The 2025 Superman reboot is, by all accounts, a resounding success. Critics like it a lot, moviegoers are loving it, and it made bank during its opening weekend. It also scared the shit outta me during a couple action sequences.
I can handle a lot of violence in films. I wouldn’t have seen four John Wick films and the Ballerina spin-off if death-by-library-book bothered me — instead, it makes me a bit giddy. Chop some limbs up, blow some brains out, dip Jack Quaid’s hand in boiling oil, I’m good with all that. What I’m not good with is violence unto eyes, something I wasn’t expecting to encounter in Superman. Though given that this is a James Gunn movie, maybe I should have seen it coming. (Pun intended.)
[Ed. note: Spoilers for two of Superman’s action sequences follow, as well as spoilers for the ending of The Suicide Squad.]
Image: Warner Bros. Entertainment
Early in the new Superman film, starring David Corenswet as the Big Blue Boy Scout, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) sics a kaiju on Metropolis. It doesn’t show particular intelligence or intention, behaving more like a natural disaster in kaiju form. The giant dude stumbles about, rapidly growing from moment to moment, breathing fire, wreaking havoc on Metropolis’ architecture, and almost killing a dog, who’s too busy barking at Superman to flee from danger.
The Justice Gang — Guy Gardner/Green Lantern, Mr. Terrific, and Hawkgirl — arrive on the scene to help Superman stop the kaiju, whose hide is too strong to really damage. The solution? Go for the eyes. Shudder.
Instead of a simple super-punch to the kaiju’s peepers, Hawkgirl swings her mace at one of its eyes. I can’t quite describe in detail how the rest of the fight goes, as I was watching through splayed fingers, trying to follow the action without too much phobia-inducing detail. She doesn’t just swing, though — her mace gets stuck in the poor thing’s eye (horrifying!) while Gardner creates a pointy pile-driver construct to comically hammer away at the kaiju’s other eye.
The scene is thankfully short, and the Justice Gang pretty casually kills the kaiju. I thought that scene would be it for eye mutilation in the film, but toward the end, as Supes battles Ultraman and the Engineer, he faces some eye-assault of his own. The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría) uses her nanobot body (don’t think too hard about it) to envelop Superman’s face, attacking his eyes and filling his lungs. On the whole, it’s a nauseating scene, and not the type of body horror I’d expect in a superhero flick.
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
But I should have expected it in a James Gunn flick — the gross-out eye injuries in Superman are continuing a small trend in his movies. The worst example comes to us from The Suicide Squad (the good one, not the bad 2016 film). Harley Quinn, Bloodsport, and more anti-heroes must take down Starro in the film’s finale. You know, the giant psychic starfish whose body centers on a giant freakin’ eyeball.
Starro’s eyeball is horrifying enough to look at on its own — it’s just so damn big — but the real horror starts when the Squad attacks the fella, forcing the most squeamish among us (being me) to look away. Margot Robbie’s Harley leaps at Starro’s eye with a javelin, not only puncturing its eye, but fully stabbing through it. Harley lands inside Starro’s eye, and gleefully swims around in it. The horror continues as Ratcatcher’s swarm of rats follow Harley inside, eating the starfish from within. Grotesque.
The Suicide Squad contains the worst phobia-triggering eye injury from a Gunn film, but it and Superman aren’t alone. Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 features a sapient walrus character with cybernetic parts that forcefully hold its eyes open at all times, creating disturbing and painful imagery. (That film is not for the faint of heart; each of its animal characters suffers from tragic abuse.) Nebula also notes how Thanos tortured her by removing her eyes and replacing them with cybernetic versions.
Image: Marvel Studios
Though Gunn didn’t write or direct it, he did produce 2019’s Brightburn, a film that asks, “What if a young Superman was instead a horror movie villain?” It includes one of the more disturbing and realistic eye injuries I’ve seen depicted in a film. A character gets a shard of glass stuck in her eye and removes it herself; to go into any more detail would mean I’d have to re-watch the scene, and I’m not going to do that. (Nor should you, unless you like nightmares.)
While researching eye mutilation in James Gunn’s films (why did I do this to myself?), I learned of a phobia called ommetaphobia, which is a general fear of eyes. As I’m part of the WebMD hypochondria generation, of course I self-diagnosed myself with ommetaphobia.
I don’t suffer from panic attacks watching these films, but their eye mutilation sequences definitely freak me out. (It’s not like I’m alone in this — the “injury to eye motif” is a trope that horror creators particularly love.) In a broader sense, sometimes just looking at eyes on a screen is enough to trigger my anxiety. I watched 28 Weeks Later recently (no involvement from Gunn, for the record) and it includes several close-ups of character eyes, all of which forced me to look away. The shots didn’t even have to show blood from burst blood vessels to make me squeamish, but them eyes were filled with blood anyway.
All of this is to say: Gunn, next time you make a movie, avoid the eyes, yeah? They’re scary enough on their own. I don’t need to see a shrieking hawk hero stuff her mace in a giant eye, too.