"WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?!"
Where, oh where to begin with the horrifying imagery used in The Cell? Can you even begin to imagine the kind of things you expect to find in the mind of a serial killer?
- The boy who suddenly turns into a snarling werewolf-like creature.
- Carl's serial killer modus operandi: he puts the victim in a glass tank which periodically showers them with water and stops, before turning on and not stopping until the victim drowns. Carl then takes the bodies back to his house, bleaches their hair and skin such that they resemble porcelain dolls, and then proceeds to masturbate whilst suspending himself above the corpse via chains attached to piercings in his back (as Roger Ebert noted, "[Carl's] libido needs such complicated tending it hardly seems worth the trouble"). The bodies are then fitted with a collar (signifying Carl's "possession" of them) and unceremoniously dumped in an area just out of sight, with the implication being that he wants the authorities to find them.
- Worse still is the fate of the first victim we see: when Carl arrives to monitor her status, she's Not Quite Dead, and in a Jump Scare briefly spasms and thrashes about in death throes before finally expiring for good. This even freaks Carl himself out!
- The horse getting sliced up sushi-style. Even worse, it's still alive afterwards.
- The collection of doll-like, corpse-like women in dioramas behind glass panels, attached to crude machinery that jerks them about in grotesque, sadomasochistic, sexual poses while they moan and groan, and one of them is bound to a dentist chair with her mouth pried open.
- The giant, rubbery-looking female bodybuilder creeping silently around behind Deane and ambushing her when you'd think her footsteps would be thunderous.
- The demon with purple curtains attached to his back advancing down the steps and screaming at Deane: "WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?!" That's the killer, within his own mind. That's why he's so surprised to see her; she's someone he hadn't thought up himself, inside his mind.
- The scenes of child abuse with Carl's father beating him with a belt, calling him a "faggot" and burning him with an iron for playing with dolls. Overlaps with Tear Jerker.
- Novak being shackled down, having a hole cut in his chest and getting his intestines pulled out and spiraled around a rotisserie.
- Demon Carl getting his nipples ripped off by Catherine.....by having his piercings yanked off!
- The way Deane entered the serial killer's mind: a cloth mask is lowered over her face and slowly, she zooms into the stitches of the cloth, until suddenly she's flying through a thicket of dodgy threadwork and nightmarish dolls jittering across her perspective. The only break from this Big-Lipped Alligator Moment is when she suddenly finds herself watching the killer's baptism- which we later discover resulted in a seizure and near-drowning experience.
- When they enter Carl the second time around, it's starts off as a malfunction in the procedure having the technician Henry ask Catherine to find a reboot switch the room. She then discovers she has somehow shrunk and looks behind to find herself suspended. Catherine realizes she's already inside his mind hinting of the possibility that Carl, while comatose, is somewhat aware of what Catherine and the team are doing.
