A look at 7 classic creepy films about haunted severed hands
Our hands are marvels. Truly. And we rely on them so much: feeding, holding, writing, working and other stuff which we won’t mention on a family website. But as the horror genre is prone to doing, the visceral, terrifying concept of losing control of one’s hands has been exploited often. From early films like the brilliant Peter Lorre vehicle Mad Love to not-so-brilliant 90s comedy horror favorite Idle Hands, having our hands doing bad things against our will is frightening. But some of the wildest horror films go a step farther and have hands actually liberated from arms running wild, taking on lives of their own and getting up to no good. I’m not talking about helpful severed hands like “Thing” from The Addams Family (comic strip, TV series and film franchise) but really evil, sentient severed hands that really enjoy committing murder most foul.
Here then are our picks for the 7 greatest evil severed hand horror movies ever. Like all of these listy-thingies, our picks are subjective and we’re more than open to suggestions from you, dear readers, as to other key creepy crawling claws in arcane cinema we may have missed.
So grip something tight and have a read below and discuss in the comments section!