The original post: /r/movies by /u/Disastrous-Beat-9830 on 2024-12-29 07:18:47.
Yesterday I solved a movie mystery that has been bothering me on and off for thirty years.
I have a distinct memory from my childhood of an image from a movie. In it, a man is bathed in light and his head is being forcibly tilted back by a device. Something has been shoved in his mouth and an enormous needle is slowly descending towards his eye, and it's quite clear that he is absolutely terrified. I have no other context for this image -- it's like I was walking past the television while it was on. I have no idea how I came to see this image; it's not the sort of thing that I would have been allowed to watch as an eight year-old and nor is it the sort of film that my parents would have watched, either.
Yesterday, thanks to a random suggestion from the YouTube algorithm, I found out that that image comes from the climax of the 1993 alien abduction film Fire in the Sky. From the film's Wikipedia article:
The aliens hold the struggling Walton to a platform in the centre of the chamber, stripping him of his clothes and covering him with an elastic material that completely restrains him. Despite Walton's terrified screams, the aliens clinically subject him to a torturous experiment in which a gelatinous substance is forced into his mouth, a tube is inserted down his throat, his jaw is locked open and a device is stabbed into his neck. Overhead equipment then begins lowering towards him. As a needle-like ocular probe extends towards his exposed eye, Walton suddenly reawakens from his flashback in a doctor's office.
Having rewatched the scene on YouTube, I discovered that this is absolutely the image that I saw. The details don't line up properly, but that can be attributed to misremembering something that I probably shouldn't have seen in the first place. Still no idea how I came to see it, but I have my theories.
So, do you have a personal movie mystery like this, and if so, how did you end up solving it.