♫ I know dark clouds will gather 'round me
I know my way is rough and steep... ♫
I know my way is rough and steep... ♫
— Excerpt from "I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger"
Let's just say that overall, 1917 practically qualifies as a non-supernatural horror film that just happens to be set during a war.
All spoilers on this page are left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
- Blake and Schofield crossing No Man's Land. During the entire scene, there is always at least one corpse on screen, at varying stages of decomposition. You also see dead bodies from both sides floating inside the flooded craters. It was scenes just like these that inspired J. R. R. Tolkien to create the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings after his time in World War I.
- Schofield arrives at the town of Écoust, finding it bombed and burning. The sight looks like hell on earth. Basically the only light seen is from various explosions, and coupled with the eerie shadows it's like a horror film scene.
- After he falls into the river, he's forced to swim/crawl through dozens of pale, bloated corpses in order to get back to dry land.
- The scene in the abandoned bunker is oppressively silent, and Blake and Schofield are visibly terrified as they pass through it. Then a rat triggers a tripwire and they have to flee the area - while Schofield is painfully blinded by chalk dust - which includes a jump over an abandoned mineshaft.
- The manner of Blake's death. They rescue a panicked German pilot from a crashed airplane and attempt to help him, but the pilot, not speaking English and either misapprehending their intentions or simply not wishing to become a captive, stabs Blake with a knife; Blake ultimately dies of his wounds after quite a lot of agony.
- As Blake is dying, he's so shocked by the pain that when a shed collapsed behind him from the flames, Blake asks Schofield whether there's an artillery bombing or that he's been shot, and Schofield has to bitterly correct him that he's been stabbed. The pain has deteriorated his mind so much that he actually forgot the reason why he is dying.
- On top of that, the entire scene has Blake's face slowly losing its colour, to the point where it's deathly pale in his final words. The sheer realism of this undignified moment can really turn your stomach inside-out. Incredibly, Dean-Charles Chapman was able to make his face go pale on his own in real time; CGI only came into play following Blake's passing, to make his face only a little paler than Chapman could have done on his own.
- The plane crash itself. You think it's just a normal scene of a German plane being shot down by the English, after the chaos ensued from the bunker cave-in. But when Schofield walks up the hill to see where the downed plane is landing... it goes over the hill and towards him and Blake, causing the two to run. The way it's shot makes it look like you are also one of those in danger due to witnessing this dogfight.
- Just the title and the year alone, 1917. World War I didn't end until 1918, which means the horrors seen in the film will continue for another year, and it's very unlikely any of the surviving characters will live that long.
- This is a rare case of a war film that doesn't make war look exciting for its entirety: war is depicted as a bluntly impersonal force that serves no apparent good, makes orphans of infants, and makes people kill one another for arbitrary reasons. The overall futility of the mission, as Colonel Mackenzie himself notes towards the end, simply adds to the overall horror of the film: Schofield may have successfully delivered his message, but Blake didn't survive the journey, and odds are the generals will simply order a charge the next week instead, and masses of young men will still die.
- In the shelled-out ruins of Écoust, Schofield dodges one of the German stragglers when the man plunges out of an unseen doorway to vomit in the street. He's almost bent double and crying out incoherently. The screenplay identifies this man as a blind drunk — left behind in the devastated town with nothing to eat and only booze to drink — but for a moment it's a frightening suggestion that something even worse than what Schofield and Blake have already seen might be in the buildings behind him. And who says there isn't, with a great deal of the town ablaze? In addition, these stragglers have likely been terrorizing any of the town's remaining inhabitants unlucky enough to cross their path, as implied by the French woman, who initially mistakes Schofield for a German and begs him to not loot the place, as she really does have nothing except for the furniture and her orphaned baby.
- The fact that the baby girl is orphaned. Her parents were probably killed when the Germans moved into Écoust.
- The end of Schofield's journey in the river where he is stopped by a makeshift dam which is holding what appears to be the bodies of the town's inhabitants, and he had to climb over their bodies.
- While relatively less nightmarish than most of the other entries on this page, the gunfire noises in this film deserve a mention. In most action movies, gunshots are loud, but not especially so compared to other sounds. In this film, every time a gun is fired or a bullet hits an object near the characters, it sounds just as impactful and terrifying as one would expect real gunfire to be toward the ones on the receiving end.
