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I too prefer subtle psychological terror to torture-porn. Nausea just is not my favorite sensation.
The only movie that ever got to me was the shower scene in Psycho (I saw it as a kid in first-run theater release, oh lord where did the decades go?) For months afterward, I would only take tub baths if I was alone in the house, because I kept hearing things that the noise of the shower *almost* drowned out.
The book I regretted reading was Thomas Harris' "Red Dragon" (Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, famed anti-hero of "Silence of the Lambs," remember him?) One scene gave me emotional whiplash, by describing a delicious recipe, and my mouth was actually watering, and then suddenly realized that Hannibal is practicing his cannibalism on a living victim. Harris wrote the scene very effectively -- I remember the emotions it invoked to this very day, 10 years after reading it.
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