The first time I heard of a “degloving injury” was when I watched Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Gerald’s Game in 2017. In the film, the protagonist is left handcuffed to a bed in a remote vacation home with no means to contact help. Her ultimate solution is to slice open her wrist so the handcuff will rip off the skin on her hand, allowing her to escape. It’s unequivocally one of the most shocking and horrific moments of cinema we’ve seen in the last 25 years; arguably an all-timer.
This brings me to another degloving injury, when I used my HBO Max subscription to watch critically acclaimed series, The Pitt. In the first episode, a woman is brought to the emergency room after a subway train decimated the lower half of her right leg. The limb is unnaturally twisted and the epidermis is totally stripped away – and the camera doesn’t shy away from showing the severity of the damage.
