The Technicolor Yawn in Technicolor: The Top 6 Instances Of Puking On Film

How did you sleep last night? I ask because I didn't — in large part because I spent most of it awake with a 4-year old who was apparently trying to turn herself inside-out. The good news is that while I was enjoying this extended dance remix tour of my daughter's digestive system, my thoughts wandered to the many and splendored ways that this particular facet of existence has been illuminated on film over the years. In some contexts, it has been treated as comedy. In others, it's an element of high drama or great horror. But no matter how it is presented, these scenes create a portrayal of humanity at its most vulnerable — and, in the process, may even teach us a little something about ourselves.

(cue: a very special episode music...)

• Team America
I can only presume that you're already familiar with Team America, the Academy Award-winning geopolitical documentary featuring hardcore puppet sex. Lovingly crafted by the sensitive minds behind South Park, Team America features an entire galaxy of stars (my personal favorite: Matt Damon), the Eiffel Tower getting blown to smithereens, and a scene in which our hero Gary - having descended into alcoholism - hits bottom and proceeds to engage in a bout of epic vomiting that must been seen to be believed. 56. Full. Seconds. Of. Puppet. Vomiting. So staggering is this mannequinamation expurgation of effluvia that its status as the ne plus ultra of onscreen hurling is challenged by only a single precedent...

• Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
Ah, Mr. Creosote. Who can say no to a wafer-thin mint?

• Stand By Me
And then we have the story of Lardass Hogan. Does everyone remember this? It's one of the great 'story-within-a-story" moments in film history, in which Stephen King stand-in character Gordie (he who will grow up to be a successful writer) tells his friends a story about a big kid ("it's not his fault; it's his glands") who finds an opportunity to revenge years of savage mockery at the town pie-eating contest... where he preps by downing gallons of castor oil and raw eggs before plowing through a pallet-full of blueberry pie. What follows is not only akin to the sight of someone opening up a fire hose on a crowd, but also the trigger to one of the great chain-horking moments in cinematic history. Like dominoes they fall...

• The Exorcist
It's kinda hard now to project yourself back in time and realize just how shocking and horrifying - in the true, "this fills me with horror" sense of the word - The Exorcist was when it was first released. The sight of a white, upper-middle class girl (a true child of privilege) abruptly saturated to overflowing with rage and bile and profanity offered clear metaphoric reference to the generational trials of the late 1960s, when the chipper and ultra clean-cut Eisenhower youth metamorphosized into the long-haired, drug-addled, Beatles-discussing, free-loving Manson family members who would gleefully destroy all that had come before them.

Plus, you know... the devil. Not a monster - a vampire, a werewolf, a great lumbering beast to be festooned upon an aluminum lunchbox - but the timeless and evil yang to the bright and comforting Judeo-Christian yin that had been the crux of western culture for centuries. An antagonist who would not be frightened by fire, killed by silver bullets or scurry into a corner at the sight of two sticks brought together in the shape of a simple cross: this was the antagonist, the most ancient and hidden of all enemies brought to terrible new life within the thrashing, tormented body of a beautiful teenage girl.

Given this context, you can begin to understand why this film shook so many people to the core — and still does today. The idea of our own children turning against us, transforming before our eyes from the pulsing heart of our world - the smiling, dreaming receptacle of our greatest hopes and wishes - into a creature of foul tongue and temper; a unrecognizable thing capable of defying laws of society and physics, masturbating with a crucifix, and vomiting terrible, bilious green into the face of a beloved family priest.

At the end, good does triumph over evil. But there is a cost; a warm and compassionate life is given freely... and none escape untouched.

• Alien
Who among us hasn't enlivened an event with family or friends - Thanksgiving dinner, for example - by suddenly standing up, horking out a bellyful of cranberry relish and sweet potatoes, then throwing themselves onto the table (one hand cleverly hidden beneath one's shirt) and mimicking a tiny, voracious little creature suddenly bursting out of our chests and hissing angrily at the other diners?

Obviously, the horking in this case is secondary to some of the other bodily fluids (and tissues, for that matter) that spray across the screen, but really... it's all magic of a kind, and I for one cannot wait until my own kids are old enough to appreciate and re-enact this touchstone moment on their own.

• The Sixth Sense
In the right hands, vomit can be the substance of sympathy. (By the way: this may be the single greatest sentence ever written). In the midst of M. Night Shyamalan's goofy Signs deadly boring Lady in the Water okay but ultimately kind of disappointing The Village this is so fucking horrible I want to kill everyone involved The Happening brilliant The Sixth Sense, there is an incredible scene when young, impossibly innocent Haley Joel Osment finds himself sitting alone, in the dark, as the air becomes unnaturally chilled and he discovers himself face-to-face with something not of this world. Our mounting sense of dread and terror as this scene develops is almost unbearable — and then, in little more than an instant, all that saturated emotion spills out of us with relief and strange laughter and then, just as quickly, a sudden and overwhelming sense of sympathy and sadness for that which, until a moment ago, been the source of such terrible fear.

As Osment sits in his tent, in his bedroom at night, the room grows cold with presence... and suddenly - in a realization of every child's nightmares - he finds a ghost sitting just a foot away. She is a young girl, anguished and beautiful and wounded, a green-gray flood of something awful streaming from her mouth.

It is a primal and wondrous moment, and Osment's entirely reasonable reaction - running away and hiding - transforms into a strange measure of pride and disbelief as he suddenly finds within himself the impossible bravery to stand tall, talk forward and pull the collapsed tent away (removing the boundary between our world and what lies beyond)... to confront the dead.

And what he finds is heartbreaking. Her pain, his fear and bravery, and the way in which they come together and shape the breathless scene that follows... ultimately, we discover that - in essence - vomit is the lubricant of the human heart.