Sergei Eisenstein
1925
66 minutes
The pram scene doesn't bother you that much. You know what to expect, and you don't really like children much anyhow...
What really throws you is the maggots. The meat that could "crawl overboard on its own".
You have a natural horror of maggots and vermin. Virtually all of your dreams feature maggots at some point, whether they are horrifying nightmares or fairly innocuous dreams. Whenever you close your eyes to sleep you're a little bit worried that maggots or other parasitic worms will make an appearance. Usually you are just trying to step carefully to avoid putting your foot into a writhing mass of them. Even a good thick pair of boots isn't going to make you feel good about that occurrence. Maggots in your food is even worse. More than once have you cracked open a raw walnut only to be greeted by a wriggling lot of very non-neotenous baby insects. This made you question every time you popped a roasted nut into your mouth without looking and found yourself greeted by a very "off" flavor.
The officer in the scene with the rotting meat doesn't see the maggots until he uses his eyeglasses. As someone who is rather farsighted, this makes the horror even worse for you. It also doesn't help that he shrugs and tells them "It's only maggots, just soak the meat in brine". You remember all the times your grandmother would take you foraging for mushrooms in the woods, a task which you were nearly useless at. She would effortlessly find heaps of them out in the woods. She would gather them into a bread bag and throw the phallic little treats ("peckerheads" as everyone referred to them) into salty water to "get the bugs out". They were tasty enough that you tried not to think about it after they were pan fried in some butter or oil and sprinkled with a bit more salt.
You always had a problem as well eating outdoors at picnics or family reunions. Watching flies land and crawl around on people's partially or fully-uncovered dishes would give you shivers. And on more than one occasion have you been greeted by actual fly-blown meat at such a gathering--always for food outside of your immediate control. Feeling morbid, you google the life cycle of flies and discover that it typically takes 12-24 hours for fly eggs to hatch into maggots for most species. This makes you wonder about the exact biological circumstances under which you observed this phenomenon. It makes you suspicious of the cleanliness of the homes those meals were prepared in for any of those picnic hellscapes you attended.
You take some comfort in the fact that any flies hatched in this film have likely been dead for over a century. You wonder if you've ever encountered any of their direct descendants.
Time to choose something different: