Heads Up, Ears Down

This blog accurately identifies depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals in films. The purpose is to provide viewers with a reliable guide so that such depictions do not come as unwelcome surprises. Films will be accurately notated, providing a time cue for each incident along with a concise description of the scene and perhaps relevant context surrounding the incident. In order to serve as a useful reference tool, films having no depictions of violence to animals will be included, with an indication that there are no such scenes. This is confirmation that the films have been watched with the stated purpose in mind.


Note that the word depictions figures prominently in the objective. It is a travesty that discussions about cruelty in film usually are derailed by the largely unrelated assertion that no animals really were hurt (true only in some films, dependent upon many factors), and that all this concern is just over a simulation. Not the point, whether true or false. We do not smugly dismiss depictions of five-year-olds being raped because those scenes are only simulations. No, we are appalled that such images are even staged, and we are appropriately horrified that the notion now has been planted into the minds of the weak and cruel.


Depictions of violence or harm to animals are assessed in keeping with our dominant culture, with physical abuse, harmful neglect, and similar mistreatment serving as a base line. This blog does not address extended issues of animal welfare, and as such does not identify scenes of people eating meat or mules pulling plows. The goal is to itemize images that might cause a disturbance in a compassionate household.


These notes provide a heads-up but do not necessarily discourage watching a film because of depicted cruelty. Consuming a piece of art does not make you a supporter of the ideas presented. Your ethical self is created by your public rhetoric and your private actions, not by your willingness to sit through a filmed act of violence.

Horror Heaven

Horror Heaven (JB’s Horror Heaven). Jörg Buttgereit, 1984.
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Edition screened: Included on the Schramm Blu-ray in the Cult Epic box set Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jörg Buttgereit, released 2016. German language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 23 minutes.

Summary: No depictions of violence or harm to animals.

Horror Heaven is one of the best “comedy horror” films I’ve seen. Films down-graded to Comedy Horror category usually are a mediation of failure between filmmaker and audience. A genuine horror film of quality is a difficult thing to make and a complicated thing to watch. Most directors address their inability to do so by instead making a film where things jump out from around corners and startle the audience; or a film with copious blood spurting to make the audience say ewwww; or most commonly, a film combining some of both of those tacts and also filled with stupid gags and jokes, thus allowing director and audience to conspire, relax, in the embarrassed apologetic lie of “comic relief.”

Horror Heaven is quietly clever, inevitably a better goal than “funny.” It summarizes a handful of classic horror films with a creative and unembarrassed attitude appropriate to a gifted beginning director. It is not a stellar film but is set far apart from most marriages of comedy and horror in not being completely atrocious.

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