Barefoot Gen/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • While most things depicting the nuclear bombings or Hiroshima and Nagasaki close up would qualify fot this, one particular example is Barefoot Gen - especially the initial shot of a little girl essentially melting. Their eyes melt out of their faces. The very next scene, horrifically burned bomb victims stumble down the street moaning, with giant hunks of flesh hanging loose, some of them with their intestines dragging along the ground. And then the radiation sickness starts setting in… Did I mention this was written based on the author’s personal experience?
  • The depiction of the bombs actual explosion and all the living zombies is terrible enough, but the most personal instance has to be when Gen runs back to his home to find his entire family except his mother trapped under their burning home. Neither of them can lift the debris off of them. After his father convinces Gen and Kimie to get away from the fire, the two watch as the other three burn to death, his sister and brother pleading for help the entire time. It's no wonder Kimie goes temporarily insane after watching that.
  • That said, the scene of people melting as the bomb strikes - particularly the woman holding a baby - is downright horrifying, and only made worse by the fact that it goes on, and on, and on.
  • Well, the whole film, as it is meant to show that War Is Hell, after all. But especially the living "zombies", and the fact that they were not zombies, but people who were badly injured (and most likely disoriented). The skin melting off and eyes melting out of sockets is beyond horrifying.
  • The idea that your whole life could be turned upside-down and darn near everything you know destroyed in seconds...all because of some enemy nation's Applied Phlebotinum.
    • The simple fact that this actually happened. And that someone survived the horror. To look upon most of them, and in retrospect even Gen, maybe it would have been more merciful for them to have died right then and there.

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