The Scariest Scene In A Non-Horror Movie, According To Reddit

Fear is in the eye of the beholder. One man's unwatchable, nightmare body horror is another man's bi-monthly rewatch of the Doctor Pimple Popper playlist on YouTube. Fear often stems from the unexpected — it's why you're still having bad dreams about Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? while movies designed to scare leave you largely unaffected, and it's why Miyazaki movie imagery is so much more haunting that, say, The Conjuring.

The phenomenon isn't lost on audiences, and a recent Reddit thread dug deep into the subject of scariest non-horror scenes. There were plenty of contenders for the title of Most Debilitatingly Unsettling Sequence in a Movie That's Purportedly Not Designed to Freak You Out. Vincent D'Onofrio's toilet scene from Full Metal Jacket was a popular choice, as was everything that Anton (Javier Bardem) did in No Country for Old Men. That half-second where Bilbo goes all Gremlin-faced and lunges at Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring had some devotees.

But in the end, only one moment in motion picture history could take the cake. It is, predictably, all Roald Dahl's fault — the guy gave us Ms. Trunchbull and the parent-eating rhino from James and the Giant Peach. There's no earthly way of not knowing where this is going.

The scariest scene in a non-horror movie, according to Reddit, is the boat scene from 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The film is considered by many to be almost sacred, to the point where the 2005 remake nearly made the public turn on Johnny Depp in the mid-2000s, back when he was at the height of his power. The original film has everything: child torture, candy slaves, Grandpa Joe's suspiciously long pinky fingernails.

But there's also a dark side.

Not long after they've begun their journey into the eponymous factory and immediately following the pneumatic expulsion of a rotund German boy, Willy Wonka's (Gene Wilder) visitors are invited to climb aboard his Oompa Loompa-powered paddle boat and list lazily down a chocolate river. Generally unphased by having just witnessed a child being vacuumed into a cocoa-flavored hell of his own making and entirely unsuspecting of what's to come, the tour group disembarks, with Wonka stating 'You're going to love this. Just love it." "Pure Imagination" plays for a few seconds while Wonka doesn't blink. Grandpa Joe, and this is true, discusses kicking a little girl out loud.

The mood in the room changes significantly when the boat approaches a tunnel. Several adults express a desire to get off the boat. Wonka's eyes somehow get bigger as he shrugs off their requests and the watercraft picks up speed.

"Faster! Faster!" Wonka cries as the lights begin to flash. A Lynchian terrorscape of disjointed film clips play across the walls of the tunnel — millipedes crawl across the unmoving face of a man. A chicken is beheaded with a meat cleaver. A lizard eats a bug. Wonka, still disinclined to blink, recites a lyrical poem about the fires of hell a-glowing and the grisly reaper mowing. Grandpa Joe thinks the whole thing is a hoot.

Then the scene is over and it's back to good old-fashioned entertainment, like inflating a little girl into a ten-foot blueberry because she wouldn't spit out her gum.