By Ade D. Adeniji
The documentary Hazing begs the question: How far will people go just to fit in?
Our need to haze and be hazed has been explored in broader American popular culture for decades, with rituals most commonly depicted in the military or, naturally, college, but there are also some astounding scenes set in high school, camp, corporate life, and even veterinary school. Here’s a few of the wildest and most disturbing over-the-top depictions of hazing in film and TV.
[Content warning: This article contains examples of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.]
School Daze (1988): “G-Phi-G, that’s what we wanna be!”
Spike Lee’s complicated love letter to his real-life alma mater Morehouse College, School Daze’s story of Black students set at Mission College, a fictional historically Black college in Atlanta, Georgia, focuses on the grueling hazing of the also-fictional Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity.
Julian “Big Brother Almighty” (Giancarlo Esposito) leads his frat in hazing new pledges with a military cadence, blurring the lines between college campus and army barracks, as he uses a comically oversized custom paddle, sending every young pledger howling in pain.
“G-Phi-G, that’s what we wanna be!” In another unforgettable scene, pledging Gammites, with matching shaved heads, are chained together and made to pant like dogs—and unlike a lot of hazing scenes in real life or on film, do so out in the open, this time in the middle of a campus protest.
Euphoria (Season 1, Ep. 6): “Darkly I gaze into the days ahead…”
In HBO’s Euphoria, football star and NFL hopeful McKay (Algee Smith) hooks up with his girlfriend Cassie after a party. Then, eight masked men barge in, pin him to the floor, and rape him. One frat guy yells: “Sig Pi Nu!” as they rush out of the room as quickly as they appeared.
The painful, if manipulative moment, is consistent with the gritty show’s tone. In the aftermath, McKay locks himself in the bathroom, stares at his reflection, then steels himself, reemerges, and asks Cassie why her shirt is on, as if he’s still game for sex. [Read more for the actor’s reaction to this brutal scene.]
Full Metal Jacket (1987): “You will speak only when spoken to!”
Though Stanley Kubrick’s harrowing Vietnam War story Full Metal Jacket eventually gets to the battlefield, it’s the boot camp scenes that linger: Privates Joker and Pyle (Matthew Modine and Vincent D’Onofrio) struggle under their abusive drill instructor, Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, played masterfully by real-life drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey, who puts them through hazing, Marine Corps-style.
“If you ladies leave my island, you will be a weapon, you will be a minister of death praying for war. But until that day, you are pukes, you’re the lowest form of life on Earth,” Hartman bellows in an early scene, setting the tone for them to get in line or get out.
Hartman uses a Marine Corps training tactic of punishing a whole platoon for the mistake of one recruit (Pyle)—which encourages the others to brutally haze the “weak link” to get them in line.
In the sadistic “blanket party” scene, after a restrained Pyle receives his pummeling, he continues to howl in the darkness. The camera shifts back to a conflicted Joker, who covers his ears so that he can forget what he’s done while part of the mob.
Heavyweights (1995): “Observe the silence of the Chi”
An early Judd Apatow project and perhaps one of the most un-Disney Disney movies ever, Heavyweights tells the story of a group of heavyset kids who go to a summer camp, theoretically to improve self-esteem and achieve weight loss. But when motivational guru Tony Perkis (Ben Stiller) takes over, things get worse. (“Being an only child, educated by private tutors my whole life, I’m looking forward to interacting with children for the first time.”)
Tony Perkis’ brand of hazing includes forcing kids on a brutal 20-mile hike without water after they all fail a public weigh-in, one that Perkis hopes to use as an infomercial to push his sketchy weight loss product. When poor campers beg for a break, Perkis says they can take one hour to meditate before climbing another 1,000 feet with their bare hands.
Soon after this low point, campers fight back as a collective. The hazed kids use their numbers to work together to turn the tables on those in power.
Animal House (1978): “Oh boy, is this great!”
Famously farcical in its take on pledging and hazing, Animal House begins in the Fall of 1962 as several desperate Faber College freshmen seek to pledge the ramshackle Delta Tau Chi house, and take part in hazing rituals like shoplifting a Food King supermarket in ludicrous fashion.
In the most outrageous hazing scene, Kent “Flounder” Dorfman is forced to sneak frat-bully Neidermeyer’s horse into Dean Wormer’s office late at night. John Belushi’s Bluto and Bruce McGill’s D-Day give him a gun and tell him to shoot the horse, though Flounder doesn’t know the weapon is loaded with blanks. True to his name, he flounders, and instead fires the gun into the air. The horse dies all the same—from a heart attack.
Old School (2003): “Why am I holding this 30-pound cinder block in my hands?”
An even more over-the-top frat-like hazing scene is found in the brutal cinder block initiation test (which is amazingly based on a real-life hazing ritual, according to the book Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men), which will either make you laugh or cringe, or both.
Atlanta, Season 2, Ep. 9: “Do this dance for our new friends.”
An awkwardly funny sequence in this epic Atlanta episode has Earn, Paper Boi, and pals go through a series of mistakes and misadventures. They end up having to stay in a frat full of white guys in mid-pledge, who despite there, uh, being a Confederate flag flying on one wall and a gun room in the house, are more eager-to-please doofuses than dangerous.
As befitting the surreal waking nightmare feel of this episode, even though the white pledges are the ones directly humiliated as part of their oddball hazing—naked with sacks over their heads and forced to dance to D4L’S “Laffy Taffy”—the Black protagonists ultimately feel exhausted from their evening as if hazed, too.
Dazed and Confused (1993): “Lick me! All of you!”
An early vehicle for stars like Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich, and Ben Affleck, Richard Linklater’s teen slice of life Dazed and Confused moves hazing from college into a late 1970s Texas high school. In one long sequence, a band of seniors, including Affleck’s sadistic O’Bannion hunt down freshman pitcher Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) to bully him brutally with paddles that they treat like totems.
But interestingly, Dazed and Confused also portrays how young women can haze in bullying fashion, too. A mean girl before Mean Girls, Darla (Posey) puts young freshman girls through a steady diet of grueling pushups, condiment smearing, and verbal abuse. Mike, an intellectual young teenager played by Adam Goldberg, observes the scene and offers up a lesson: “This is what’s fascinating. Not only the school, but the entire community seems to be supporting this.”
For Men Only (1950s style)
The obscure 1952 film noir, luridly titled For Men Only features an amped-up ritual led by cruel frat bros, chasing a defiant young student to his death, and then Paul Henreid’s doctor trying to end the practice once and for all! The film was inspired by a real-life incident at UCLA in 1948, which, awfully, involved the death of a dog, reportedly as a result of a hazing ritual gone awry. The controversial puppy scene in this film, For Men Only (a.k.a. The Tall Lie), was censored at times in the U.S. and the U.K.
Raw (2016)
One of the most intense and grotesque series of hazing rituals depicted is in a scene from Julia Ducournau’s squeamish horror film Raw, a hard-to-safely-describe sequence in which a young woman (a soon-to-be-former vegetarian) in veterinary school is forced to eat raw animal organs. Of all the hazing scenes mentioned here, this one truly takes the cake, like it or not.
These stories show the extreme ways fictional versions of hazing will emphasize laughs or shocks, when the reality is less humorous and titillating, and more emotionally devastating.
Ade Adeniji is a Staff Writer forInside Philanthropy and an approved Rotten Tomatoes critic. He’s also written for outlets CBS News, WIRED, Newsweek, Mic, and The Rumpus, and blogs about film, television, and the majestic NBA on his own website, adeadeniji.com.
Related Films
