10 Movie Scenes That Make You Feel Like You Shouldn’t Be Watching

Certain movies play on human discomfort to create masterful scenes that call the ethics of viewing into question. While movies can function beautifully as an escape from stress and other negative emotions, the right filmmaker can use the cinematic form to generate these feelings to great effect. It’s a strange side effect of the film medium that the viewer becomes a secret observer of the characters and action on-screen. This phenomenon is easy to ignore, but some great films have created intensely moving art by playing on this implicit invasion of privacy. There are plenty of ways a film can ratchet up the discomfort to make the audience feel like an intrusive spectator. It’s often horror films that take aim at this feeling since viewer discomfort is an aim of the horror form. However, any film which hazards to depict something that transgresses comfortable social and cinematic boundaries can make the audience feel like they’re watching something they shouldn’t be. Gore, sexual violence, and visceral emotion are three powerful types of primal imagery that are often used to generate this discomfort. It’s worth looking into how and why.