Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, I’m sharing the short list of horror moments that have succeeded in truly getting under my skin.

I don’t pay much attention to awards season. Horror rarely gets the credit it deserves, and the Oscars, after all, are very local.

But I do love a superlative, and for the past year, I’ve been compiling a little awards list of my own. Today I present: The grossest moments I’ve encountered during the past five years of my horror hyperfixation.

There are really only a few moments in books and movies that have actually turned my stomach—and I feel the same way I imagine a tennis athlete does when their opponent bests them on the court. The lunge, the swerve, the neon green ball streaking past your racket. My best defenses are breached when I least expect it!

Upon reflection, my list definitely reflects my real-life emetophobia and OCD. There’s lots of hunger-horror on this list, when people eat things they shouldn’t or perhaps didn’t consent to.

I was also surprised to find that books freak me out far more than movies. Maybe there’s something in the imagining; my brain is uniquely capable of creating imagery that’s perfectly attuned to my personal terrors.

But if you’ve got a sensitive stomach, fear not. This is a list that’s not meant to be triggering, so I tried to be subtle. If you know these stories, you know what I mean!

Thanks for reading Scare Me! Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to receive a new edition every Thursday.

Yah Yah Scholfield’s debut is gorgeous, romantic, and at times delightfully gory. The story follows Jude, the forty-one-year-old caretaker of her aging mother. Jude has endured decades of physical and verbal abuse—until the day she finally snaps. Alone and on the run, she builds a new life in the desolate Georgia swamp, soothing a hainted house and discovering a new identity as a healer, a queer person, and a survivor.

This book grossed me out in a very fun way, pushing my comfort zone but always rewarding me for venturing beyond it. If I had to sum it up: Scholfield’s characters have a hard time keeping their insides inside. Vomit, blood, piss—in the book’s most violent scenes, it’s all flowing.

I felt sick about this book from the moment I picked it up. But I’m so, so glad I did. Lucy Rose’s 2025 debut is about bisexual cannibals in the woods, mommy issues, expired lipstick, stagnant blood, and so, so many body parts sizzled in butter, garlic, and herbs.

But beneath the bloody set pieces, The Lamb is a profoundly moving story of neglect, abuse, dysfunction, and survival. It’s about the fragile steel of girlhood, the flutter of first love, the realization that the adults you rely on are not safe, the soft tendrils of young hemlock pushing up through cold dirt.

Somehow, this book eventually worked its magic on me, and Rose managed to make some of the cannibals’ concoctions sound…appetizing? I guess if you chop enough fresh rosemary, anything might taste all right.

Lapvona confirms all my worst fears about what it was like to live during the Middle Ages. This novel is an odd, disturbing fairy tale about men living through a time of pestilence, famine, and death. As the village’s food scarcity worsens, its residents turn to cannibalism to survive. It’s gnarly as hell. If you’ve read it, do you remember what I mean when I say “the toe”?

This book is special to me because a colleague at my corporate job recommended it, and by doing so vaulted over the “friends at work” hurdle into “we’re real-life friends now” territory. There’s truly nothing like heaps of corpses and a village witch to cement a new friendship.

Thomas Tryon’s 1971 novel is a triumph of psychological horror that centers a pair of twin boys: one cruel, one meek. You might think this book is on the list because of the animal cruelty, or that scene with the pitchfork, or the thing in the ring box.

But no—while all of those were horrible, it was the wine barrel that got me in the end. I was even more dismayed because I wasn’t able to anticipate it. My dread just grew and grew as I thought, “Surely he wouldn’t…” But oh yes. Tryon did.

Iain Reid’s 2016 debut is a slim, engrossing nightmare. The story plunges us into an unnamed narrator’s perspective as she accompanies her boyfriend on a wintry road trip to visit his parents, all the while reflecting on the impending breakup she’s planning.

The ending didn’t quite stick the landing for me, but there is a moment that I can still viscerally feel in my body: The narrator chews off her own thumbnail, which gets caught in between her molars. This is not something I have ever done, so why do I remember it as vividly as if it happened to me?

There’s an old episode of How Did This Get Made? that I remember describing the movie adaptation as being drenched in old man fluids. I haven’t seen the movie, and after reading this monstrosity, I never will.

I have a childish sense of humor. I love fart jokes! The early chapters involve a man shitting out a parasitic alien! You’d think this would be up my alley! But the entire experience of reading this made me feel so clammy and unwell that I donated the book back to the thrift store where I bought it. Sorry, Stephen King! I do love your other books!

There’s a type of book I think of as an “ants under the magnifying glass” experience. The Ruins is one, and The Troop is another. These books place their characters in impossible situations, just to watch them slowly fry to death. It’s a cruel kind of storytelling, and not a style I’m fond of.

The Troop is Dreamcatcher-like in many ways; one by one, characters fall victim to a mysterious wasting disease while trapped on an island camping trip. As the Scout troop struggles to survive, they resort to disgusting and upsetting tactics, including one infamous scene in which they attempt to hunt a turtle. But the turtle is the tip of the iceberg—there’s also cruelty against kittens, monkeys, and of course, the kids themselves. I found it all to be a bit too lingering and unsubtle. It left me feeling icky, but not in a way that I enjoyed.

Stephen Graham Jones’ 2020 bestseller is a modern classic for good reason. It’s chilling, inventive, moving, funny. But for me, it’s also a book that’s somehow invaded my sense of smell. At one point, the cursed elk hide at the center of the story is described as resembling a soft, ripening cheese.

I have an extremely keen sense of smell, and we all know that smell is intricately linked to memory. But it wasn’t until I read this book that I realized my brain was capable of manufacturing its own false memories bound up in my olfactory senses.

I swear I can still smell that elk hide, feel my finger pressing into its soft mushiness, almost as clearly as I can imagine hearing that Elk Woman’s anguish, the dull beat of a basketball, and the soft whumping thuds of footfalls in the powdery snow.

I found this manga while browsing at a bookstore, and from the moment I picked it up, I felt unseasy. Obviously, I bought it immediately.

The story follows a young boy who witnesses his mother commit an unspeakable crime. Over seventeen volumes, Oshimi traces the impact of this traumatic event through our main character’s childhood and into his adult years. It’s one of the darkest stories I’ve ever read, in part because it feels so authentic. The mother in this story has an unsettling blend of childlike malice and sexual menace that was effective, devastating, and absolutely made my skin crawl.

Oshimi never fully casts any character as being monstrous or beyond redemption. Instead, he explores the ugly reality of mental illness and abuse, and the healing that is possible against steep odds.

I thought I knew what to expect going into Audition. I’d read the book! I knew the story! But Takashi Miike added his own horrific spin on it, culminating in a moment that grossed me out more than anything else on this list.

Audition famously builds to a scene in which would-be actress Asami tortures the unlucky widower Ayoama, who lured her into a relationship through an audition for a fake television show.

In Ayoama’s pain-fractured mind, he sees Asami do something with a dog bowl that I will not repeat here. I physically gag just thinking about it. It’s the briefest moment, and for most people it probably doesn’t register at all. But it will live in my nightmares for the rest of my life.

Hatred, racism, discrimination, state-sanctioned violence. We’re living in heavy times. In case it’s not already clear how I feel: Fuck ICE. No one is illegal on stolen land.

My friend Maya over at The Weird Girl Edit put together a great list of Minnesota-based organizations that are working to support communities that are under attack, and I’m sharing it here:

If you’re not in a position to donate money—times are tough!—there are plenty of other ways to show up. Resharing a fundraiser post, being honest about how you’re feeling, or checking in on a friend are all great ways to be engaged and present. There’s no action that’s too small to matter.

Next week, we’ll finally return to interview-land! We’ll be catching up with Catriona Ward, whose new novel Nowhere Burning will be out on February 24. I’m going to have to dance very carefully around any potential spoilers, but I promise we’ll find a way to delve into the novel’s rich themes without giving away any of its secrets.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.