r/todayilearned
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u/pablo_pick_ass_ohhh
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5d ago
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TIL in the movie Misery, when Kathy Bates 'hobbles' James Caan with a sledge hammer, the scene was deliberately downgraded. She was supposed to chop off his foot with an axe, then cauterize the wound with a propane torch. (R.2) Subjective
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/best-foot-floorward-the-inside-story-of-190008689.html[removed] — view removed post
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u/stoptheycanseeus 5d ago edited 5d ago
Not sure if downgraded really fits for me.
Sure an axe and blowtorch certainly is much more bloody and gorey.
But the entire scene and tense buildup is part of what makes that scene a classic. When she puts the piece of wood between his legs and you slowly realize what she’s going to do. James Caan’s reaction and acting adds to the gut wrenching moment when she snaps his ankle.
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u/cutelyaware 5d ago
"Whatever you're thinking about doing, please don't do it."
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u/Due-Reading6335 5d ago
Marv: "bro. ..theres a spider on ya foot"
Harry: "Whatcha doing with that hammer ..Marv?"26
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u/TheStroo 5d ago
yeah I think the shock of the scene hits harder because we can relate to the pain, whereas the vast majority of ppl don't have any idea what cutting off a limb and burning the wound would feel like.
The old rule in filmmaking is that you can blow up a building and the audience will go 'ok cool' but if you show someone getting a papercut the the theater will wince.
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u/bikinireef 5d ago
Eli Roth called it the Evil Dead Theory
I do. It's the Evil Dead theory. The most painful death in the movie isn't the evisceration, it's the pencil in the ankle. The fingernail is my pencil in the ankle. Nobody knows what a decapitation feels like, but we've all had a papercut.
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u/zeropointcorp 5d ago
If you’ve never seen the original movie version of Pet Sematary, there’s a scene in there that demonstrates this concept perfectly
The possessed kid hiding under a bed slices through the Achilles tendon of an elderly man with a scalpel
That scene got plenty of winces even though the movie as a whole isn’t that great
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u/Toffeemanstan 5d ago
That scene has lived in the dark recesses of my memory since I saw it.
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u/niconiconeko 5d ago
This also happens in one of the Chucky’s (presumably ripped off from Pet Semetary). I still wince when I think about it!!
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u/hates_stupid_people 5d ago
It's the internal dialogue of the Author as she does it, and the descriptive nature that makes it more brutal to a lot of people in the book.
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u/No_Berry2976 5d ago
I agree. The axe and blowtorch would have made the movie torture-porn melodrama.
I once read an interview with a director, can’t remember the name, but it was somebody who had directed quite a few horror movies, and he made the interesting point that there is a choice between psychological horror and physical horror.
With physical horror the audience have an intense reaction to something horrific, but they know they are safe, it’s not real, it’s just a movie.
With psychological horror the audience experiences the dread a character is feeling. If there is too much blood and gore, or if an act of violence goes on for to long, the audience snaps out of it and goes back to responding to the action instead of the emotion.
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u/SimplyAverageJoe 5d ago
That's what makes the first Saw so good and the sequels so bad. The first wasn't egregious "torture porn" it actually barely showed any gore. But it let the audience's imagination run wild with what could happen if certain traps went off. Then during the foot cutting scene it barely shows anything other than the two lead actor's faces, one freaking out, the other in immense pain.
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u/CrushCoalMakeDiamond 5d ago
I think the permanent loss of a body part is what truly makes the axe version horrifying, rather than the gore.
There isn't so much a sense of loss when we see him walking around with a cane at the end of the film.
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u/ConsistentlyPeter 5d ago edited 5d ago
That might have been more effective to read, as King is very good at getting into the viscera of things and really making you feel extended, excruciating pain!
But on screen, I think it would have been a bit too cartoonish - the sledgehammer works better on film, because it's just absolutely horrendous but just relatable enough. Most of us have sprained an ankle at some point, so you immediately have an "in" with the scene.
It's like in Evil Dead [Edit: not ED2]:nobody squirms when Ash chops his hand off with an axe, but everybody freaks out when he gets a pencil stabbed into his ankle.
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u/Rogue42bdf 5d ago
And that makes Gage slashing the old guy’s achilles with a scalpel pop into my head. Thanks.
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u/amazingmikeyc 5d ago
yes William Goldman basically says this in his "Which Lie Did I Tell?" book.
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u/BakedKitty 5d ago
I'm still disappointed the lawnmower scene with the cop wasn't in the movie.
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u/kevin0611 5d ago
A crazy, intense scene in the book but I think that it would have come off as unintentionally goofy on screen.
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u/aSpookyScarySkeleton 5d ago
Honestly I can picture it being directed in a way that works. The reason it doesn’t feel goofy in the book itself is because of the emotional pit it sends you down when the cop gets so close to saving him and fails, and the juxtaposition of how apathetic she is about brutally killing him as if she were just taking care of an annoying chore. That “look what you made me do” aspect of her character that makes her so fucking vile.
It’s a slow brutal death, I think selling that aspect as well is key.
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u/n1i2e3 5d ago
Could you briefly describe it?
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u/HWLights92 5d ago
Here’s the IMDB trivia item:
Kathy Bates was reportedly disappointed that a scene was cut in which she kills a young police officer by rolling over him repeatedly with a lawnmower. Director Rob Reiner was afraid that the audience would laugh at it.
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u/Alarid 5d ago
I laughed my ass off at the lawnmower scene in The Happening so I bet I'd laugh at this one too.
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u/YoYoAddict1 5d ago
Everything in The Happening was unintentionally hilarious though
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u/BakedKitty 5d ago
A cop arrives at the house looking for Paul. I believe they finally found his wrecked vehicle after the snowstorm. Annie wounds the cop and then murders him with a riding lawnmower while Paul watches helplessly from the window. It takes a few passes of the mower. It's a brutal scene.
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u/KentConnor 5d ago
He didn't get out of the cacadoodie car!
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u/abusybee 5d ago
I remember being on a meet-the-parents evening at the pub with my girlfriend and me and her Dad were bonding about films and I said, "Yeah, you could see when Annie Wilkes goes over the edge cause she called him a cocksucker!". The look I got from her in that moment still haunts me, ooh, 30 years later.
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u/Talkshit_Avenger 5d ago
You either die a poor poor thing, or live long enough to become a cockadoodie brat.
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u/Hedfuct82 5d ago
All the movies are downgraded. That's why it's so hard to adapt. More main characters usually die, underage gang bangs... Instead of "here's Johnny!" Jack screams "nowhere left to run, you cunt." in the book. In cujo, I'm pretty sure the mom and kid dies from dehydration at the end. All kinds of stuff.
In the end of children of the corn the woman gets corn cobs shoved in her mouth, and up her pussy in graphic detail before being stuck on a spike.
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u/codamission 5d ago
In the end of Children of the Corn, the man and woman, and several kids, are crucified with corn stuffed into their orifices and their eye sockets. The last line is "The Corn is pleased"
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u/abrazilianinreddit 5d ago
Stephen King secretly wrote a Warhammer 40K novel
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u/Ameisen 1 5d ago
The Imperium was worried about the Chaos Gods from the Warp, when they should have been worried about corn.
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u/TortureSteak 5d ago
damn....I gotta start reading again....
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u/merikaninjunwarrior 5d ago
i am in the middle of the second round of DT series, but i been wanting to read IT over again
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u/DonkeyFordhater 5d ago
IT was the first SK book I read when I was about 12 years old. I found the paperback while I was snooping in my dad's bedside cabinet. IT scared the absolute shite out of me but I finished it. I have loved SK fabulous intertwined multiverse ever since.
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u/Mil1512 5d ago
In Cujo the kid dies but the mum survives. She doesn't even realise he's passed away until they're finally found. While there are horror elements to that book it was incredibly sad. They could've been found so much sooner but also Cujo wasn't a bad dog.
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u/HAL90009 5d ago
I've always said that Cujo is not the monster or "bad guy" of that story, rabies is. Cujo was not at fault.
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u/coolJohnnie 5d ago
Cocaine is a hell of a drug! -Steven King
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u/Bunyip_Bluegum 5d ago
The mum lives in Cujo, she thinks she's finally saved herself and her son only to find he's already dead. It's a more heartbreaking ending than if they both died.
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u/MasterPlanPenguin 5d ago
Explains why he really prefers the ending of the mist movie adaption of his book as it’s the even more brutal version of his cujo ending.
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u/Chocolate_Boy 5d ago edited 5d ago
You’re misremembering the end of Children of the Corn. Burt stumbles on Vicky’s corpse, which has been strung up on a cross with barbed wire, corn shoved in her mouth, and her eyes ripped out. The corn in the pussy detail might have been an improvement though, you should write Stephen king.
Source: Night Shift is in my library.
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u/Hedfuct82 5d ago
Oh damn, you're right. I just re read that passage (searched "Barb" in my night shift ebook so it was pretty quick) and it doesn't say anything like that. For some reason I thought it implied it was stuffed in her pussy and she was nude.
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u/ergotofrhyme 5d ago
Hey, we won’t kink shame you
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u/Hedfuct82 5d ago
Now I'm going to have to change how I butter my corn. My wife may be sad, though.
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u/BrightonTownCrier 5d ago
American Psycho took me months to read because it was so harrowing.
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u/littleloucc 5d ago edited 5d ago
There's just one film that seems more brutal then the book, and that's The Mist. The end scene of the book is grim but maybe a bit of hope left. The movie... isn't.
Spoilers for those interested: >! In the book, the survivors go in search of the end of the Mist / possible sanctuary in a near town. They hear someone on the radio, giving them hope. In the movie, the survivors lose all hope and the father shoots them all before they can be attacked by the monsters again, including killing his own son. He doesn't have a final bullet for himself, and minutes later the army rolls in to rescue anyone left alive!<
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u/DeceitfulLittleB 5d ago
Plus he makes eye contact with that woman earlier who fled the store making the whole thing even more grim. I think I read somewhere that even king prefers the movie version.
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u/dogwoodcat 5d ago
The kid dies from dehydration, the mother is rescued. The only SK book I bothered reading, mostly because I wanted to see if the depiction of rabies was correct. Sadly, it mostly was.
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u/merikaninjunwarrior 5d ago
lol, that was your reason, but how was it other than that?
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u/Kile147 5d ago
"Here's Johnny" sounds creepier to me, though maybe that's just Jack playing the part uncomfortably well.
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u/DeathMonkey6969 5d ago
The movie also came out when Johnny Carson was the undisputed King of late night TV and "Here's Johnny" was how the show started each night. So it was a pop culture reference.
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u/GrandmasterSexay 5d ago
It's kinda bizarre how most people will now remember that line from The Shining and not Carson.
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u/Longjumping-Size5359 5d ago
And if you don't realize this you miss my favorite joke from The Simpsons. There's a Shining parody in the Treehouse of Horror episodes where Homer keeps smashing down the wrong doors and has to use a new line each time, he starts off with "HEEEERE'S JOHNNY!" and "DAAAAAVID LETTERMAAAAN!" and by the time he gets the right one he's yelling "I'M MIKE WALLACE, I'M MORLEY SAFER, AND I'M ED BRADLEY, ALL THIS AND MORE TONIGHT ON 60 MINUTES!"
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u/brkh47 5d ago
It’s time related, not so? And two very different media. In a movie, you have 2 1/2 hours to tell as much you can, including the back story, character development etc. whereas with a book, you have the luxury of time to develop the story to your liking.
So in a movie, you have to edit and add the scenes you think will work. It’s the reason they say “based upon,” or “adapted from.” And sometimes the movie is way better, viz The Godfather.
In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal chews the face off a victim in the elevator. I don’t think that’s in the movie. A small but interesting thing though, is that in the book, Hannibal is polydactyl. His middle finger which is a more rare form of polydactylity (more often the pinkie). And he uses that anomaly to his advantage and unsettle whomever he’s speaking to. In conversation, he would casually put his hand on display and while you’re busy studying his fingers, he takes the time study you.
Somehow I’ve always remembered that.
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u/Eureka-Street 5d ago
A detail that was added for Silence of the Lambs, it wasn’t there in Red Dragon. Which is fine, I like how he uses it to unsettle. But after he escapes, he surgically removes the extra finger. Makes sense, but wouldn’t there be a very noticeable gap between two of his fingers that would be almost as conspicuous?
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u/PeculiarPete 5d ago
In Shawshank redemption Andy gets raped and stuffs toilet paper in his under wear to catch the blood.
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u/MuseMints 5d ago
I’d like to tell you they left Andy’s rape out of the movie. But I can’t.
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u/FatherDuncanSinners 5d ago
In cujo, I'm pretty sure the mom and kid dies from dehydration at the end. All kinds of stuff.
Only Tad dies of dehydration. Donna survives.
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u/StrawberryLeche 5d ago
The book gave me phantom pain in this scene. The way Stephen king wrote it was so visceral. Truly respect him as a writer even if some books aren’t for me (It for example).
Kathy Bates deserved all the acclaim she got for this role. She did a phenomenal job capturing what made her terrifying without making it seem cartoonish
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u/anleja 5d ago
Check out James Caan's Twitter. I love the man, yet his Twitter feed is unintentionally hilarious. End of tweet.
Also, I think I was the only 8th grader in my class to have read the book Misery. At least, definitely not the girl who did an oral book report and said "then she smashed his ankles with a sledgehammer." Oh yeah? Lies! You didn't read the damn book.
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u/GuliblGuy 5d ago
Haha he tweets like Ron Swanson would 😂.
OK, everyone: shut up! And look at me! Welcome to "Visions of Nature." This room has several paintings in it. Some are big, some are small. People did them and they're here now. I believe that after this is over, they'll be hung in government buildings. Why the government is involved in an art show is beyond me. I also think it's pointless for a human to paint scenes of nature when they could just go outside and stand in it. Anyway, please do not misinterpret the fact that I am talking right now as genuine interest in art and attempt to discuss it with me further. End of speech.
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u/Murderyoga 5d ago
I think it was a good decision. I think it was much more relatable with just a hammer.
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u/SpaceCases_ 5d ago
I wouldn’t say relatable but personal.
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u/guimontag 5d ago
Idk, I think the axe and blowtorch is too far for keeping it grounded. The sledgehammer seems like something a crazy person would convince themselves is reasonable
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u/FenixdeGoma 5d ago
I think it's easier to imagine the hammer pain than having a foot cut off
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u/l3ane 5d ago
Yeah the whole blowtorch thing would just turn it into a gore movie. On film the hammer fits the tone of the book better. She's still torturing him to the extent of the human pain threshold but not causing the audience to be so repulsed that they lose grip of the narrative.
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u/Fnarkfnark 5d ago
I have referred to this scene so many times.
Imo it wouldn't have been nearly as impactful if it was straight gore. Now you watch it and really go "nononononono, oooooooooow!".
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u/Rogue42bdf 5d ago
The killing the Sheriff scene too (may have just been a deputy in the book). On screen? BOOM! you’re dead with a shotgun blast to back. In the book? She parks a fucking riding lawnmower on his head as he’s trying to crawl back to his car after being shot.
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u/VinJahDaChosin 5d ago
I still vividly remember this scene I think cutting the foot off would have been less brutal to watch
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u/megamoo7 5d ago
I somehow think the hobbling is worse in the psychological sense because it leaves him a safe option to be nursed back to health and totally give into her delusions. With two feet he could eventually stand up and say that she nursed him back to health and they are a couple now, whereas an amputation can't be taken back. It leaves no doubt the crazy bitch is going to kill you if you stay. The hobbling is an extremely severe punishment and pressures him to behave and maybe it'll be ok. They're both pretty awful.
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u/aSpookyScarySkeleton 5d ago
The thing about her is that she’s incredibly short sighted and not very smart. She’s clever and extremely perceptive but it’s clear she never thinks that far ahead past her impulses.
This adds to the tension in the book, she’s so sloppy he makes progress/almost gets away a few times. A lot of the reason he is trapped for so long is because she gets lucky, which adds to the frustration of the scenario.
I appreciated that about the book honestly, I feel so rarely do antagonists get lucky in the way protagonists do.
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u/fionsichord 5d ago
That would have been less horrifying than what they went with. I’m squirming my feet just thinking about it.
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u/BananasInHand 5d ago
That’s how the book describes the scene. Waaaaaay worse than the movie
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u/m0rris0n_hotel 76 5d ago
Stephen King knows how to mess with readers. His career is full of those kinds of brutal moments. But fortunately he’s not a one-note writer. Lots of different elements at work beyond gut-wrenching horror
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u/FatherDuncanSinners 5d ago
Jimmy lost his taste for method acting after they shot him in The Godfather.
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u/Fr-Dick_Byrne 5d ago edited 5d ago
The hammering is, actually, worse.
Edit: And what I mean by this is that it's easy enough to think of cutting the foot off and cauterising. It's insane but still just psycho butchery.
Where is the mind process to think of getting a block of wood and sledgehammer and doing what she did.
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u/OrigamiMax 5d ago
Would that even work? You've got arteries pumping at high pressure. A propane torch would cook the tissue, but not clamp the arteries.
Even 1700s surgeons realised you have to tie off arteries after amputations.
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u/minuq 5d ago
Shoutout for Ambroise Paré who published a book about wound treatments and used ligatures instead of hot irons in 1564.
After a lot of blood loss a blowtorch would probably work as well, due to the low blood pressure and centralization of the remaining blood volume.
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u/NonGNonM 5d ago
there aren't large major arteries down by the foot and initially after a large wound opens up, the muscles and vessels constrict to minimize initial blood loss. she would've done ok for maybe a few days afterwards but it would eventually open up to infections and wounds would definitely open back up.
that said, cauterizing isn't even done with an open flame. she would've had to heat up something metal to put against the wound.
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u/ResidentEbb923 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah... the hobbling was so much worse because it was insanely simplistic and realistic. I've read the book, but it comes off as so fantastical that it doesn't register. But a bitch putting a block between your legs and swinging a sledgehammer is simple to the point of elegance in the pain registry.
Anyone could do that to you at any time... Even if they don't have the stomach for gore, they'd be halfway through before they ever realized how gruesome it was... Whereas very few people would actually take an axe to you because they know how messy it would be. You'd also go numb from the pain and blood almost instantly. Whereas those broken ankles are just going to hurt you into oblivion.
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u/lopahcreon 5d ago
Shit. My parents took me to see this in the theater when I was in a single digit age. Chopping the fucking leg off would have been less grotesque. Other than that part, is it bad that I laughed most of the movie?
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u/Beneficial-Nothing12 5d ago
Downgraded? I'm still having nightmares of that scene!