The first time I heard of a “degloving injury” was when I watched Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Gerald’s Game in 2017. In the film, the protagonist is left handcuffed to a bed in a remote vacation home with no means to contact help. Her ultimate solution is to slice open her wrist so the handcuff will rip off the skin on her hand, allowing her to escape. It’s unequivocally one of the most shocking and horrific moments of cinema we’ve seen in the last 25 years; arguably an all-timer.
This brings me to another degloving injury, when I used my HBO Max subscription to watch critically acclaimed series, The Pitt. In the first episode, a woman is brought to the emergency room after a subway train decimated the lower half of her right leg. The limb is unnaturally twisted and the epidermis is totally stripped away – and the camera doesn’t shy away from showing the severity of the damage.
It’s not played for horror (the intention isn't specifically to scare or disturb), but as a dedicated fan of that genre, I found that it instilled a particular affection for the craft of the show that I didn’t expect to have, even after being exposed to loads of hype.
The reason that it took me a minute to get around to watching The Pitt is because I’m generally not a big fan of medical dramas. When I was a kid, the start of ER meant it was time to turn off the TV after an enjoyable night of watching NBC’s Must See TV sitcom lineup, and I’ve never watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, the Chicago shows, nor 9-1-1.
It took extreme word of mouth to get me to try one of 2025’s streaming sensations, and while it is principally the series’ “15 straight hours in an emergency room” narrative that allows me to properly appreciate it (it circumvents the tropes of a traditional episodic TV structure), the filmmaking craft and horrific effects/makeup greatly enhanced my affection for it.
Being a streaming series and not limited by the content restrictions of network television, The Pitt doesn’t have to softball the cataclysmic things that can happen to a human body, and it has a number of excellent consequences – including enhanced realism, raised stakes and the promotion of bold filmmaking choices.
While I won’t use this forum to spoil all of the gnarliest moments of the show (after all, the intention of this feature is to get likeminded potential viewers to give it a shot), I will say that the degloving injury described above is really only the start. Surgeries and invasive procedures aren’t purely filmed with focus on the faces of the stressed physicians, and seeing what their hands are doing is extreme and messy. I’ve never personally witnessed a birth, but now have a vivid understanding of the procedure.
While I can get behind some cheap, bloody cinematic thrills on occasion, my greater enjoyment for visceral on-screen gore in the horror genre stems from both its use to spike emotion in a dramatic (or comedic) moment and an understanding of the craft that went into making it. The Pitt is definitely not a horror show, but there is still a demonstration of an understanding of that, and it makes the series a great surprise to viewers like me who definitely didn’t see it coming. I can’t wait to see what kind of visceral nightmares are on the way in Season 2.
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