Because for all of the extravagant moments in Tarantino’s filmography, he still knows how to direct an emotionally gripping scene. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood might be remembered for the action scenes and the 1960s chic that went on up and down Hollywood Boulevard, but watching Leonardo DiCaprio as a struggling actor that gets his mojo back over the course of shooting a Western is still one of the most poignant scenes anyone has made about the film industry.

But the most traumatic films of all time doesn’t always mean everything has to be scary. Despite Ari Aster creating one of the most disturbing cinematic experiences of the modern age in Hereditary, nothing about a suburban home is meant to be inherently scary. It’s what you put around it, and Tarantino’s kryptonite ended up coming from two movies that take place entirely in the woods.

Granted, Tarantino dealt with trauma from both angles when talking about his favourites, saying, “I think Bambi is well known for traumatizing children. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. The only other movie I couldn’t handle and had to leave was at a drive-in in Tennessee. I was there alone, sitting on the gravel by a speaker, watching Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. So for me, Last House on the Left and Bambi are sitting on the f— shelf right next to each other.”

If you’ve ever experienced anything having to do with Disney, though, it’s no surprise that Bambi is on that list. While it might not hit as hard for adults who showed their kids back in the day, hearing that hunter’s gunshot as Bambi is running away before finding his mother dead is enough to put a few scars on some kids. It’s not the climax of the film by any stretch, but it’s not like we were going to immediately go back to Thumper like we didn’t witness a murder.

That was the trauma for children, but Last House on the Left is much more grotesque than some of the most violent horror movies are known for going. The idea of a horror movie taking place in the woods has already gone through many different incarnations since The Blair Witch Project, but having to watch a woman get sexually assaulted and killed before her family gets revenge on the killer was the kind of carnage that most people didn’t even think was possible to show on film in 1972.

Then again, that might be a bigger insight into what makes Tarantino tick half the time. The shots in Last House on the Left are already deeply off-putting, but when you place them in the context of Tarantino’s movies, he seemed to take that kind of carnage to the nth degree, especially when looking at the massive bloodbaths in the Kill Bill franchise.

So before anyone calls Tarantino a sick man for the 1000th time for using that much blood in his movies, there could be a method to his form of madness. It’s hard for anyone to deal with their deepest darkest fears, but sometimes the best way to conquer them is to face them head on and turn them into something else. And while Tarantino’s love of gore is by no means beautiful every time it’s onscreen, there’s hardly one drop out of place as well.

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