Don't Let THIS Happen to Your Eyes…

It's October, and that means it's Eye Injury Prevention Month—no, seriously. To support the cause, we’ve pooled together some big-screen eye-related horrors to guarantee you'll steer clear of eye poking, plucking, slicing, and any other threats to your vision. Heed their warning, because there's some high-quality cinema coming to theaters in the next few months that you're going to want to be able to see.

By Perri Nemiroff
Un Chien Andalou

If "eye stuff" in movies gets you (meaning you're probably in the majority), don't watch the opening sequence of Luis Bunuel's 1929 debut film, which has been ranked as one of the most shocking in film history and probably gets shown to poor Filmmaking 101 students at schools everywhere. If you have seen it and wondered how it was done, it was a dead calf's eye that Bunuel took a razor to.
A Clockwork Orange

You want to be able to see, but you don't want to be forced to see all the time, especially when you are forced to see violent movies and only violent movies. But that’s not even the worst part of Alex’s run in the prison aversion therapy experiment in A Clockwork Orange. Those eye speculums are so torturous and creepy that just looking at them is aversion therapy enough.
Final Destination 5

Thanks to Final Destination 5, LASIK is no longer an option. Even though doctors like the folks at NVISION came out to ensure the public that the death by LASIK was totally unrealistic, the seed has been planted, and a life without a boatload of eye care products no longer seems worth the risk of having a hole burned through your head and then falling out a window.
V/H/S/2

Sometimes clinical trials can be the only way to cure a medical condition, but is it worth injuring yourself further or perhaps losing your life? Even though the man in V/H/S/2 still had one working eye, he just had to have two and insisted on taking a bionic eye for a test spin. Not only did that decision let a team of scientists recording and watching his every move into his life, but it let in a horde of malicious ghosts, too.
Would You Rather

A popular question in a recreational game of "Would You Rather" is, would you rather be blind or deaf? Shepard Lambrick takes that scenario to an unprecedented level when he poses the question, "would you rather slice your own eye open or die?" The answer may seem obvious, but when you watch Lucas try to make that same decision by putting a razor blade to his eye, there’s a good chance you’ll rethink whether you’re capable of making even the shallowest cut.
Deep Impact

Forget the fact that these astronauts are out in space, hanging out on a comet that’s poised to blow earth to bits, and that Jon Favreau floated away; the scene during which Oren has his eyes singed by the rising sun is the one that rips your heart out. Yet even had Oren reacted just a split second quicker, pulling his visor down wouldn’t have changed the Messiah’s collision course with a portion of Wolf-Beiderman.
Hostel

Here’s an easy one to avoid. Don’t believe a guy who tells you there’s a magic hostel filled with beautiful women in Slovakia. Should you fall for it, you might wind up tied to a chair, with a blowtorch in your face and your eye dangling from its socket. And, odds are, there won’t be a guy like Paxton, who’s moronic enough to run back into the torture chamber to save you.
The Birds

CGI and VFX makeup have come a long way since The Birds arrived in 1963, but catching even a very staged glimpse of a poor guy having just suffered a vicious bird attack is unnerving -- especially when you live in New York City and take pigeons to the face every other block. At least getting pooped under a bird-infested traffic light post isn’t half as bad as having your eyes pecked out.
Saw 4

The mausoleum is easily one of Jigsaw’s most clever traps. In Saw 4, he challenges two men to free themselves of their shackles before being sucked into a winch in the middle of the room. The catch? Ones eyes are stitched shut and the other has his lips sewn together, making it impossible for the two to communicate and make it out alive together.
The Eye

Sydney Wells lost her sight when she was five but still grew up to become a successful violinist. Why mess with that? Sydney still opts to take the plunge and go in for a cornea transplant. If only Sydney had done a little research into where that cornea came from before she went through the procedure. Perhaps she could have been seeing happiness and rainbows instead of fire and death with her newfound sight.
Blindness

Blindness is easily one of the most horrific eye-related big screen disasters. It isn’t a bad film, but it is absolutely miserable to watch. The thought of widespread blindness is terrifying, but it’s what happens after that makes you pray that something like this never becomes a reality. If you’ve yet to catch Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of the bestselling book, you’ve been warned; the deplorable things that go down in this film will make you wish you were blind.
May

Roger Ebert called this smallish horror flick one of the genre's best, giving it four of four stars, and with good reason: it's tight, tense and shifts from black comedy to horrific awfulness in, well, the blink of an eye. Angela Bettis is the titular lazy-eyed character who turns the self-hatred of her condition into something much worse: self-mutilation.
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Offers

Un Chien Andalou

A Clockwork Orange

Final Destination 5

V/H/S/2

Would You Rather

Deep Impact

Hostel

The Birds

Saw 4

The Eye

Blindness

May

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