Netflix Says This Horror Movie Is So Disturbing, Most Viewers Can’t Finish It
We’ve all started a movie we didn’t finish before. Now, I make it an earnest point to finish everything I watch, even if I’m bored out of my mind. The way I reason it, I can’t accurately assess a movie—critically or otherwise—if I don’t watch it in full. Boredom is hard to overcome, though there are several other reasons any given audience member might leave a movie unfinished. In the case of horror audiences, that’s often because of one key thing: the movie is either too disgusting or too disturbing to endure.
Netflix saw that happen with Paco Plaza’s Verónica, a movie so scary that a reported 70% of viewers turned it off before the end. The Substance saw festival walkouts, and Terrifier 3 infamously made a woman sick to her stomach. We all have different metrics for what we can handle, though disgust is as surefire a way as any to compel general audiences to hit pause or eject their disc.
One such classic was so infamously nasty that Netflix ranked it as their sixth most unfinished movie ever—not because audiences were bored, but because they were so disturbed. While it’s no longer streaming there, you can catch the body horror classic now on Prime Video.
Per Prime Video: Still a stranger to her own body, a high school student discovers she has a physical advantage when she becomes the object of male violence.
Every millennial knows Teeth. It was the movie of the moment—the stuff of dares in the early days of streaming. “Bet you haven’t seen this yet.” Well, eventually, we all did see Teeth. Yes, it’s nasty and disturbing, but it’s also considerably more tender and meaningful than its admittedly provocative premise. It was refreshingly feminist and expertly funny, managing the seriousness (and horror) with a bucket of laughs. Think of it as a precursor to The Substance—the two share a lot of DNA in common.
As a result, Teeth was a critical and commercial hit, even if more general audiences had a hard time stomaching some of the more extreme scenes once the film hit streaming. I’m willing to bet most people turned it off after the first penis was bitten clean off. In a retrospective on the film here at Dread Central, Jenn Adams concluded, “Dawn learns that she is not the monster patriarchy paints her to be, and her story has the power to help other women see this as well. Her sexual desire doesn’t make her dangerous; it makes her human. By embracing her body for everything it is and everything it can be, Dawn inspires us all to look at ourselves in the mirror and find a way to love what we see.”
That’s good stuff. So, why don’t you bite some time out of your schedule and plan a watch (or rewatch) of Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth on Prime Video? If you do, let me know what you think over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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