFX.” For Gollum, Demi Moore spent seven hours in the makeup chair, where the upper half of her body was covered in prosthetics.
Then, for Monstro, Margaret Qualley wore a full bodysuit with extra limbs and breasts. The only digital effect was the addition of Demi’s screaming face. For the scene where she starts shooting blood, they used a firehose and 30,000 gallons of fake blood.
3.
For the final scene of The Substance, where Sue’s face crawls onto her Hollywood star, the team dissolved an SFX head. Prosthetics and makeup effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin told GQ, “We used gelatine skin. filled with tons of blood bags, and disgusting stuff inside, that we could blow up.”
4.
Saltburn writer/director Emerald Fennell told Entertainment Weekly, “The bathtub was the first thing, the first image, that came to me. It was a boy saying, ‘I wasn’t in love with him,’ and that same boy licking the bottom of a bathtub. So that was the very center of the film for me, this kind of unreliable narrator, somebody who was clearly in the grips of extreme desire and who hasn’t yet come to terms with it or who has had to find another way of coming to terms with it or explain it.” She had a clear idea of what the scene would look like, so she had tub cut in half “enough so that we could feel like we were inside it.”
5.
Pitch Perfect actor Shelley Regner tweeted, “Fun fact: we used [Anna Camp’s] puke mic in all the performance numbers. It wasn’t hard to figure out who had the puke mic by the smell.”
6.
Chris Owen told DVD Talk that, in the She’s All That scene where he had to eat pizza covered in pubes, it was actually “corn silk.”
7.
The Bridesmaids food poisoning scene took two days to shoot. Director Paul Feig told Esquire, “All of the stuff in the dress shop was one day, and the stuff in the bathroom was another. There’s a deleted sequence where, after Becca throws up on Rita’s head, she has to throw up again, so she runs out of the bathroom and down the hall, thinking that there’s another bathroom at the end of the hallway. It turns out that the door opens onto Whitney’s office; she throws the door open and projectile vomits across this beautiful white office, and all over the wedding picture of Whitney and her husband. We shot a lot of outrageous stuff knowing that we could adjust the balance later. The minute we shot that sequence, we all said, ‘I think this is a bridge too far.’ So we scrapped that.”
8.
For the Alien chestburster scene, John Hurt lay under a table with an artificial chest screwed on top of it. Director Ridley Scott told the Guardian, “Prosthetics in those days weren’t that good. I figured the best thing to do was to get stuff from a butcher’s shop and a fishmonger. On the morning, we had them examining the Facehugger; that was clams, oysters, seafood. You had to be ready to shoot because it started to smell pretty quickly. You can’t make better stuff than that — it’s organic.”
Executive producer/screenwrtier Dan O’Bannon added, “Once the creature was rigged up, they stuffed the chest cavity full of organs from the butcher’s. Then they ran a couple of big hoses to pump the stage blood. During all this, Ridley moved about, tending to the finest detail. I remember easily half an hour was spent with him draping this little piece of beef organ so it would hang out of the creature’s mouth.”
9.
In American Pie, the “pale ale” that Stifler accidentally drinks was actually egg whites. Seann William Scott told DVD Talk, “I really tried not to think about what it was supposed to be. Every time we did [a] take, I just drank it and pretended it was beer.”
10.
Pink Flamingos writer/director John Waters told Entertainment Weekly that the scene where Divine eats dog poop “was always the end.” He continued, “It was a publicity stunt, basically, and one that would frighten hippies. Divine liked the idea of causing trouble. We were all potheads, so the idea made us laugh. I had a history of knowing about exploitation films, and how they worked, and I was trying to make exploitation films for art theaters, which had never been done. It worked, and I won the contest. I’ve never tried to top it since, and no one has really. Maybe Johnny Knoxville…The dog came to the premiere.”
11.
For the Bones and All scene where Taylor Russell’s character eats her friend’s finger, they paused filming and had the other actor tuck her two fingers and replaced them with fake ones right before she bit down. Jason Hamer, who’s the owner and creative director of Hamer FX, told GQ, “They’re silicone and have a urethane bone on the inside…I was like, ‘Bite down, but not too hard. You can break these; it is fragile.’ It relied heavily on her acting to be able to sell it. There’s also a blood tube that ran underneath her hand; it was very effective.”
12.
Because of the hair gel scene, Fox took six months to give There’s Something About Mary the green light. Then, when it was time to film it, Cameron Diaz was hesitant. Co-director Bobby Farrelly told Esquire, “One of the hair-and-makeup girls was putting the gel in Cameron’s hair, and she was like, ‘Hey guys, I don’t know, this could totally backfire.” Co-director Peter Farrelly said, “She was rightfully concerned. If it doesn’t work it ruins the movie and her career is in jeopardy because she’s ‘cum head’ the rest of her life.” So, the directors told her, “Listen, Cameron, let us cut this together, and then you can sit and watch it with an audience, and if they groan we’ll take it out of the movie.'”
13.
According to All the Right Movies, the Brundlefly transformation scene in The Fly was inspired by the lifecycle of an insect, and it was broken down into seven stages. Jeff Goldblum wore increasingly bigger prosthetics and a contact that made one eye seem larger. He had to spend up to five hours in the makeup chair for the latter stages. Additionally, the “digestive enzyme” was made from milk, honey, and eggs.
14.
While filming the bug scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Kate Capshaw had several buckets of live bugs poured on her. In a behind-the-scenes featurette, she said, “I was really asking people. ‘Is there a pill? There must be something I can take to keep myself from freaking out.’ Because I don’t want everyone to look at the movie going, ‘She’s on drugs!’ But I did take something that was like a relaxant.”
15.
Stand By Me director Rob Reiner told Entertainment Weekly that, for the pie-eating contest, “I set up a lot of cameras because I didn’t want to have to do a lot of cleanup. It was hard work, but it was also very fun. We made a big mixture of blueberry pie filling and large-curd cottage cheese.” Actor Andy Lindberg added, “The first time the crew tried the vomiting effect, they used a power washer. They filled the reservoir and just rocketed it out, and 500 pounds per square inch of pressure went on the guy to my left. But that didn’t work. The stream was too fine. Finally, after experimenting, they got four or five guys to press down on a giant plunger on top of a cylinder, which pushed all five gallons of pie filling up a vacuum hose through my shirt collar and out from the tube taped to the side of my face.”
16.
Per Vulture, for the twelve deaths in Midsommar, prosthetic makeup designer Iván Pohárnok made rubber corpses out of casts of the actors’ bodies. For the scene where an old man survives jumping off a cliff, they put actor Björn Andrésen in a large hole with only his head visible. A fake body lay over the hole.
Then, for the part of the scene where the man’s head is smashed with a mallet, Iván and his team created a fake head with pneumatic cylinders attached inside each section. At the push of a button, the head “smashed” itself. He told Vulture, “It worked beautifully. We just pressed the button and everything popped back into the original, pristine face.”
17.
Making a puppet puke in Team America: World Police was quite challenging. First assistant director Eric Jewett told the Independent, “It made a lot of people nauseous. We connected a 50-gallon drum of viscous, beige fluid to the puppet’s head with a tube, and the special effects guys started pumping. Gallon after gallon of vomit spewed out of Gary’s mouth, then stopped – and then started again. Puke went everywhere. It ran off the set onto the floor and under our shoes. Trey [Parker] and Matt [Stone] demonstrated their mastery of comedic timing with the stopping and starting, and it was hilarious. But people had to leave the room.”
18.
According to EBSCO, one Night of the Living Dead actor owned a butcher shop, so they donated meat and entrails for the low-budget film to use as human flesh in the “feast of flesh” scene. Additionally, chocolate syrup stood in for fake blood.
19.
Jim Karz, who played Bruce Bogtrotter in Matilda, told Newsweek that he had to “practice eating” for the cake scene. He said, “There were a ton of cakes. They had a factory, like, pumping out the cakes. Seemed like every day there was a new cake on set. They had three or four ready to go if they needed. It seemed like there was a lot of cake always at the ready. I don’t know how much I ate. It was definitely a lot.” Cinematographer Stefan Czapsky also said, “What was ironic about it was, the actor who played Bruce? He didn’t like chocolate cake. They had a spit bucket for him. It worked for the scene because it was kind of like a child torture scene — to force him to eat chocolate cake.”
20.
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life actor Michael Palin told the Guardian, “Having done The Holy Grail and Life of Brian, we found ourselves with a much bigger budget for The Meaning of Life. This meant we could spend an entire week on things like the sketch with Mr. Creosote…The sheer amount of minestrone used in the vomiting sequence was only possible because we were with Universal. That part was filmed at Seymour Leisure Centre in Paddington. On the morning after the final scene, in which Mr. Creosote explodes and thousands of gallons of vomit get hurled against the walls, the room was all cleaned up immaculately – and, within 12 hours, two people were married in there. I wonder if they ever knew what had happened hours before.”
21.
Candyman actor Tony Todd told the Guardian, “I negotiated a bonus of $1,000 for every sting during the bee scene. And I got stung 23 times. Everything that’s worth making has to involve some sort of pain. Once I realized it was an important part of who Candyman was, I embraced it. It was like putting on a beautiful coat.
22.
According to Screen Rant, to pull off the Spider-Head transformation in The Thing, production built a replica of actor Charles Hallahan’s body and put a hydraulic mechanism in the stomach mouth. For Dr. Cooper’s ripped-off arms, they made fake hands from Jell-O with blood-filled plastic veins. Dr. Cooper himself was briefly played by an actor with a double amputation; he wore a Richard Dysart mask.
Then, for the part where the Spider-Head emerges, a hydraulic ramp stretched veins made from gum and melted plastic as a replica of Charles Hallahan’s head emerged. There were actually two heads — a radio-controlled version for long shots and a mechanical version for close-ups. The entire sequence was done with practical effects.
23.
Ghostbusters (2016) director Paul Feig reportedly told Entertainment Tonight that the ectoplasm is “a secret concoction.” He said, “But I can tell you one of the secret ingredients in it is tapioca flour. It’s very hard to get off…Yeah [you can eat it], but I wouldn’t.”
24.
The Help property master Chris Ubick told Entertainment Weekly, that, for the scene where Octavia Spencer’s character serves Bryce Dallas Howard’s a poop-filled chocolate pie, “We made our beautiful, beautiful pie with sugar and butter and all that sort of stuff and put it on the table. Then, we switched it out for a pie that didn’t have any sugar in it for [Bryce]. It was a very big slight of hand scene so that she could eat lots of pie and not feel like she’s been eating so much sugar.” Bryce’s pie was also vegan and gluten free.
25.
In The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, the fish that Andy Serkis bit into during his transformation from Smeagol to Gollum was “a gelatin fish.” He told TheOneRing.net, “They made a few gelatin models, which I had to bite into, which actually, in all honesty, tasted more disgusting than biting into a raw fish. I would rather have eaten a raw fish.”
26.
In the Se7en commentary track, director David Fincher reportedly said that all of the spaghetti in the Gluttony scene was real. The sauce sat out for weeks before filming began. Morgan Freeman sighed in disgust the first time he saw it.
27.
The chewing tobacco in The Sandlot was “actually shredded beef jerky and black licorice.” Actor Grant Gelt told The Arrow, “They didn’t tell us about the licorice, which, looking back, I think was intended to actually make us feel nauseous. David [Mickey Evans, the director] wanted to capture that immediate sharp reaction of, ‘Holy shit, this is terrible. What were we thinking?’ After a summer of David and the crew having to put up with us, I think that night was a good way for them to get revenge.” Prop master Terry Haskell added, “That was a real tobacco brand, and yep, the black jerky and licorice was me. I absolutely wanted them to feel revolted.”
Additionally, the carnival ride made the child actors feel sick. Tom Guiry told TIME, “We had to go on that ride about 15 times, and I think me, Ham [played by Patrick Renna], and Chauncey [Leopardi] all threw up a few times. At first it was like, ‘This isn’t so bad.’ But by the fifteenth go-round, it was like, ‘This is getting a little uhhhhh…'”
28.
Suicide Squad actor Margot Robbie told the Washington Post, “That chemical [scene] was the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. So that was definitely my least favorite. It was, like, this gluggy paint stuff that was so far in my ears and up my nose, and I was choking on it underwater, and I couldn’t breathe, and I tried to open my eyes, and it would glaze over my eyeballs, and I could only see white. It was horrible.”
29.
The fish that Danny DeVito ate in Batman Returns was a raw bluefish. Plenty of people eat raw fish in sushi, but what made his experience nasty was the fact that “in the middle of the action, [he] would squeeze a mixture of mouthwash and spirulina into [his] mouth.” He told the Daily Telegraph, “But that was because I needed to ooze this green, kind of black, thickish liquid out of the corners.”
30.
And finally, for Vampire’s Kiss, Nicolas Cage told director Robert Bierman, “The thing I hate most in the world are cockroaches. They are my Room 101. … So let me eat a cockroach.” The director readily made it happen, and the actor munched a cockroach on camera. Robert told the Ringer, “He wanted to eat the most frightening thing for him. I thought, ‘This is terrific!’ I sent my prop people down into the boiler room. … They brought me a box, divided up into little sections with tissue paper. The cockroaches were there lined up for me to cast. I think they’re actually called water bugs — they’re bigger than cockroaches.” Nic said, “I really [wanted] to do something that would shock the audience, something you would never forget.”
Before shooting the scene, producer Barbara Zitwer made them consult a doctor to ensure he wouldn’t get sick. The doctor told them, “No. But have him drink some whiskey right after.” So, they had the actor wash his mouth out with 100-proof vodka after each take. They only did two takes, but Nic actually ingested the bug both times. Co-producer Barry Shils lied to an animal rights group and said that they were still alive.
What’s the grossest movie scene you’ve ever watched? Let us know in the comments!
