The 15 Most Uncomfortable Moments Of Female Nudity In Movies

Need a surefire way to get people interested in your movie? Tell them that, at one point or another, one or more of the film’s actresses gets naked. As lowbrow and sad as such a publicity hook may be, it’s damn near foolproof. For instance, the majority of dudes who’ve found the time to watch Sam Raimi’s oft-forgotten 2000 thriller The Gift likely did so only because they’d heard about Katie Holmes’ topless scene. Same goes for the amount of folks who braved the otherwise idiotic Swordfish just to check out Halle Berry’s twins.

Viewing the disturbing new indie flick Compliance (opening in limited release tomorrow), however, we were struck by how unnerving it is to watch beautiful star Dreama Walker take her clothes off. Based on various real-life incidents, writer-director Craig Zobel’s fascinating and subdued thriller shows the fallout (i.e., humiliation, sexual desecration, and moral bankruptcy) that results from a prankster (Pat Healy) calling a fast food joint, saying he’s a police officer, and instructing the eatery’s manager (Ann Dowd) to strip-search an employee (Walker) accused of robbery.

The situation gradually worsens, and Walker’s naked, helplessly vulnerable character gets put through the ringer. And there’s nothing sexy about it, much like the rest of the films included in our countdown of The 15 Most Uncomfortable Moments of Female Nudity in Movies.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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Pretty much everything about David Lynch’s Blue Velvet can be classified as uncomfortable, but Dennis Hopper’s wonderfully deranged performance as flesh-and-blood monster Frank Booth is without a doubt the film’s creepiest component. He’s a wackjob who gets sexual thrills from dry humping while all hopped up on a mysterious, inhaled gas; he’s also the type of guy who beats his helpless lover, Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), just for kicks.

Near the end of Blue Velvet, Dorothy shows up on good guy Jeffrey’s (Kyle MacLachlan) front lawn totally naked, but also covered in bruises and scared to death. Under happier circumstances, seeing Rossellini approaching your doorstep in the buff would be one hell of a joyous surprise. The wrath of Frank Booth, however, drains the sight of all its attractiveness

One of the most underrated films of 2010, British genre filmmaker Simon Rumley’s devastating and brutal Red, White & Blue follows a trio of interconnected lost souls, drifting through Austin, TX, without much purpose and on direct paths to tragedy. The saddest one of them all is Erica, played with an endearing detachment by cutie Amanda Fuller.

For Erica, life is about little more than hopping from one guy’s bed to another, sometimes with multiple sex partners. Thus, Fuller gets naked in the movie quite often, yet none of Rumley’s sexual scenes are the least bit titillating. He, Fuller, and the film itself never lose sight of the fact that Erica’s numerous carnal conquests are sad, not hot, the meaningless time-killers of a girl who’s too emotionally comatose to care.

Check Dreama Walker out—there’s no doubt about it, she’s gorgeous. And in Craig Zobel’s controversial flick Compliance, she plays Becky, a seemingly promiscuous high school girl collecting checks at a fast food joint; she’s the kind of girl the jocks get to hook up with while the nerds are left to fantasize.

So the thought of watching her disrobe should be a teenage boy’s dream come true. Except, in Compliance, it’s against her will, the byproduct of a prank caller (Pat Healy) phoning into the restaurant, pretending to be a cop, and telling Becky’s boss (Ann Dowd) that she stole a customer’s money. And it’s not hot—it’s vile.

Especially when the caller manipulates people to physically violate the naked Becky, in increasingly despicable ways. Compliance, in the end, is a bleak, disheartening examination of a person’s fear of authority and momentary lapses of reason, but Becky’s the most damaged of all its victims.

Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby remains one of the best horror movies ever made, 44 years after its release, and its dream sequence of a centerpiece is one of the many reasons why.

Whether it’s a vivid nightmare or a real-life occurrence is open to interpretation. No matter how you see it, though, the scene in which Lucifer himself impregnates a helpless and naked Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) is one of the genre’s moments of directorial wizardry.

In a dark bedroom, surrounded by disrobed elderly Satanists, Rosemary’s body gets clawed up and probed as she cries out, “This is no dream—this is really happening!” The scratch marks she discovers on her back after waking up certainly point to the same explanation.

Aside from being extremely discomforting, Larry Clark’s shocking Kids is a film that could make any grown person never want to have children of his or her own. And if conception does happen, heaven help those parents whose child has to deal with even half of the turmoil experienced by Jennie (Chloë Sevigny), the film’s most tragic character.

First, Jennie learns that she’s HIV-positive, which brings the realization that Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), the only guy she’s ever had sex with, is the one who infected her. She then goes looking for Telly at a rave, stupidly takes a depressant pill, eventually passes out on a couch, and gets raped by Telly’s equally disgusting friend Casper (Justin Pierce).

Her panties pulled down and eyes shut, Jennie is clueless about what’s happening—as is Casper, who may very well contract HIV during his sex crime and, like Telly, unknowingly continue to spread the virus.

Anyone who’s knowledgeable when it comes to 1980s horror flicks knows the name Linnea Quigley well, and, chances are, they’re big fans. It’s hard not to love a sexy actress who’s always down for the gory cause, whether it’s spending most of a zombie movie (The Return of the Living Dead) as a naked brain-eater or jamming a tube of lipstick into one of her nipples in 1988’s Night of the Demons. You don’t necessarily want to marry her, but you know she’d be great at a party.

For the purposes of this list, we’ve chosen her Night of the Demons moment as the most theoretically uncomfortable. Why? Because it’s easier to accept Quigley running around as a naked zombie when she does it for such an extended period of time; the infamous lipstick moment, however, comes out of nowhere.

It’s the result of her character, Suzanne, getting possessed by a supernatural force during a Halloween night house party, and it’s the exact moment when the bash gets really ugly.

If you’re one of the dozen or so people who foolishly paid to see last year’s inept Straw Dogs remake, do the cinema gods a favor and catch up with Sam Peckinpah’s exceptional original. A visceral look at man’s proclivity for violence, the 1971 adaptation of British novelist Gordon Williams’ book The Siege of Trencher’s Farm erupts in a third-act explosion of reactionary slaughter carried out by the formerly nebbish David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman).

The film’s most unforgettable sequence, however, happens much earlier into its two-hour duration. David’s sexy wife, Amy (Susan George), is home alone when her ex-boyfriend Charlie (Del Henney) shows up, rapes her, and then lets his buddy have at it as well.

At first, George’s bold performance makes it unclear whether she’s deriving pleasure or not, but once the second guy begins his violation, her intense displeasure becomes painfully visible.

Though it’s undeniably uncomfortable, the much ballyhooed rape scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is also a tour de force of ballsy and masterful filmmaking.

It all begins when Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his band of reprehensible “droogs” break into the home of a wealthy man and kick the ever-living shit out of him. Left in a heap of pain and pinned to the ground, he’s forced to watch as Alex, who’s gleefully crooning “Singin’ in the Rain,” cuts holes into the breast areas of his wife’s top and sexually violates her.

It takes a genius like Mr. Kubrick to pair such a pleasant song with such a horrific act. The result, while tough to watch, is damn brilliant.

Look, Kathy Bates is a great actress. We loved her in the Stephen King adaptations Misery and Dolores Claiborne, appreciated her dedication to Adam Sandler’s idiotic material in The Waterboy, and were delighted to see her in Woody Allen’s efficient Midnight in Paris last year.

But all of our affection doesn’t justify About Schmidt, an otherwise solid movie tainted by one eye-scarring sequence that goes on for what feels like an hour. Those who’ve seen Alexander Payne’s comedy already know where we’re going with this: We’re referring, of course, to the beefy Bates’ overly generous dip in the hot tub. Misery, indeed.

In David Fincher’s Hollywood-made take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Rooney Mara, playing Goth computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, endures a particularly graphic rape scene. The film was released just in time for Christmas last year, but we're certain the sequence didn’t spread any holiday cheer.

Those who’ve seen the original 2009 Swedish flick know that director Niels Arden Oplev’s execution of the parent-less Salander’s rape, at the hands of her lawyer, Nils Bjurman, is actually much tougher to watch. Having already forced Lisbeth to go down on him, he strains their relationship even further by beating Ms. Salander down, handcuffing her to a bed, and anally ravaging her naked body.

On the positive side, though, at least Lisbeth gets her revenge in gloriously hardcore fashion by sodomizing him and tattooing the words “I am a sadist pig and a rapist” on Bjurman’s stomach.

Munich, Steven Spielberg’s thriller about the Israeli government’s revenge tactics in the wake of 1972 Summer Olympics massacre, is mostly a guy’s flick. The cast is predominantly male, with Eric Bana and Daniel Craig leading the way as Avner and Steve, respectively, two of the Mossad team’s top guns, but it’s actually a female who injects the strongest amount of menace into Spielberg’s box office hit.

The woman in question is a Dutch assassin (played by Marie-Josée Croze) who kills one of the Mossad agents. So, naturally, Avner and his colleague Hans (Hanns Zischler) have to permanently silence her. And they do in the the movie’s rawest scene: On her houseboat, the assassin strips in hopes of seducing them, but they quickly empty rounds into her chest and throat.

Not satisfied with her punishment, Hans then shoots her in the skull and opens up her robe, leaving her both dead and shamefully exposed.

Deadgirl takes the sickening concept of necrophilia and somehow makes it even more disgusting. Wisely, screenwriter Trent Haaga and directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel don’t treat the eponymous, naked female corpse as an object of attraction—she’s never more than an undead piece of meat, and the film’s two horny, morally corrupt teenage protagonists (played by Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan) see her as just that.

After discovering the random body in an abandoned psych hospital, the guys start inviting people in to have their way with her, but she’s not completely lifeless. When one of them tries to get her to go downstairs, she chomps down, and it only gets worse from there.

It’s a disgruntled married man’s fantasy, no doubt: While watching over the Overlook Hotel, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) hears from his nagging wife that their little boy got attacked by some in Room 237, which Jack considers foolish since, as far as he knows, they’re the only people in the place. So Jack heads up to Room 237, walks into the bathroom, and finds a voluptuous blonde taking a bath. And she’s down to make out.

Sounds pretty hot, no? It would be if the Overlook wasn’t completely haunted. Before Jack can get to second base, the mystery woman suddenly becomes an older, boil-covered creature of nightmares. One that hauntingly cackles and slowly approaches a shell-shocked Jack with arms reaching forward, Frankenstein’s monster style, with a devilish smile on her face.

That’s one way to keep a guy from ever wanting to commit infidelity again.

Within the first 20 minutes of French filmmaker Gaspar Noé’s polarizing flick Irréversible, which is told in reverse order, a hallucinogenic tour of a sordid gay men’s club culminates with a dude’s skull getting bashed into oatmeal by a fire extinguisher. But that’s nowhere near the movie’s most uncomfortable scene.

In a brave and unbelievably committed performance, Monica Bellucci plays Alex, the film’s most tragic character, whose rape triggers the story’s downward spiral of events. And, boy, is that rape hellish. Without any edits or camera movements, Noé lets his lens rest as pregnant Alex gets viciously assaulted—penetration, punches, and kicks—by a stranger in an underpass. The sequence lasts nearly 11 minutes; whether that’s artistic gallantry or sadistic overkill on Noé’s part is the viewer’s own call.

By the time Darren Aronofsky’s incredibly depressing, but altogether excellent, Requiem for a Dream gets to its “ass to ass” sequence, the film’s uncompromising bleakness has long been established. If for whatever reason Aronofsky didn’t feel the need to subject his young female drug addict Marion (a fearless Jennifer Connelly) to the ultimate humiliation, Requiem for a Dream would still end on more than enough seriously downbeat notes.

But he did opt to show how her need for a fix sends her to the darkest place imaginable, and the film is all the more powerful for it. Marion, desperate to score more narcotics, meets a pimp (Keith David) who offers her drugs to participate in a sex show for a bunch of corporate sleazeballs.

More specifically, she has to sit on all fours, “ass to ass” with another girl, and have a dildo penetrate them both at the same time. And, thanks to Aronosfky’s horror movie-like direction, it’s even more distressing than it sounds.