10 Times Steven Spielberg Went Really F***ing Dark

What do you imagine when you think of Steven Spielberg? Do you think benevolent bearded uncle of family entertainment, the man behind such popular fare as ET, Jurassic Park, the Indiana Jones movies and, oh yes, Hook? Or do you think dark lord of Hollywood cinema, responsible for some of the most traumatic moments in recent cinema history? Despite his reputation as a family favorite, there's a severely dark streak to Steven Spielberg. He's been accused of infantilizing cinema by his critics, but Spielberg - especially in his later years - has also been given to offering up some extremely unsettling scenarios to his audiences. To keep things fair (basically so Schindler's List doesn't take every spot), no film of Spielberg's will get more than one entry on this list, a list so horrifying that innocent InGen workers getting mercilessly slaughtered by Velociraptors in The Lost World didn't even make the cut. Curious to see what did make our list, though? Read on for ten Steven Spielberg moments that are really f***ing dark. 10) Minority Report Body horror has never really been Spielberg's thing, with the Beard preferring to leave that to David Cronenberg as he instead sticks to creating colorful action set-pieces. However, Spielberg's Minority Report - which all the same still features a good deal of those aforementioned slick set-pieces - is home to one of the grossest moments in sci-fi this century. In a movie that also finds Tom Cruise injecting a serum into his own face so it turns to "mush," the biggest fingers-over-the-eyes moment involves Cruise's rogue cop having his own eyes removed and replaced by a (presumably - hopefully) dead man's, a process which eventually results in him chasing his loose eyes down a corridor. 9) Empire Of The Sun Empire of the Sun is designed like a boys' own adventure tale - only this one has the terrifying backdrop of WWII coming to Hong Kong, in a wave of bloody invasion. JG Ballard's story is partially true, and harrowing, with Christian Bale atypically the film's sole source of joy, as the hyperactive English kid separated from his parents and imprisoned by the Japanese army. It's all fairly downbeat when Jamie gets to the internment camp, where emaciated residents drop like flies or are beaten by the prison guards. One glimmer of hope for Jamie is the young Japanese boy beyond the wire that he befriends. When the war ends, Jamie and the boy meet outside the fence for the first time, symbolically sharing a piece of fruit. Then John Malkovich shoots the kid to death.... 8) A.I. If you can't remember the time Steven Spielberg worked with Chris Rock, you've either forgotten because the comedian's role was so brief or because his single scene in A.I. is so weirdly distressing that you trained yourself to forget. In Spielberg's misunderstood sci-fi classic, Rock plays a robot rounded up and destroyed at a carnival, all for the entertainment of the humans who hate his kind. The reason the scene is so disturbing? Maybe it's the fact that the robots of A.I. are so uncannily human, or it's the reminder that mankind can be this unnecessarily cruel. Granted, Chris Rock can be irritating, but by the time he's been set on fire and put through a giant blender, you're pretty much ready to forgive him. 7) Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade If you want to teach your kids about the process of ageing but don't have the time/can't be bothered making the effort, just show them Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which basically explains it all in microcosm. The scene at the end of the film, which sees Indiana vanquish his treacherous foe Donovan simply by out-archaeologising him, is horrific, and a moment that Spielberg springs from nowhere. Hoping to claim the Holy Grail for himself, Indiana rival and evil Nazi shit Donovan drinks from what he thinks is the cup of Christ, knowing full well that "choosing poorly" will bring him an agonizing death. All Indiana can do is watch as Donovan begins to age rapidly immediately after taking his sup, with his body slowly withering to dust. The real kicker here though is that helpless moan Donovan gives as the life drains from his body. 6) War Of The Worlds One thing Spielberg likes is to insert some real disturbing and/or gory moments into his popcorn fare (see: Jurassic Park, and Gennaro getting eaten whilst on the toilet). War of the Worlds, despite its PG-13 rating and (unwarranted) reputation as a dud, is full of stuff primed to haunt you. There's the part where the invading aliens turn the people of New Jersey to dust like it's some laser-fried holocaust, or the scene in which Tom Cruise beats a troubled Tim Robbins to death with a spade. Or there's the moment where the aliens drink the blood of a man then spray it onto their extraterrestrial 'red weed' crops. It's not just dark - it's also really, really weird. 5) Munich Never has Spielberg - the man who gave us "ET phone home" and a softly-spoken Daniel Day-Lewis lovingly trying to save America in a stovepipe hat - dwelled so heavily on carnage. It's difficult to pick just one moment of misery from globe-hopping revenge drama Munich, but out of all the head-stabbings, child-shootings, and point blank woman-executions, the unexpectedly visceral nature of the Cyprus hotel scene takes the prize. It's simple, Matthieu Kassovitz's bomb-maker Robert tells Eric Bana's Mossad hitman Avner - you flip the switch, and the bomb goes off. Piece of cake, if Avner didn't also happen to be in a neighboring hotel room to the target. This means that Avener's forced to witness the aftermath of the blast, which leaves bits of the target's corpse hanging from the ceiling like it's a particularly gory Halloween. Dark as f**k! 4) Raiders Of The Lost Ark Even in his PG work, Spielberg has been known to push the limits of what's acceptable in terms of screen violence. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg's action-adventure classic featuring a whip-happy, gun-toting archaeologist is a real favorite, partly because it's so uncomplicated. And because Jones has enemies - Nazis - that are so completely OK for you to hate, that the censors didn't seem to mind that their punishment was absolutely horrible. In Raiders, "acceptable screen violence for a child accompanied by an adult" means showing German soldiers having their souls sucked out of them and their dastardly leaders melting to death. This got past the censors just fine, with the MPAA in a moment of madness believing a whole generation of children were due for some decent nightmares. 3) Saving Private Ryan If you thought the Omaha Beach landing was going to take the prize for Saving Private Ryan's darkest scene, think again. For all the opening sequence's grizzly, offal-heavy verisimilitude, nothing beats Private Mellish's slow death by knife for sheer, heart-stopping (literally) brutality. It's partly the unexpected nature of it - of course you'd assume good guy Mellish is going to overcome the bad guy Nazi - that makes Mellish's death so horrendous to watch. It also doesn't help that the German soldier slowly plunging the knife into Mellish's heart is whispering words of attempted comfort as Mellish helplessly screams and goes into shock. Very grim stuff. 2) Amistad Amistad is something of a forgotten Spielberg movie, mostly because it isn't all that great. In spite of the blood-boiling subject - slavery, and the treatment of slaves by the American justice system - Spielberg appears oddly detached for much of Amistad, which spends most of its time in stifling court rooms. The flashback scenes set on the slave ship, however, are undeniably disturbing, reaching their nadir in the moment that some of the slaves are chained together and thrown overboard, still alive, kicking down into the deep. The real horror is in understanding the slaves are nothing but cargo to their captors, who look on dispassionately as they would at some particularly heavy barrels they might be tossing to drop weight. 1) Schindler's List How strange is it that Spielberg can still be considered by some a mere provider of 'entertainment' after Schindler's List? Especially after the scene in which he shows you German soldiers routinely executing sick Jews in their hospital beds, or the one in which piles of bodies are gleefully burned as a drunken officer shoots into the pile. Or, you know, any scene involving Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes is terrifying in Schindler's List even when he's doing nothing, but the scene in which his concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth uses the boy who's just insufficiently cleaned his bath tub as target practice is perhaps the worst of the lot. This is Steven Spielberg at his most downbeat, proving once and for all he's not just some family-friendly helmer.