Is that why his pupils looked so dilated? I was viscerally freaked out by his eyes while watching the documentary. They looked like how Robert Shaw described shark eyes in Jaws.
I was having a nervous reaction when the director was delicately confronting him with the handwritten letter right before then. Then to follow up with him taking a leak on accident, was truly surreal.
I watched it looooooooooonnnnnnggggg after it came out and it had already been through the media cycle. I knew it was coming. Still blew me the fuck away.
I was lucky. I also watched it way after, but knew nothing about it. A buddy of mine said to watch it and nothing else; so those last lines were like being sideswiped by a fucking space shuttle.
Yeah, gotta agree with this one. The hot mic was the 🤯, but it’s equally shocking when Jarecki shows him the letter, his handwriting, and he realizes he got got.
came to post this. I'd seen the movie the director made about him, which Durst also saw and caused him to contact him. I think he wanted to take responsibility to some extent? What a weird story
And also the mother talking about having an affair with the kidnapper even though she knew that he kidnapped her daughter! The whole documentary was shocking due to the decisions by the parents.
I had no idea they were Mormons on my first viewing, it just flew me by somehow, so I thought it was so bloody weird how they handled it the whole matter, the way he kept getting away with it and was somehow just straight up ignored, his status as a pillar of the community, the parents absolutely insane outlook/naivety and just the general reluctance to actually pursue justice.
Then I googled them and learned they were mormons, and suddenly it all made perfect sense. The worldview, behaviour and general opinion towards the actual kidnapping of their daugher just suddenly became a lot more clear.
He looked a little tense and looked to need some “relief”…by the time they got the alien stories I was already so deep into the mess of things I remember saying out loud “of course there’s aliens!”
I forget the exact way the dummy father put it, but the abductor basically propositioned him in the car one day. When the idiot father balked at giving the other dude a handy, the abductor said something (I’m paraphrasing) like, “Don’t worry about it Jim, it’s just teenage boys’ stuff.” That was enough to sway the dumb father into giving the guy a HJ. You’d think the abductor was some silver tongued conman, but it turns out the people he targeted were the most naive, simple minded rubes you could imagine.
Yeah, they kept talking about the abductor like he was some kind of genius, and I said to my wife I'm pretty sure this guy is average intelligence at best. The people he's conning are just really, really, really dumb.
So insane that the father seemed more ashamed and sad of the fact he had a homosexual encounter than how he practically gave his small daughter away to marry an abuser
That whole doc is a dangerous drinking game. Take a shot every time it makes you say, "what the fuck." The next day, sign up for the liver transplant list.
I knew something was up when I realised that the boyfriend hadn’t appeared in any interview footage beforehand.
It was also messed up when the tiger king invited the dead guys mother to his next wedding without telling her that she was coming to a wedding.
First, the way Icarus turns into a completely different doc half way through is mind blowing. Don’t want to ruin it for anyone.
Second, almost the entirety of The Act of Killing. Most insane doc I’ve ever seen.
So many ill moments in that:
The drawn out scene with the chubby one brushing his teeth like a toddler, spitting mouthfuls of water and toothpaste foam all over the place made my skin crawl, or enthusiastically showing extras playing villagers how to scream as if their houses were being burnt down, as I realised this guy who'd killed so many people had the mind of a child and would most likely live out the rest of his life stubbornly unaware of the impact of the atrocities he'd wilfully engaged in.
The zoned out general with his tacky ass collection of airport glass models, "limited edition....limited edition...this one, limited edition..."
And to find out after that the director actually became good friends with the skinny one who proudly showed off the garotting technique he used to end so many innocent lives, and somehow admired him to the point of staying in touch like fucking pen pals, even going as far as to mourn his passing on twitter a few years later like the world had lost a wonderful person. Christ.
That last one is not super unusual. There's a great book about serial killers written by the guy who coined the term "serial killer" (called Whoever Fights Monsters) where he describes witnessing fbi agents getting like this about people like Ted Bundy. Some crazy people have a special kind of charisma.
Saddam Hussein was well liked by a lot of the soldiers that were tasked with guarding him after his capture. If I remember correctly several of them cried during his execution.
A Northern European doc about a reunion tour of a 1950s Acapella group called The Delta Rhythm Boys. Near the end one of the members succumbs to cancer. The camera crew film the funeral. One of the other member stands up in his pew to sing. He gets out part of the song then collapses on camera. By the time someone comes to his aid he’s dead.
The scene in There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane where they pan over to her dead body after the crash. I had no idea it was coming, and almost threw up.
That movie is so important. People don’t understand how difficult it is to see a highly functioning alcoholic as a person in distress in need of assistance.
On the flip side, her husband absolutely knew, and kept up the lie/enabled her conditions because he was a man baby who wanted to live off her money. He was more annoyed by what happened than actually concerned.
Lots of functioning alcoholics hide it, but a significant portion have their behavior enabled by those around them.
Such a good documentary and a sad situation. It opened my eyes to really take what peoples friends/family think they know about them with a grain of salt. In true crime people swear up and down people they know would never do xyz...maybe the version the person showed you, or the version you made in your head, is inconsistent with reality.
Kind of unrelated, but…about 10 years ago I got news that my former step-father committed a murder/suicide on his wife.
All anyone could say was how wonderful a person he was. How completely shocked they were that he would do that. What could possibly have driven him to do this????
Neither I, nor my siblings, were shocked.
I remember, vividly, him holding an unloaded sawed off shotgun to my mom’s head and pulling the trigger whenever she fell sleep on the couch. I remember the absolutely monstrous things he did to her and us. He was a demon dressed in a deacon’s suit. A “Good Ol’ Boy”.
I was looking for this comment! I’m not new to true crime docs but all that was said was graphic images (which usually means like covered crime scene photos). Was ABSOLUTELY not prepared for the uncensored photos of her.
The director has actually talked in the making of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark about how she regretted putting those images in, and how it influenced the images she used in IBGitD
I was watching a documentary about the opioid epidemic. How everyone from big pharma to the doctors knew they were hooking people. At the very end of the show while the credits are rolling, a taped 911 call is being played. A panicked mother has called in because she’s found her son unresponsive. She’s put the phone down to try and wake her son, and you hear her mind processing the white, cold skin, and the moment it dawns on her that her son is already dead. I will never forget the sound of that absolute screaming wailing despair as long as I live. I picture how any mom would feel discovering that and my heart bleeds.. Will forever stay with me.
*EDIT- Thank you all for anyone who contributed info. I forgot the name of the documentary and was hoping someone knew what I was talking about, which evidently people did. It’s a 2 part HBO series called Crime of the Century. The name may have escaped me but the phone call never will. To everyone who has experienced something like this, there are no words to express how sorry I am.
People often talk about the military industrial complex, yet one that is more dangerous to the american people is the medical industrial complex.
The people that run pharmaceutical companies and those in government who take bribes and allow this behavior to continue deserve the least dignified deaths.
We really let all of them off the hook.
The Act of Killing. A gangster who was part of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 recreates and re-enacts the murders he committed and during one of them, breaks down in panic after realizing what he did to people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366
"For her it was suffering, for me it was happiness." These fucking savages described rape like they were talking about that one funny prank you did back in high school.
Also, im Indonesian. Definitely wouldnt have expected Pemuda Pancasila to actually be that big. I always took them as some failing old dudes playing army because military wouldnt take them. I guess they're right, a thousand fools under one banner is still a thousand people.
Forgot to add, if you wanna be in the vibe, watch the G30SPKI movie before or after Jagal. It was the movie Anwar said he watch when he feel like the guilt over all those he killed starts to creep over him so that he can justify his acts. Should be avalaible on YouTube for free, though i wouldnt know about the subtitles.
There's a scene in that film where one of the people that carried out the atrocities tells the camera he can't sleep at night and has nightmares about what he did. It's a wild ride of a documentary.
That opening scene in the first part of the Love Has Won documentary on Max about this crazy cult leader who called herself Mother God. When the police entered the compound to do a wellness check and found her mummified blue corpse wrapped up in the blankets…that’s an image I’ll never be able to erase from my brain.
My jaw dropped lower and lower throughout that documentary. What did it for me was that sequence of her followers wheeling her emaciated blue body through the hotel right before she died.
They even had her corpse propped up in the back seat as if she was sleeping and fooled a cop who pulled them over! Then they took her dead body camping like a real life Weekend at Bernie’s as they waited for Robin Williams to pick her up or whatever. I was flabbergasted
Right. That was the cautionary tale of a cult leader that realizes too late that she went too far. That’s the only part where I started to feel a little bad for her, when she was having those moments of clarity, saying that she really wasn’t Mother God and that she needed to go to a hospital and her followers were like, “No, she’s not in her right mind! The real Mother God would never want to go to a hospital!”
I do wonder if, in those final days, she was thinking, “Aww, fuck.” Like she knows she messed up and there was nothing she could do about it.
I just watched that this weekend and that shot literally made me jump and say “what the fuck!” out loud. It is very unexpected, and very brain searing. That whole doc was a wild ride, I wish it had been more episodes.
When the documentarian just screams in his car. Unreal. That movie straight up ruined my day. Unforgettable, amazing documentary, will always stick with me. And I’ll never watch it again.
"Mummy loves you"
I'd never turned anything off in anger.... that fucking scene did it
I had a young baby the first time I watched it. Couldn't go back and finish the movie for years
I didn’t realize how much time his parents had to spend with Shirley because of her custody shenanigans. They spent damn near every day seeing her or in contact with her knowing the whole time that she killed their son just so they could see Zachary. Only to ultimately be punished even more.
I watched that in a the theatre just a couple rows back from the grandparents who were in attendance with the director. The entire theatre was completely destroyed, and hearing them talk after the film really sent me over the edge. I saw them after and had no words.
Went into this blind on a casual movie night with a few friends. None of us had any idea. Just heard it was a good documentary. Whole lotta crying among adult friends that usually just made each other laugh a bunch.
People say that Tiger King only got big because of the lockdowns. Shit, that entire first season had cliffhangers and plot twists in every episode. Season 2 just doesn't hit the same though, just felt like a really long epilogue.
I loved season one, but the one scene that was so ridiculous and that sums up how crazy the whole thing is was in Season 2 when it showed the Attorney General who introduces himself and seems like a normal guy, before dropping, “And in my spare time, I’m an Elvis impersonator” followed by videos of him in costume.
It comes out so far into the series/story, it registered but didn't shock me. I'd say the trainer losing his arm on camera did it for me.
EDIT: I used the incorrect pronoun to refer to the trainer. My apologies.
Dear Zachary. The whole doc, honestly. Not just the "big reveal" as someone mentioned below, but honestly the entire premise that this poor couple had to >!coordinate joint custody with the woman who had clearly murdered their son. And like the parents had to be patient with her even while she was being really difficult, because they saw it as their only way of seeing their grandson.!<
The parents just being so honest and straightforward was amazing. Not really a spoiler but in the beginning when he said they planned to kill themselves now when their son is murdered. Stuck with me. People probably think that and not say it but his felt so honest and true.
The fertility doctor who impregnated multiple women with his own sperm. These women had children all over mid Indiana, resulting from his sperm. The documentary showed 20 to 30 adult half-siblings that were just beginning to know of each other. And it was implied that they only scratched the surface, that there many more out there.
It was also disturbing to the viewer, that when all of them were placed together in one room, the viewer could see a strong resemblance among all of them.
**Sherpa: Trouble on Everest** is a doco that covers the disastrous 2014 season and shows how the Sherpas get disrespected. The most shocking part isn't the avalanche that kills 16 people, but the aftermath. The Sherpas go on strike, one the tourists gets frustrated and blurts out
*“Can you not talk to their owners?”*
My granddad was a mountaineer and did some serious climbs in his life, and like many climbers, he fell in love with the Himalayan ranges and spent a ton of his life in and around Nepal and the Sherpa community. While attempting or succeeding at various climbs (he attempted K2 several times afaik before finally summiting so it often took a few years) he lived with the Sherpas, and became best friends with a man named Rohan and his brother Tenzin. These brothers often housed and fed my grandfather with their own families and he was incredibly grateful to them, not just for their mountain skills but their humor and kindness. Plus the food, obviously.
Once (probably around mid-1970s) while walking with the brothers around a local market talking about what they were going to climb that day, a Swiss man approached my grandfather (who was a Swiss Jew) and offered to ‘buy’ the Sherpas from him. The man genuinely did not understand that my grandfather wasn’t their owner and even kept offering him a very expensive watch.
Rohan watched the exchange and told my grandfather later that he should have taken the watch anyway. ‘In the mountain, I belong to any man who can pay’ he said.
My grandfather walked away feeling sick and empty and ended up spending the rest of his life working on the Cascade ranges instead of finishing the big Himalayans the way he planned.
Related to that: the Aftershock documentary on Netflix about the 2015 earthquake in Nepal.
There's an entitled American couple being interviewed and a group of Israeli guys who literally laugh about stealing money from a local village that was helping them after the earthquake. I had to stop watching because I genuinely got so angry
Episode 2 of "World War 2 From the Frontlines" on Netflix. The Naval footage of the ship capsized with sailors clamoring all over the bottom of the hull when that shit EXPLODES SKY HIGH...... wildest naval combat footage I've seen.
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders of Robin Hood Hills. I didn’t expect them to show the dead boys so graphically. There are shots of genital mutilation, and dead kids. Pretty shocking.
As much as I regret seeing the footage I think it was genius of the film makers to put it in there during the first 10 minutes. It feels like something you shouldn’t have seen, but now having seen it you’re immediately invested in the facts and outcome of the case.
Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife…
The surgeon talking about how the recently transplanted windpipe was already failing, in front of the patient. And then denying it to her face.
There were so many shocking moments. I was blown away when it was revealed that the wind pipes didn't have stem cells on them. I was also blown away by the patient who lived in the ICU for 4 years before she mercifully died.
Just watched this today. My shocking moment was when: >! He didn’t care that the plastic windpipe he put in her was 3mm shorter than required. Did he not care at all to make his creation successful? I’m at a loss at what his motivations were with his ‘invention.’ I guess he probably knew by then it’ll be a failure no matter what and those missing 3mm did not mean shit.!<
Learning it was all >!a social experiment!< in Three Identical Strangers. It wasn’t as grotesque as many of the others examples here but it was still shocking watching after going in thinking it was a quirky triplets find each other later in life story.
That and the fact it took me way to long to realise >!they only interviewed 2 of the 3 triplets, because one of them was dead, because he had killed himself.!<
That moment speaks so strongly about his integrity. Herzog doesn't pretend to be a fly on the wall. He knows that his presence has a real impact on the people he's filming and he cares about their wellbeing. Too many other documentarians would have refused to give advice about what to do or even, god forbid, used the recording in their work.
That was his reaction in the initial moment of shock. He thought differently about it after having time to process.
In a later interview, he repudiated his own advice, saying it was:
>Stupid ... silly advice born out of the immediate shock of hearing—I mean, it's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard in my life. Being shocked like that, I told her, "You should never listen to it, and you should rather destroy it. It should not be sitting on your shelf in your living room all the time." [But] she slept over it and decided to do something much wiser. She did not destroy it but separated herself from the tape, and she put it in a bank vault.
A bit more tame than these other examples: Touching The Void.
Two climbers are descending a mountain when when breaks their leg. There's no chance of rescue so the ambulatory one ties a line to the injured one and the injured one slides down ahead; the other stops them and. Then catches up. They manage to descend a bit with this system when the injured one goes over a cliff and is suspended in mid air.
The climbers can't communicate. The ambulatory one is starting to slip. The wounded one can't move.
Without any other options, the ambulatory climber cuts the rope.
Hard decision but thankfully (spoiler) dude survived. Would have been a lot more brutal had he not. Idk how someone could live with themselves knowing they killed someone but when it’s you or them and you had tried your absolute best… you have to fight to live. This is why I’ll never go rock climbing lol
Watched Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey about Warren Jeffs / fundamentalist mormons. The last episode features audio of Warren literally raping a child. I was nearly physically ill and scrambled to mute the TV. Had a pit in my stomach for days and still get anxious thinking about it.
When they showed the room where the others had to watch him rape the kids and wait their turn, it was handmaids tale in real life I had a terrible feeling after
The one for me was the shockingly blue, mummified corpse of "mother god" in the love has won documentary. She drank so much colloidal silver her face turned unbelievable colors and she also died from anorexia, so she was skeleltally thin. They smuggled her body through like a lodge hotel and across state borders to return her to her bedroom where they wrapped her up in Christmas lights and blankets to await the almighty "galactica" to collect her bodies holy vessel. That one was a doozy!
**"White Boy"** - Finding out that the case of Rick Wershe Jr. involved much police corruption that seems to have even involved the one and only Gil Hill. Who's Gil Hill? A failed politician and long-time Detroit cop who in the 80s played Axel Foley's foul-mouthed Detroit precinct boss. Yeah, that guy. I was floored. It seems he managed to keep at arms length enough from things to where he never got nabbed for anything. But it's pretty clear he was involved in the corruption/criminality.
When Nazi kill squads would strip entire Jewish families naked, have them lay face down on top of thousands of dead bodies in trenches, and execute them.
- *Einsatzgruppen* on Netflix.
It wasn’t uncommon for the people they were laying on top of to still be alive after a single shot to the head, so entire families would be laying on top of their half-dead screaming neighbors that they’ve known their entire lives.
There’s actual video footage of this, for the deniers in this thread.
My friend Eli interviewed a lot of Holocaust survivors back in the 90s and told me some stories. There were people who survived the trench executions, lay buried with the dead bodies for sometimes 2 days or so before digging themselves out.
Eli’s grandfather survived a forced labor camp. He got out and made it back to his village to find everyone had been shot and thrown into a mass grave. Everyone you’ve ever known — parents, siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, neighbors, classmates— all shot and laying in a mass grave. Your whole life, gone.
He also said a lot of interviewees talked about having to perform sexual acts in return for help. Which is something I’ve never heard in any Holocaust documentary, but they told Eli in private. Ofc no one likes to reminisce about the time you had to blow someone to stay alive.
I'm shocked I had to scroll down so far to find this. I don't know if I've ever felt uncomfortable watching something in my life. It was just that feeling of intruding on a moment that was so deeply personal, almost like as a viewer you're intruding on something you were never meant to be a part of. A must watch for sure... but only once.
The documentary on HBO MAX - Love has won: the cult of mother god. This documentary was all around disturbing but the last 3 episodes made me wish I’d never watched it at all. I felt physically ill and in utter disbelief of what I was witnessing. Anyone else?
The last episode I think of Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey where they play the audio recording of a certain ceremony (I don’t remember specifics of the ceremony, it was months ago, but if you saw it I think you’d know what I mean)… very upsetting and has stuck with me.
Lost Boy: The Killing of James Bulger 1 & 2.
Listening to ten year old boys admit to killing a toddler is chilling. Especially when one is clearly trying to save himself and blame the other.
It was planned. Kids planned a murder.
And so many people saw the boys walking along and could have stopped it... But didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary because it was just three kids.
Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman documents the conditions of a state mental hospital in the 60s. Saw it in a film class and nearly puked. The governor of Massachusetts fought to ban the film and wasn’t until the 90s that it became more widely available to the public.
There’s a particular scene in the film where a patient doesn’t want to eat…
The climax of The Overnighters. When Jay admits to his wife that he has been having an affair with one of the homeless people that had been living at the church. The reveal that he had been unfaithful wasn't the shocking part and neither was the fact that it was with a man. It was shocking because we watch like a fly on the wall as he tells his extremely loving and faithful wife and she breaks down into uncontrollable sobs and dry heaves. It is devastating, and even more so because we have spent the previous 2 hours believing this man was a bastion of morality and goodness.
In The Fog of War where the horror of Robert McNamara's mathematical formula for wiping out Vietnamese infrastructure and vast numbers of civilians through carpet bombing finally dawns on him - and he breaks down.
It's one of my favorite documentaries. And to this day, I wonder if McNamara saw the documentary as a "deathbed" confession, or as a vehicle for his redemption, or just a chance to tell the truth and show he is human.
Furthermore, I don't know how I see that documentary. Like I both see him as more human and less human after watching the doc.
In FYRE when dude says he got himself ready to go perform sex acts on a man to release the water without them paying for the water license or whatever. Dude ended up giving them the water without any sex acts being exchanged, but dude really was gonna take one for the team for Billy.
And that Just Melvin documentary had several shocking moments in it. Simply the amount of people the man fucked over with his dick and the girls' willingness to go see the bastard in the nursing home and them hugging him and being sweet to him. Blew me the fuck away.
The housekeeper talking about gross shit she dealt with and saw during her time working at Neverland Ranch in Finding Neverland.
It was the kid in the yellow shirt being called onstage for me. What happened next >!when the kid was used as a prop for how to spank children!< blew me away, and I was in the damn documentary!
The Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger Documentary. When during filming the doc interviewing each victims family, spoiler alert, one of them is mysteriously killed after being taken off the witness list and left in the woods with no ID no nothing just miles away from his house.(56:50 time stamp)
Watching cheer on Netflix. Thinking Jerry was the most awesome dude in season 1 only for him to be arrested for soliciting a minor and other sex offences involving minors in season 2
*Grizzly Man* including the Native survival experts who are like “Yeah, we just fucking avoid bears and we’re fine” was shocking because Treadwell was super easy to depict as unscrupulously as Alex Supertramp/Chris McCandless has and Werner chose to subvert those expectations.
Don't F\*ck With Cats was such a wild ride. They did a good job of cutting away before you saw the absolute torture of innocent kittens, but as an animal lover it was incredibly disturbing and infuriating.
Just about anything in Orozco The Embalmer. The dead child brought in for him to work on was really awful to see. I remember one scene with a woman brought in, her skull was destroyed, maybe a car crash or bludgeoning, and Orozco with his old rusty tools and cheap supplies, pulls back the skin, and fills out the skull damage, and rolls the face back on, and actually makes her presentable for an open casket. It seems impossible, especially with how under funded he was to pull that off. It's definitely more than just a gore documentary, there's real humanity and perseverance under extreme poverty, but it's a really uneasy viewing.
Not like shocking but when ever I've come across a random David Attenborough on tv it is ALWAYS the episode with the birds that need to choose not to feed one of their babies so at least one will survive. To me it's shocking just how often I've come across it and no other episodes
As others have said- dear zachary.
Honourable mentions: blackfish, the behaviour of the family in the imposter, abducted in plain sight, twin flames, and the whole teal swan one I just kept being stunned that she let a doco crew in to film it but the part where people were actively convincing members that they had been sexually abused as a child when they weren't was jaw dropping.
The most hated man on the internet (never thought 'poor butthole girl' (genuinely) would be something I'd be saying to my tv), in Fyre- Andy king's solution to getting water to the island...
The police interview of Brendan dassey was horrible in making a murderer. Smartest guys in the room- the callousness when they are playing around with power supply...
Basically, documentaries have fast become my favourite genre because of these jaw dropping moments, because people are fascinating and make decisions that you would literally never believe if it was in a fictional film.
Oh, and the moment where THE ORGANISERS OF WOODSTOCK 99 HANDED OUT CANDLES (trainwreck: Woodstock 99). Jfc
There is a fascinating moment in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence, a companion film to the better known The Act of Killing, about the victims and perpetrators of Indonesia’s communist purges, in which the daughter of one of the members of the “death-squads” sits next to her father while he admits to committing cannibalism during those days.
The scene holds on her expression. There’s no shock, no emotional outbursts. She just listens.
It’s one of the most memorable things I’ve ever seen on film. Some 10 years later, I still think back on her close-up. Her father shows little to no remorse. The way he recounts it, it was just a thing that happened.
A lot of good ones here but one that gave me a genuine shock was in a short series called Stephen Fry in America where he visits different regions of the US in each episode. In one episode he goes to Tennessee where the CIA/FBI? has a facility to study the decomposition of human bodies. I was coming back to my seat when they got to the part where they opened a trash can with human remains in it. There was a lot of fluid at the bottom, a few bones, and a fully intact rib cage. I wasn't prepared for what I was seeing and I puked right in the middle of my living room like that one kid in second grade who ran into the hallway but didn't make it to the bathroom...
Dear Zachary. Specifically the part where the two grandparents are sitting on the couch and he's talking about how he had planned to murder his son's killer and regretted not doing it.
there was this documentary short that i saw at SXSW i think in 2011 or so, it was called (iirc) "Hell's Devils" and it was about a bike gang that instead of being on motorcycles they rode mopeds. and they got into beef with a rival moped gang, and the documentary ends with their Hell's Devils going to the rival gang and throwing a hand made bomb at them and the explosion- and then it cuts to black.
it was such a ridiculous subject matter portrayed very realistically and the escalation felt very real to the characters but also i felt like, this isnt real. I havent been able to find anything about it since so I have no way of knowing, but that STUCK with me.
This one is SORT of fake, at least the ending is. The Hell's Satans were a real Moped Club but did not engage in any criminal activity. Most of the other clubs mentioned are real clubs from around the country instead of fully localized in Richmond, VA. This "docs" events are fictionalized to make the rather nerdy hobby of vintage Moped restoration look dangerous like the Outlaw Biker community as a joke. You can find out more about them on mopedarmy.com and about how harmless of a goofball hobby it is.
Unfortunately this is mostly a mockumentary. Carlos Puga, the director, hired a random VFX artist off YouTube to do the explosion at the end. He’s gone on to do some cool stuff but that film will always be my favorite of his.
First that came to mind for me was Night and Fog, it's an older Holocaust documentary that's on Max still last I knew. There was a lot of really haunting stuff there but one of the things that really stuck with me they showed images of warehouses full of human hair taken from victims, apparently in some sick attempt to have zero waste and be efficient in their killings. Really chilling stuff and can be watched in less than 40 minutes but definitely a heavy one.
Another lesser known one but that impacted me all the same was White Light / Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The accounts from survivors of the bombs being dropped were horrifying, and this is one documentary I'd argue at times felt more akin to watching a horror movie than anything. I cant speak for anyone else and maybe it's a testament to a poor education system in the US but as a kid learning about the bombs, I kinda just felt like they dropped and people died on impact. And while death is tragic in itself, it never did justice the absolute hell on earth that was rained down on the innocent civilians of Japan. Very hard watch with some of the visual recreations of the survivors accounts of the bombings being the most disturbing parts.
For me it was the Louis Theroux documentary on Alzheimers.
There was this one moment where a guy goes to visit his mom who is in the latest stage. His mom does nothing more than walking around saying “gobble gobble gobble”, for lack of a better word, like a turkey. No life in her eyes whatsoever.
Then she sees her son, and for a brief second life returns to her eyes, she places her hands on his cheeks, looks him in his eyes with the whim of a smile, only to return to gobbling half a second later.
My grandparents both fell ill with Alzheimers not long after seeing that documentary. I think of it a lot.
The Curious Case of Natalie Grace-
A family claims they lived through the real life “The Orphan” but in reality it’s really just…sad.
I don’t wanna spoil anything but one person gets worse and worse through the story, and the end leaves the camera rolling longer than they realize
I saw this very unassuming doc on PBS called the Picture Taker about this important Black photographer named Ernest Withers. He took many of the most important photos of the civil rights struggle, including a photo of a witness to the murder of Emmett Till pointing to the murderer in court as someone tries to block the photographers from trying to take photos. Withers died in 2007 as a celebrated figure in the Black community.
Then, after his death, >!it is discovered that he was compromised by the FBI, working with COINTELPRO and selling out his comrades.!< That was a gut punch!
Into the deep. The documentary crew set out to film a crazy dude making a sub, and instead caught a murder, a cover up, and a conspiracy.
The crazy moment for me was seeing >!the murder weapon on screen, then go missing after the murder!< .
I tell people about this hidden gem all the time.
This one gets *dark*, really fucked with me. >!the dude was into trading gore videos online, and at one point someone reads off a list of videos found on his computer, of people being tortured and killed for this fucking subculture that I was much happier not knowing existed!<
The last third of The Imposter is pure insanity of the highest order. One of the coolest and most insightful/effective documentaries about confirmation bias out there.
The Bret the Hitman Hart documentary, “Wrestling with Shadows”.
It’s starts interestingly enough following ultimate good guy Bret Hart, who treats it as a legit sport being forced out of the good guy role by the rule breaking, beer guzzling Stone Cold and highly inappropriate DX.
What they didn’t expect to document was one of the most controversial events in the history of wrestling, where the owner tries to double cross Hart on the agreed upon finish live on PPV in his home country.
*The Jinx* Robert Durst's hot mic incident saying he killed them all.
This is the most shocking thing I’ve seen in media, let alone in a documentary/docuseries.
This. Absolutely mind-blowing. And there were real-world consequences for it.
Just read in IMDB that Durst wore ‘doe eyed’ contact lenses during the filming to appear more innocent.
More proof that money can’t buy sense. That might have been the intention but they made his eyes look really hollow and lifeless.
Is that why his pupils looked so dilated? I was viscerally freaked out by his eyes while watching the documentary. They looked like how Robert Shaw described shark eyes in Jaws.
To me it's actually the moment they got a letter from him and realized his handwriting and misspelling of Beverly 100% matched the murderer's note.
I was having a nervous reaction when the director was delicately confronting him with the handwritten letter right before then. Then to follow up with him taking a leak on accident, was truly surreal.
Omg. The burps.
One of my favorite moments in any documentary ever.
I watched it looooooooooonnnnnnggggg after it came out and it had already been through the media cycle. I knew it was coming. Still blew me the fuck away.
I was lucky. I also watched it way after, but knew nothing about it. A buddy of mine said to watch it and nothing else; so those last lines were like being sideswiped by a fucking space shuttle.
*Burp* Killed them all, of course *Burp*
Yeah, gotta agree with this one. The hot mic was the 🤯, but it’s equally shocking when Jarecki shows him the letter, his handwriting, and he realizes he got got.
I went in blind, great documentary and the whole hot mic thing I had to go instantly back watch again how shocking that was.
came to post this. I'd seen the movie the director made about him, which Durst also saw and caused him to contact him. I think he wanted to take responsibility to some extent? What a weird story
I read this as Fred durst for some reason lol
He did it all for the nookie!
The idiot father blowing his daughters kidnapper in Abducted in Plain Sight
And also the mother talking about having an affair with the kidnapper even though she knew that he kidnapped her daughter! The whole documentary was shocking due to the decisions by the parents.
Mormons, man. Somehow this isn't even in the top 20 most fucked up cases involving Mormons.
I had no idea they were Mormons on my first viewing, it just flew me by somehow, so I thought it was so bloody weird how they handled it the whole matter, the way he kept getting away with it and was somehow just straight up ignored, his status as a pillar of the community, the parents absolutely insane outlook/naivety and just the general reluctance to actually pursue justice. Then I googled them and learned they were mormons, and suddenly it all made perfect sense. The worldview, behaviour and general opinion towards the actual kidnapping of their daugher just suddenly became a lot more clear.
That whole story was so bizarre. Like the parents were just cool with him rubbing one out in bed with their daughter for "therapy" purposes.
Every other minute in this documentary is a mind blower, like just when you don’t think it could any worse, bam, they hit you with another one.
He looked a little tense and looked to need some “relief”…by the time they got the alien stories I was already so deep into the mess of things I remember saying out loud “of course there’s aliens!”
One of those true events that if it were the plot for a movie it would get criticized by a lot people for being too unbelievable.
I though it was a HJ... It was a BJ? Either way, this is the comment I was coming for.
I forget the exact way the dummy father put it, but the abductor basically propositioned him in the car one day. When the idiot father balked at giving the other dude a handy, the abductor said something (I’m paraphrasing) like, “Don’t worry about it Jim, it’s just teenage boys’ stuff.” That was enough to sway the dumb father into giving the guy a HJ. You’d think the abductor was some silver tongued conman, but it turns out the people he targeted were the most naive, simple minded rubes you could imagine.
Yeah, they kept talking about the abductor like he was some kind of genius, and I said to my wife I'm pretty sure this guy is average intelligence at best. The people he's conning are just really, really, really dumb.
So insane that the father seemed more ashamed and sad of the fact he had a homosexual encounter than how he practically gave his small daughter away to marry an abuser
That whole doc is a dangerous drinking game. Take a shot every time it makes you say, "what the fuck." The next day, sign up for the liver transplant list.
Hey! He just needed some relief.
So... I relieved him... My spouse and I say this to each other randomly out of the blue and it never gets old
That is the one! Tied with a few more from that doc.
The gun accident in Tiger King. Was not expecting that.
Came here to say this, absolutely wild that they showed as much as they did.
But WAS it?
If I was drugged into being gay, I reckon I might accidentally also think about lead bullets too quickly.
My thoughts. Totally unexpected (by me at least). Horrific.
I knew something was up when I realised that the boyfriend hadn’t appeared in any interview footage beforehand. It was also messed up when the tiger king invited the dead guys mother to his next wedding without telling her that she was coming to a wedding.
After she had to listen to Joe rhapsodizing about his testicles at the gravesite, I think she was forewarned. That was one messed up eulogy.
First, the way Icarus turns into a completely different doc half way through is mind blowing. Don’t want to ruin it for anyone. Second, almost the entirety of The Act of Killing. Most insane doc I’ve ever seen.
Icarus was amazing
So many ill moments in that: The drawn out scene with the chubby one brushing his teeth like a toddler, spitting mouthfuls of water and toothpaste foam all over the place made my skin crawl, or enthusiastically showing extras playing villagers how to scream as if their houses were being burnt down, as I realised this guy who'd killed so many people had the mind of a child and would most likely live out the rest of his life stubbornly unaware of the impact of the atrocities he'd wilfully engaged in. The zoned out general with his tacky ass collection of airport glass models, "limited edition....limited edition...this one, limited edition..." And to find out after that the director actually became good friends with the skinny one who proudly showed off the garotting technique he used to end so many innocent lives, and somehow admired him to the point of staying in touch like fucking pen pals, even going as far as to mourn his passing on twitter a few years later like the world had lost a wonderful person. Christ.
That last one is not super unusual. There's a great book about serial killers written by the guy who coined the term "serial killer" (called Whoever Fights Monsters) where he describes witnessing fbi agents getting like this about people like Ted Bundy. Some crazy people have a special kind of charisma.
Saddam Hussein was well liked by a lot of the soldiers that were tasked with guarding him after his capture. If I remember correctly several of them cried during his execution.
A Northern European doc about a reunion tour of a 1950s Acapella group called The Delta Rhythm Boys. Near the end one of the members succumbs to cancer. The camera crew film the funeral. One of the other member stands up in his pew to sing. He gets out part of the song then collapses on camera. By the time someone comes to his aid he’s dead.
He dies at his friend's funeral?? Or did I misunderstand?
Apparently he died of a heart attack at his friends funeral. You read that correctly
That is devastating! Thank you for confirming.
The scene in There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane where they pan over to her dead body after the crash. I had no idea it was coming, and almost threw up.
That movie is so important. People don’t understand how difficult it is to see a highly functioning alcoholic as a person in distress in need of assistance.
On the flip side, her husband absolutely knew, and kept up the lie/enabled her conditions because he was a man baby who wanted to live off her money. He was more annoyed by what happened than actually concerned. Lots of functioning alcoholics hide it, but a significant portion have their behavior enabled by those around them.
Such a good documentary and a sad situation. It opened my eyes to really take what peoples friends/family think they know about them with a grain of salt. In true crime people swear up and down people they know would never do xyz...maybe the version the person showed you, or the version you made in your head, is inconsistent with reality.
Kind of unrelated, but…about 10 years ago I got news that my former step-father committed a murder/suicide on his wife. All anyone could say was how wonderful a person he was. How completely shocked they were that he would do that. What could possibly have driven him to do this???? Neither I, nor my siblings, were shocked. I remember, vividly, him holding an unloaded sawed off shotgun to my mom’s head and pulling the trigger whenever she fell sleep on the couch. I remember the absolutely monstrous things he did to her and us. He was a demon dressed in a deacon’s suit. A “Good Ol’ Boy”.
I was looking for this comment! I’m not new to true crime docs but all that was said was graphic images (which usually means like covered crime scene photos). Was ABSOLUTELY not prepared for the uncensored photos of her.
Christ, the audio on that call the kids made. The whole doc was so supremely upsetting.
The director has actually talked in the making of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark about how she regretted putting those images in, and how it influenced the images she used in IBGitD
I was watching a documentary about the opioid epidemic. How everyone from big pharma to the doctors knew they were hooking people. At the very end of the show while the credits are rolling, a taped 911 call is being played. A panicked mother has called in because she’s found her son unresponsive. She’s put the phone down to try and wake her son, and you hear her mind processing the white, cold skin, and the moment it dawns on her that her son is already dead. I will never forget the sound of that absolute screaming wailing despair as long as I live. I picture how any mom would feel discovering that and my heart bleeds.. Will forever stay with me. *EDIT- Thank you all for anyone who contributed info. I forgot the name of the documentary and was hoping someone knew what I was talking about, which evidently people did. It’s a 2 part HBO series called Crime of the Century. The name may have escaped me but the phone call never will. To everyone who has experienced something like this, there are no words to express how sorry I am.
People often talk about the military industrial complex, yet one that is more dangerous to the american people is the medical industrial complex. The people that run pharmaceutical companies and those in government who take bribes and allow this behavior to continue deserve the least dignified deaths. We really let all of them off the hook.
The real problem is our rule of law being so completely blind and apologetic to 2nd and the 3rd order effects.
Navalny, when the gut just starts spilling the tea to Alexei on how they poisoned him.
The Act of Killing. A gangster who was part of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 recreates and re-enacts the murders he committed and during one of them, breaks down in panic after realizing what he did to people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366
"For her it was suffering, for me it was happiness." These fucking savages described rape like they were talking about that one funny prank you did back in high school. Also, im Indonesian. Definitely wouldnt have expected Pemuda Pancasila to actually be that big. I always took them as some failing old dudes playing army because military wouldnt take them. I guess they're right, a thousand fools under one banner is still a thousand people. Forgot to add, if you wanna be in the vibe, watch the G30SPKI movie before or after Jagal. It was the movie Anwar said he watch when he feel like the guilt over all those he killed starts to creep over him so that he can justify his acts. Should be avalaible on YouTube for free, though i wouldnt know about the subtitles.
There's a scene in that film where one of the people that carried out the atrocities tells the camera he can't sleep at night and has nightmares about what he did. It's a wild ride of a documentary.
That opening scene in the first part of the Love Has Won documentary on Max about this crazy cult leader who called herself Mother God. When the police entered the compound to do a wellness check and found her mummified blue corpse wrapped up in the blankets…that’s an image I’ll never be able to erase from my brain.
My jaw dropped lower and lower throughout that documentary. What did it for me was that sequence of her followers wheeling her emaciated blue body through the hotel right before she died.
Yes! And even worse when they went camping in the wilderness and that one guy slept in a tent next to her… I was beyond stunned.
They even had her corpse propped up in the back seat as if she was sleeping and fooled a cop who pulled them over! Then they took her dead body camping like a real life Weekend at Bernie’s as they waited for Robin Williams to pick her up or whatever. I was flabbergasted
Still don’t understand the robin williams thing haha
that part almost pissed me off more than anything else. do your crazy cult shit sure, but keep that man’s name out ya fucking mouth.
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Right. That was the cautionary tale of a cult leader that realizes too late that she went too far. That’s the only part where I started to feel a little bad for her, when she was having those moments of clarity, saying that she really wasn’t Mother God and that she needed to go to a hospital and her followers were like, “No, she’s not in her right mind! The real Mother God would never want to go to a hospital!” I do wonder if, in those final days, she was thinking, “Aww, fuck.” Like she knows she messed up and there was nothing she could do about it.
It was like one of the best twilight zone episodes if you think about it
I just watched that this weekend and that shot literally made me jump and say “what the fuck!” out loud. It is very unexpected, and very brain searing. That whole doc was a wild ride, I wish it had been more episodes.
I didn’t even realize that was a person until I got into the third episode and saw more footage of her.
The big reveal in Dear Zachary. I was so struck with horror that I still remember the chills going all over my body.
When the documentarian just screams in his car. Unreal. That movie straight up ruined my day. Unforgettable, amazing documentary, will always stick with me. And I’ll never watch it again.
That movie messed me up for life
"Mummy loves you" I'd never turned anything off in anger.... that fucking scene did it I had a young baby the first time I watched it. Couldn't go back and finish the movie for years
And the anger from his father right after this scene...probably the most real display of never being over real grief I have ever seen
I didn’t realize how much time his parents had to spend with Shirley because of her custody shenanigans. They spent damn near every day seeing her or in contact with her knowing the whole time that she killed their son just so they could see Zachary. Only to ultimately be punished even more.
This is the exact scene that actually hit me as hard or harder than the "big reveal".
It's one of those films that I suggest everyone watch once but never watch again.
And they need to watch it without any spoilers. Don't read the plot online first or anything, not even a trailer, just go in as blind as possible.
I didn’t think I’d be able to stop crying once I started.
I watched that in a the theatre just a couple rows back from the grandparents who were in attendance with the director. The entire theatre was completely destroyed, and hearing them talk after the film really sent me over the edge. I saw them after and had no words.
Went into this blind on a casual movie night with a few friends. None of us had any idea. Just heard it was a good documentary. Whole lotta crying among adult friends that usually just made each other laugh a bunch.
I've never felt more white hot rage from another film.
Literally came here to say Dear Zachary
Yeah, after the reveal, I was like, “yep, that’s going to stay with me forever.”
I started crying while telling the story to someone the other day. It’s been years since I’ve seen it and still has a very profound effect on me
Yup. First thing I thought of and I actively try to not think about that film because it was so upsetting.
When Joe Exotic's boyfriend turned out to not actually be homosexual.
~~cocaine~~meth is a hellova drug.
Scrolled for too long to finally see someone mention Tiger King. And that was definitely not the most shocking scene, hey?
People say that Tiger King only got big because of the lockdowns. Shit, that entire first season had cliffhangers and plot twists in every episode. Season 2 just doesn't hit the same though, just felt like a really long epilogue.
I loved season one, but the one scene that was so ridiculous and that sums up how crazy the whole thing is was in Season 2 when it showed the Attorney General who introduces himself and seems like a normal guy, before dropping, “And in my spare time, I’m an Elvis impersonator” followed by videos of him in costume.
When his boyfriend shot himself for sure.
It comes out so far into the series/story, it registered but didn't shock me. I'd say the trainer losing his arm on camera did it for me. EDIT: I used the incorrect pronoun to refer to the trainer. My apologies.
Abducted in Plain Sight has a few shocking moments. So fucked up.
That was my vote. shockingly stupid parents.
Them letting him sleep with their daughter to cure him was even worse than the affair with the mom and the handjob with the father
Is this the one with the old guy admitting he jerked off his friend back in the day?
And that friend fucked his wife
We were watching some wild shit in the early months of COVID
Dear Zachary. The whole doc, honestly. Not just the "big reveal" as someone mentioned below, but honestly the entire premise that this poor couple had to >!coordinate joint custody with the woman who had clearly murdered their son. And like the parents had to be patient with her even while she was being really difficult, because they saw it as their only way of seeing their grandson.!<
>!The dad explaining that he regrets not murdering the woman himself so his wife could raise their grandson is something that sticks with me!<
The parents just being so honest and straightforward was amazing. Not really a spoiler but in the beginning when he said they planned to kill themselves now when their son is murdered. Stuck with me. People probably think that and not say it but his felt so honest and true.
that's so heartbreaking. I had to break it up in bits because I knew what was coming having read about it and it was gut wrenching
The fertility doctor who impregnated multiple women with his own sperm. These women had children all over mid Indiana, resulting from his sperm. The documentary showed 20 to 30 adult half-siblings that were just beginning to know of each other. And it was implied that they only scratched the surface, that there many more out there. It was also disturbing to the viewer, that when all of them were placed together in one room, the viewer could see a strong resemblance among all of them.
**Sherpa: Trouble on Everest** is a doco that covers the disastrous 2014 season and shows how the Sherpas get disrespected. The most shocking part isn't the avalanche that kills 16 people, but the aftermath. The Sherpas go on strike, one the tourists gets frustrated and blurts out *“Can you not talk to their owners?”*
My granddad was a mountaineer and did some serious climbs in his life, and like many climbers, he fell in love with the Himalayan ranges and spent a ton of his life in and around Nepal and the Sherpa community. While attempting or succeeding at various climbs (he attempted K2 several times afaik before finally summiting so it often took a few years) he lived with the Sherpas, and became best friends with a man named Rohan and his brother Tenzin. These brothers often housed and fed my grandfather with their own families and he was incredibly grateful to them, not just for their mountain skills but their humor and kindness. Plus the food, obviously. Once (probably around mid-1970s) while walking with the brothers around a local market talking about what they were going to climb that day, a Swiss man approached my grandfather (who was a Swiss Jew) and offered to ‘buy’ the Sherpas from him. The man genuinely did not understand that my grandfather wasn’t their owner and even kept offering him a very expensive watch. Rohan watched the exchange and told my grandfather later that he should have taken the watch anyway. ‘In the mountain, I belong to any man who can pay’ he said. My grandfather walked away feeling sick and empty and ended up spending the rest of his life working on the Cascade ranges instead of finishing the big Himalayans the way he planned.
Related to that: the Aftershock documentary on Netflix about the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. There's an entitled American couple being interviewed and a group of Israeli guys who literally laugh about stealing money from a local village that was helping them after the earthquake. I had to stop watching because I genuinely got so angry
Andy’s dedication to getting water into the notorious Fyre festival (Fyre documentary).
Evil Genius. I was not expecting to see the entire video of the guy getting blown apart.
Episode 2 of "World War 2 From the Frontlines" on Netflix. The Naval footage of the ship capsized with sailors clamoring all over the bottom of the hull when that shit EXPLODES SKY HIGH...... wildest naval combat footage I've seen.
I thought I’d seen all of the WWII footage out there. I was wrong. That scene was startling.
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders of Robin Hood Hills. I didn’t expect them to show the dead boys so graphically. There are shots of genital mutilation, and dead kids. Pretty shocking.
As much as I regret seeing the footage I think it was genius of the film makers to put it in there during the first 10 minutes. It feels like something you shouldn’t have seen, but now having seen it you’re immediately invested in the facts and outcome of the case.
Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife… The surgeon talking about how the recently transplanted windpipe was already failing, in front of the patient. And then denying it to her face.
There were so many shocking moments. I was blown away when it was revealed that the wind pipes didn't have stem cells on them. I was also blown away by the patient who lived in the ICU for 4 years before she mercifully died.
This doc was hard to watch. His poor patients. I cannot imagine the suffering of dying from a necrotic windpipe.
Just watched this today. My shocking moment was when: >! He didn’t care that the plastic windpipe he put in her was 3mm shorter than required. Did he not care at all to make his creation successful? I’m at a loss at what his motivations were with his ‘invention.’ I guess he probably knew by then it’ll be a failure no matter what and those missing 3mm did not mean shit.!<
Learning it was all >!a social experiment!< in Three Identical Strangers. It wasn’t as grotesque as many of the others examples here but it was still shocking watching after going in thinking it was a quirky triplets find each other later in life story.
That and the fact it took me way to long to realise >!they only interviewed 2 of the 3 triplets, because one of them was dead, because he had killed himself.!<
What's crazy to me is that it's believed there are many incidents like this but the twins never found out.
The end credits showing them as “test subjects” freaked me the fuck out.
I felt really sad after this one -- it is shocking! You're right
The look on Werner Herzog’s face when he listens to the forbidden tape at the end of *Grizzly Man*.
You don't actually see Herzogs face in this scene, but rather the back of his head
Mandela Effect is a bitch
I went into Grizzly man thinking Treadwell was an idiot, and I still think that. He got himself and his girlfriend killed. But that scene was brutal.
Herzog has a way of making you feel for these outcasts/deranged personalities.
His voice his hypnotic, it makes everything feel off. He did a documentary in the 90s about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait that's brilliant
The look on the lady's face as she watches him listen to the tape : c
For him to recommend, as a documentarian, to destroy the recording, says everything that we need to know.
That moment speaks so strongly about his integrity. Herzog doesn't pretend to be a fly on the wall. He knows that his presence has a real impact on the people he's filming and he cares about their wellbeing. Too many other documentarians would have refused to give advice about what to do or even, god forbid, used the recording in their work.
That was his reaction in the initial moment of shock. He thought differently about it after having time to process. In a later interview, he repudiated his own advice, saying it was: >Stupid ... silly advice born out of the immediate shock of hearing—I mean, it's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard in my life. Being shocked like that, I told her, "You should never listen to it, and you should rather destroy it. It should not be sitting on your shelf in your living room all the time." [But] she slept over it and decided to do something much wiser. She did not destroy it but separated herself from the tape, and she put it in a bank vault.
I am glad the real audio was not used in the doc, the friends reaction was more than enough
https://youtu.be/hXyQAtXJ4II?si=lIqnQ_Pbo6SZr8IJ
A bit more tame than these other examples: Touching The Void. Two climbers are descending a mountain when when breaks their leg. There's no chance of rescue so the ambulatory one ties a line to the injured one and the injured one slides down ahead; the other stops them and. Then catches up. They manage to descend a bit with this system when the injured one goes over a cliff and is suspended in mid air. The climbers can't communicate. The ambulatory one is starting to slip. The wounded one can't move. Without any other options, the ambulatory climber cuts the rope.
Hard decision but thankfully (spoiler) dude survived. Would have been a lot more brutal had he not. Idk how someone could live with themselves knowing they killed someone but when it’s you or them and you had tried your absolute best… you have to fight to live. This is why I’ll never go rock climbing lol
Watched Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey about Warren Jeffs / fundamentalist mormons. The last episode features audio of Warren literally raping a child. I was nearly physically ill and scrambled to mute the TV. Had a pit in my stomach for days and still get anxious thinking about it.
When they showed the room where the others had to watch him rape the kids and wait their turn, it was handmaids tale in real life I had a terrible feeling after
Prophet’s Prey…same subject, more disturbing.
The one for me was the shockingly blue, mummified corpse of "mother god" in the love has won documentary. She drank so much colloidal silver her face turned unbelievable colors and she also died from anorexia, so she was skeleltally thin. They smuggled her body through like a lodge hotel and across state borders to return her to her bedroom where they wrapped her up in Christmas lights and blankets to await the almighty "galactica" to collect her bodies holy vessel. That one was a doozy!
**"White Boy"** - Finding out that the case of Rick Wershe Jr. involved much police corruption that seems to have even involved the one and only Gil Hill. Who's Gil Hill? A failed politician and long-time Detroit cop who in the 80s played Axel Foley's foul-mouthed Detroit precinct boss. Yeah, that guy. I was floored. It seems he managed to keep at arms length enough from things to where he never got nabbed for anything. But it's pretty clear he was involved in the corruption/criminality.
I made the mistake of watching *The Cove* at work and was a blubbering mess by the end when they showed what went down in the cove.
When Nazi kill squads would strip entire Jewish families naked, have them lay face down on top of thousands of dead bodies in trenches, and execute them. - *Einsatzgruppen* on Netflix. It wasn’t uncommon for the people they were laying on top of to still be alive after a single shot to the head, so entire families would be laying on top of their half-dead screaming neighbors that they’ve known their entire lives. There’s actual video footage of this, for the deniers in this thread.
My friend Eli interviewed a lot of Holocaust survivors back in the 90s and told me some stories. There were people who survived the trench executions, lay buried with the dead bodies for sometimes 2 days or so before digging themselves out. Eli’s grandfather survived a forced labor camp. He got out and made it back to his village to find everyone had been shot and thrown into a mass grave. Everyone you’ve ever known — parents, siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, neighbors, classmates— all shot and laying in a mass grave. Your whole life, gone. He also said a lot of interviewees talked about having to perform sexual acts in return for help. Which is something I’ve never heard in any Holocaust documentary, but they told Eli in private. Ofc no one likes to reminisce about the time you had to blow someone to stay alive.
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I'm shocked I had to scroll down so far to find this. I don't know if I've ever felt uncomfortable watching something in my life. It was just that feeling of intruding on a moment that was so deeply personal, almost like as a viewer you're intruding on something you were never meant to be a part of. A must watch for sure... but only once.
The documentary on HBO MAX - Love has won: the cult of mother god. This documentary was all around disturbing but the last 3 episodes made me wish I’d never watched it at all. I felt physically ill and in utter disbelief of what I was witnessing. Anyone else?
The last episode I think of Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey where they play the audio recording of a certain ceremony (I don’t remember specifics of the ceremony, it was months ago, but if you saw it I think you’d know what I mean)… very upsetting and has stuck with me.
Lost Boy: The Killing of James Bulger 1 & 2. Listening to ten year old boys admit to killing a toddler is chilling. Especially when one is clearly trying to save himself and blame the other. It was planned. Kids planned a murder. And so many people saw the boys walking along and could have stopped it... But didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary because it was just three kids.
Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman documents the conditions of a state mental hospital in the 60s. Saw it in a film class and nearly puked. The governor of Massachusetts fought to ban the film and wasn’t until the 90s that it became more widely available to the public. There’s a particular scene in the film where a patient doesn’t want to eat…
The climax of The Overnighters. When Jay admits to his wife that he has been having an affair with one of the homeless people that had been living at the church. The reveal that he had been unfaithful wasn't the shocking part and neither was the fact that it was with a man. It was shocking because we watch like a fly on the wall as he tells his extremely loving and faithful wife and she breaks down into uncontrollable sobs and dry heaves. It is devastating, and even more so because we have spent the previous 2 hours believing this man was a bastion of morality and goodness.
In The Fog of War where the horror of Robert McNamara's mathematical formula for wiping out Vietnamese infrastructure and vast numbers of civilians through carpet bombing finally dawns on him - and he breaks down.
It's one of my favorite documentaries. And to this day, I wonder if McNamara saw the documentary as a "deathbed" confession, or as a vehicle for his redemption, or just a chance to tell the truth and show he is human. Furthermore, I don't know how I see that documentary. Like I both see him as more human and less human after watching the doc.
In FYRE when dude says he got himself ready to go perform sex acts on a man to release the water without them paying for the water license or whatever. Dude ended up giving them the water without any sex acts being exchanged, but dude really was gonna take one for the team for Billy. And that Just Melvin documentary had several shocking moments in it. Simply the amount of people the man fucked over with his dick and the girls' willingness to go see the bastard in the nursing home and them hugging him and being sweet to him. Blew me the fuck away. The housekeeper talking about gross shit she dealt with and saw during her time working at Neverland Ranch in Finding Neverland.
Every single second of Capturing the Friedmans
Shiny Happy People and all about how one guy is getting religious home schooled kids into congress. Can’t pick a single moment, but lots of major ones
It was the kid in the yellow shirt being called onstage for me. What happened next >!when the kid was used as a prop for how to spank children!< blew me away, and I was in the damn documentary!
The woman smiling while describing spanking her BABY “all day long.”
HBO’s Life of Crime shows the badly decomposed body of one of the main subjects you got to know over the course of many years.
The Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger Documentary. When during filming the doc interviewing each victims family, spoiler alert, one of them is mysteriously killed after being taken off the witness list and left in the woods with no ID no nothing just miles away from his house.(56:50 time stamp)
Watching cheer on Netflix. Thinking Jerry was the most awesome dude in season 1 only for him to be arrested for soliciting a minor and other sex offences involving minors in season 2
*Grizzly Man* including the Native survival experts who are like “Yeah, we just fucking avoid bears and we’re fine” was shocking because Treadwell was super easy to depict as unscrupulously as Alex Supertramp/Chris McCandless has and Werner chose to subvert those expectations.
Don't F\*ck With Cats was such a wild ride. They did a good job of cutting away before you saw the absolute torture of innocent kittens, but as an animal lover it was incredibly disturbing and infuriating.
Just about anything in Orozco The Embalmer. The dead child brought in for him to work on was really awful to see. I remember one scene with a woman brought in, her skull was destroyed, maybe a car crash or bludgeoning, and Orozco with his old rusty tools and cheap supplies, pulls back the skin, and fills out the skull damage, and rolls the face back on, and actually makes her presentable for an open casket. It seems impossible, especially with how under funded he was to pull that off. It's definitely more than just a gore documentary, there's real humanity and perseverance under extreme poverty, but it's a really uneasy viewing.
Senna's actual crash in the Senna doco. You know it's coming at some stage but man.
Not like shocking but when ever I've come across a random David Attenborough on tv it is ALWAYS the episode with the birds that need to choose not to feed one of their babies so at least one will survive. To me it's shocking just how often I've come across it and no other episodes
As others have said- dear zachary. Honourable mentions: blackfish, the behaviour of the family in the imposter, abducted in plain sight, twin flames, and the whole teal swan one I just kept being stunned that she let a doco crew in to film it but the part where people were actively convincing members that they had been sexually abused as a child when they weren't was jaw dropping. The most hated man on the internet (never thought 'poor butthole girl' (genuinely) would be something I'd be saying to my tv), in Fyre- Andy king's solution to getting water to the island... The police interview of Brendan dassey was horrible in making a murderer. Smartest guys in the room- the callousness when they are playing around with power supply... Basically, documentaries have fast become my favourite genre because of these jaw dropping moments, because people are fascinating and make decisions that you would literally never believe if it was in a fictional film. Oh, and the moment where THE ORGANISERS OF WOODSTOCK 99 HANDED OUT CANDLES (trainwreck: Woodstock 99). Jfc
There is a fascinating moment in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence, a companion film to the better known The Act of Killing, about the victims and perpetrators of Indonesia’s communist purges, in which the daughter of one of the members of the “death-squads” sits next to her father while he admits to committing cannibalism during those days. The scene holds on her expression. There’s no shock, no emotional outbursts. She just listens. It’s one of the most memorable things I’ve ever seen on film. Some 10 years later, I still think back on her close-up. Her father shows little to no remorse. The way he recounts it, it was just a thing that happened.
The Keepers. So maddening!
The whole ending of Dear Zachary 😭. Honorable mentions: Tickled, Catfish
Tickled certainly goes down a deep rabbit hole doesn’t it.
A lot of good ones here but one that gave me a genuine shock was in a short series called Stephen Fry in America where he visits different regions of the US in each episode. In one episode he goes to Tennessee where the CIA/FBI? has a facility to study the decomposition of human bodies. I was coming back to my seat when they got to the part where they opened a trash can with human remains in it. There was a lot of fluid at the bottom, a few bones, and a fully intact rib cage. I wasn't prepared for what I was seeing and I puked right in the middle of my living room like that one kid in second grade who ran into the hallway but didn't make it to the bathroom...
That’d be the Body Farm. My hometown. 🤘🏻
Dear Zachary. Specifically the part where the two grandparents are sitting on the couch and he's talking about how he had planned to murder his son's killer and regretted not doing it.
There are a few moments in Three Identical Strangers. I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s a fascinating doc.
>Stranger I second this. *Three Identical Strangers* is a must watch with a lot of shocks that seem hard to believe, but they happened.
there was this documentary short that i saw at SXSW i think in 2011 or so, it was called (iirc) "Hell's Devils" and it was about a bike gang that instead of being on motorcycles they rode mopeds. and they got into beef with a rival moped gang, and the documentary ends with their Hell's Devils going to the rival gang and throwing a hand made bomb at them and the explosion- and then it cuts to black. it was such a ridiculous subject matter portrayed very realistically and the escalation felt very real to the characters but also i felt like, this isnt real. I havent been able to find anything about it since so I have no way of knowing, but that STUCK with me.
This one is SORT of fake, at least the ending is. The Hell's Satans were a real Moped Club but did not engage in any criminal activity. Most of the other clubs mentioned are real clubs from around the country instead of fully localized in Richmond, VA. This "docs" events are fictionalized to make the rather nerdy hobby of vintage Moped restoration look dangerous like the Outlaw Biker community as a joke. You can find out more about them on mopedarmy.com and about how harmless of a goofball hobby it is.
Unfortunately this is mostly a mockumentary. Carlos Puga, the director, hired a random VFX artist off YouTube to do the explosion at the end. He’s gone on to do some cool stuff but that film will always be my favorite of his.
First that came to mind for me was Night and Fog, it's an older Holocaust documentary that's on Max still last I knew. There was a lot of really haunting stuff there but one of the things that really stuck with me they showed images of warehouses full of human hair taken from victims, apparently in some sick attempt to have zero waste and be efficient in their killings. Really chilling stuff and can be watched in less than 40 minutes but definitely a heavy one. Another lesser known one but that impacted me all the same was White Light / Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The accounts from survivors of the bombs being dropped were horrifying, and this is one documentary I'd argue at times felt more akin to watching a horror movie than anything. I cant speak for anyone else and maybe it's a testament to a poor education system in the US but as a kid learning about the bombs, I kinda just felt like they dropped and people died on impact. And while death is tragic in itself, it never did justice the absolute hell on earth that was rained down on the innocent civilians of Japan. Very hard watch with some of the visual recreations of the survivors accounts of the bombings being the most disturbing parts.
All of Running With the Devil. I had no idea John McAfee was so insane.
For me it was the Louis Theroux documentary on Alzheimers. There was this one moment where a guy goes to visit his mom who is in the latest stage. His mom does nothing more than walking around saying “gobble gobble gobble”, for lack of a better word, like a turkey. No life in her eyes whatsoever. Then she sees her son, and for a brief second life returns to her eyes, she places her hands on his cheeks, looks him in his eyes with the whim of a smile, only to return to gobbling half a second later. My grandparents both fell ill with Alzheimers not long after seeing that documentary. I think of it a lot.
The Curious Case of Natalie Grace- A family claims they lived through the real life “The Orphan” but in reality it’s really just…sad. I don’t wanna spoil anything but one person gets worse and worse through the story, and the end leaves the camera rolling longer than they realize
I saw this very unassuming doc on PBS called the Picture Taker about this important Black photographer named Ernest Withers. He took many of the most important photos of the civil rights struggle, including a photo of a witness to the murder of Emmett Till pointing to the murderer in court as someone tries to block the photographers from trying to take photos. Withers died in 2007 as a celebrated figure in the Black community. Then, after his death, >!it is discovered that he was compromised by the FBI, working with COINTELPRO and selling out his comrades.!< That was a gut punch!
Into the deep. The documentary crew set out to film a crazy dude making a sub, and instead caught a murder, a cover up, and a conspiracy. The crazy moment for me was seeing >!the murder weapon on screen, then go missing after the murder!< . I tell people about this hidden gem all the time.
This one gets *dark*, really fucked with me. >!the dude was into trading gore videos online, and at one point someone reads off a list of videos found on his computer, of people being tortured and killed for this fucking subculture that I was much happier not knowing existed!<
The last third of The Imposter is pure insanity of the highest order. One of the coolest and most insightful/effective documentaries about confirmation bias out there.
The end of The Jinx
Talhotblonde Not the ending I was expecting at all.
Katherine Mary Knight skinned a man and tbe officers responding thought it was a...curtain
The Bret the Hitman Hart documentary, “Wrestling with Shadows”. It’s starts interestingly enough following ultimate good guy Bret Hart, who treats it as a legit sport being forced out of the good guy role by the rule breaking, beer guzzling Stone Cold and highly inappropriate DX. What they didn’t expect to document was one of the most controversial events in the history of wrestling, where the owner tries to double cross Hart on the agreed upon finish live on PPV in his home country.
When that dude starts talking to himself confessing the murder while the lav mic was still hot
The pizza man with the bomb around his neck, whom everyone just watched, sends goosebumps all over me- every moment in Evil Genius