The Disturbing John Travolta Scene That Still Haunts Our Dreams
John Travolta is a legendary actor, with an astonishing filmography to back that status up. Travolta started acting in the mid 1970s, and achieved fame with movies like "Saturday Night Fever" and "Grease" before having something of a career downturn. This changed once again with the release of 1994's classic Quentin Tarantino film "Pulp Fiction," which gave Travolta something of a career resurgence. That film also earned Travolta his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and arguably led to plethora for future roles.
Given his rather large filmography of classic films, it's no surprise that Travolta has quite a few memorable movie moments. More than a few, such as the dancing sequence with Uma Thurman, come from "Pulp Fiction" itself, but there are plenty of other scenes to choose from as well. However, only one particular part in one of Travolta's most famous movie roles still finds a way to permanently haunt the dreams of fans to this very day.
The face transplant scene in Face/Off is still horrifying to watch
Many viewers may remember a little gem of a film from 1997 called "Face/Off," which had something of an unusual premise. The movie starred John Travolta and Nicolas Cage as mortal enemies Sean Archer and Castor Troy, respectively. During the course of the film, Archer undergoes an operation to literally have his face surgically removed and replaced with Troy's. Naturally enough, the villainous Troy eventually assumes the identity of Archer and chaos ensues.
However, it's that initial face transplant scene that still lives in the nightmares of fans everywhere. It's a fairly graphic and surprisingly realistic sequence, and there's good reason for that. According to a behind-the-scenes featurette, an effects team essentially created two life-sized clones of both Travolta and Cage. These body doubles were remote controlled as well to imitate real-life human breathing and twitching to add a further layer of realism to the face transplant. In the video itself, Cage expresses a level of disbelief over these clones, especially the more life-like features that were used.
It's hard not to make the argument that, had the film been made today, the filmmakers would have most likely used CG technology to achieve such a feat. But there's something a little more pure and terrifying in equal measure about the idea of actually bringing in effects experts and having them craft a realistic body clone for Travolta and Cage. It's definitely one of those movie moments that will hopefully live on in the minds of viewers for yet another 25 years.