Editor’s Note: The following piece contains graphic descriptions of horrific, taboo, and potentially triggering imagery and content.We delight in watching acts of violence on screen. From the shenanigans ofLooney Tunescartoons to the Avengers beating the shit out of Thanos in a four-quadrant blockbuster, moviegoers get a kick out of people getting a kick. Perhaps it’s an act of vicarious catharsis; perhaps it’s because we know it’s all fake which gives us “permission” to enjoy it; perhaps it’s because the actual stakes, both in and out of the text, seem so low. I am not here to indict folks who enjoy this kind of content — I am one of them. Instead, I’m here to examine what happens when filmmakers turn this dial past the breaking point.
There isa subset of cinema that is interested in exploring the extreme, the profane, the taboo, the disturbing. A brand of movie that brands the viewer, searing their brain with unforgettable imagery and dissection of the most base and perverse human impulses — impulses which just might have something in common with the more “sanitized” form of screen violence we find acceptable (whoops, I guess I am self-indicting a little!). Some of these movies are made merely to shock with empty provocation; some have something genuine to say at their core; all of them will disturb you.
Here, then, are the most disturbing movies of all time, a list of transgressive cinema that will leave you shell-shocked and cowering. Watch at your own risk.
1A Serbian Film (2010)
Directed by Srđan Spasojević
The bluntness of this film’s title should clue you in for the bluntness of its content.A Serbian Filmputs the entirety of Serbia in its crosshairs; its directorSrđan Spasojevićexplicitly comments not just on the broader implications of living in a war-torn, fascist-leaning society and government, but on the specific hypocrisies of this same government funding bourgeois, “safe” films that seek to whitewash their own atrocities. To make this point, Spasojević and co-writer Aleksandar Radivojević have crafted a plot that takes us past the point of the underworld.
Retired porn star Miloš (Srđan Todorović) is having trouble taking care of his family. So, despite his better instincts, he agrees to star in an artsy porn film by a provocative auteur (Sergej Trifunović). However, the director’s methods and subjects involve tranquilizing Miloš into a state of catatonia and forcing him to do unspeakable things on camera. And when I say “unspeakable,” I am not being hyperbolic. Taboos involving sexual violence, necrophilia, incest, and pedophilia are lensed with unsparing detail, giving the film an instant sense of notoriety on the festival circuit. The final shot and decision made are purely evil.
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2Antichrist (2009)
Deep, intellectual art-house flick, or a sick, depraved entry in the “torture porn” horror genre?DirectorLars von Trier’sAntichristmakes forstrong arguments to be made on either side, making it, arguably, the most divisive film on this list. In a nutshell, the film follows “He” (Willem Dafoe) and “She”(Charlotte Gainsbourg) who retreat to their cabin, “Eden,” in the woods after the tragic death of their young son in an effort to confront their grief. On the one side,Antichristis a stark and visceral exploration of loss, a deeply symbolic interpretation of Original Sin, and the battle of rationality versus the mysterious unknown. On the other side, there’s a doe with a stillborn fawn halfway out of her, a talking, self-disemboweling red fox, violent intercourse at the base of a dead tree with corpses in its roots, a block of wood smashed into a groin, a handjob with a bloody “happy ending,” and, in its most infamous scene, a clitoris that gets cut off. Be dared by the graphic scenes of sex and violence, stay for the cerebral.— Lloyd Farley
Antichrist
A grieving couple retreat to their cabin in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage, but nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.
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3Audition (1999)
Takashi Miikeis a beyond-prolific director, whose most notorious films, likeIchi the KillerandVisitor Q, regularly soak the viewer in imaginative viscera and psychologically punishing taboos. Why doesAuditionmake the cut over his many other films? In part, because of its borderline-cruel bait-and-switch.Auditionstarts with a premise and tone of a light romantic drama — Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is a lonely widower who’s looking for a new love. Under the advice of his film producer friend (Jun Kunimura), Aoyama starts literally “auditioning” women to potentially be his love, and immediately falls for Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina). The two pledge deep, melancholy feelings of love for each other. And then… shit gets weird. Miike’s switch-flip smacks you in the face, forcing you to confront the inherently problematic premise of the film and the inherent sexism baked into dating, romantic pursuits, and even the film industry. When Asami Yamazaki finally starts acting with her own agency… hoo boy, look out. Images of needle-based torture, dismemberment, and eating a bodily fluid that definitely shouldnotbe eaten collide with intense psychosexual obsession in a way that sledgehammers the viewer into submission. Which is, precisely, YamazakiandMiike’s goal.
A widower takes an offer to screen girls at a special audition, arranged for him by a friend to find him a new wife. The one he fancies is not who she appears to be after all.
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4August Underground’s Mordum (2003)
Fred Vogel’s Toetag Pictures is an independent horror film production company and studio known for low-budget, boundary-pushing works of extreme cinema. Their defining statement comes in the form of a brutal, aggressively nihilistic, found-footage trilogy of mayhem known asAugust Underground. All three films involve a found family of serial killers traveling around and shooting footage of each other instilling miserable forms of torture and death on their hapless victims. All three films are shot in jagged, lo-fi quality, resulting in an aesthetic that feels as close to a literal snuff film as anyone has produced in a narrative feature film. All three films feature stomach-churning realistic effects, and committed actors willing to do wild, wild shit to each other. But the second chapter,August Underground’s Mordum, might be the most abjectly disturbing of the lot. Bodies are nothing more than anonymous opportunities for morbid dissections and corruption, and the Toetag team is more than willing to shove it all in our faces, with each scene managing to top the previous one in its horrific cruelty. Is there a point beyond the chaos of the content on its face value? That’s a question I’m not sure Toetag is interested in asking.
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5Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
A notorious 1980 horror film that is a foundational text in the found footage genre was straight up banned in several countries,resulted in the directorRuggero Deodatogetting arrested and having to prove in court the special effects were faked, helped kickstart a wave of cannibal exploitation cinema, and influenced filmmakers in its wake (perhaps most explicitlyEli RothwithThe Green Inferno).Cannibal Holocausttells, in mockumentary form, the story of a group of anthropologists who travel to an Amazonian village to try and rescue a group of filmmakers left there.
When they arrive, they discover reels of footage with horrific actions perpetrated by the cannibalistic natives, resulting in a knotted, metatextual narrative that pokes aggressively at white saviorism, colonialism, the role of sensational television news in exacerbating violence, and even the role of the audience member watching this very film. Now, isCannibal Holocaustonly interested in making these points with unimpeachable intellectual acumen? Certainly not. The images shown, in unsparing detail, are clearly designed to court controversy, and in some sequences of actual animal cruelty, may walk a line into purposeless text for some. But there’s no denyingCannibal Holocausthas a lot on its mind, and it’s willing to eat some brains to try and make its many points.
Cannibal Holocaust
During a rescue mission into the Amazon rainforest, a professor stumbles across lost film shot by a missing documentary crew.
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The debut feature of notorious nightmare-stirrer/meteorologistDavid Lynch,Eraserheadis likely the closest I’ve ever felt to living in the casual, gnawing surrealism of a real-life nightmare in cinematic form. Using stark black and white photography and inexplicably terrifying sound design, Lynch tells the story of Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a feeble and sensitive man who lives in a bizarre, post-industrialized apocalyptic society. His life is turned upside down by the presence (or threat) of domesticity, child-rearing, sexual intercourse, and even the afterlife. Lynch presents these challenges both with a searingly skin-crawling style and no style at all; while the production design of this film is peerless in its atmosphere, so many of the film’s haunting images occur almost inadvertently, with no comment on its bleak oddness. All of this culminates in the revelation of a child whose visage remains controversial for the methods in which Lynch may have made it. Somehow,Eraserheadmakes speakable the things in our subconscious we can’t speak, by barely speaking at all. Sing it with me: “In heaven everything is fine…”
Eraserhead
Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.
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7Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
If the aforementionedAugust Undergroundis the thrash metal of the “found footage serial killer family horror film,“Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killeris the quiet jazz improvisation.John McNaughton’s low-budget 1986 horror film features a career-making lead performance fromMichael Rookerin the title role. Rooker’s work here is astonishing, managing to find the crevasses of humanity in a person so wired to inflict nothing but nihilistic, meaningless damage upon those around him, especially those who dare show anything resembling human affection. As for the found footage of it all:Henryis not entirely rendered using in-text cameras.
Many of the film’s quieter, more psychologically bruising scenes are shot in simple, stark 16mm coverage, McNaughton’s colors feeling atypically deep and luxurious for such a low-budget, horrific affair. But the film’s most startlingly brutal moments of murderous carnage — and, importantly, the dread leading up to said outbursts — are filmed within the text by Henry and his crew. The casualness of the carnage, the inevitability of such wanton destruction is what will linger in the mind long after viewingHenry. It’s a portrait of a serial killer and a portrait of what can happen if we allow ourselves to be dehumanized and desensitized to a point where empathy is impossible.
8The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011)
Directed by Tom Six
Tom Six’sThe Human Centipede, released in 2009, had a raucous premise that instantly became notorious not just among extreme cinephiles, but throughout the general populace. What if you made a “human centipede” by, y’know, attaching people’s mouths to other people’s butts? I wouldn’t blame you if that premise makes you giggle, and the first film’s weirdly bright color scheme and the palatable performance fromDieter Laserlean into the accessible, blackly comic nature of it all. But its sequel,The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), takes any sense of accessibility and runs it over with a car, crushing its skull. And yes, that is, unfortunately, a hint at something that happens in the film.
Borrowing a touch ofWes Craven’s New Nightmare,Human Centipede 2centers onLaurence R. Harveygiving one helluva committed performance as a malady-suffering man who is obsessed with —brace yourself — the Tom Six motion pictureThe Human Centipede. This audacious meta-choice is heightened to its most obvious extreme as Harvey, who’s gotten a taste for macabre blood after dispatching with his abusive mother graphically, decides to create his own human centipede out of his own very,veryamateurish “medical supplies.” Sitting at the top of this centipede?
Brace yourself —Ashlynn Yennie, playing “Ashlynn Yennie, star ofThe Human Centipede.” While there is something undeniably engaging and unexpectedly self-critical with Six folding in his mythology on itself, he mostly uses this as a launching pad for depictions of unspeakable cruelty in sickeningly greasy black-and-white. The aforementioned “skull-crushing” sequence happens to a person you donotwant to see it happen to; barbed wire is used in a sexually violent way; and a scene involving the human centipede, um, “eating” is beyond vile.The Human Centipede 2feels like the film everyone expected part 1 to be, for “better” or for worse.
The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
Inspired by the fictional Dr. Heiter, disturbed loner Martin dreams of creating a 12-person centipede and sets out to realize his sick fantasy.
9In a Glass Cage (1986)
Directed by Agustí Villaronga
Of all the various subgenres of exploitation cinema, Nazisploitation might be the most eager to break and shove taboos in your face. The ripple effect of psychosexual Nazi-evoking horror shows likeIlsa, She Wolf of the SS,andGestapo’s Last Orgycould be seen in prestige pictures likeThe Night Porterand in modern works likeRob Zombie’sGrindhousetrailerWerewolf Women of the SSand the Amazon programHunters.In a Glass Cagethreads the Nazisploitation needle between “empty shock value” and “something to say” queasily but effectively, using uncommonly atmospheric filmmaking to boot.
The person in the titular glass cage is Klaus (Günter Meisner), a former Nazi doctor who tortured, experimented on and committed horrific acts of sexual violence to children both during the Holocaust and after, where he has exiled himself in Spain. In an episode of his demons catching up to him, Klaus attempts suicide and fails, resulting in his being incubated in an iron lung. A nurse by the name of Angelo (David Sust) offers to take care of him, but he’s no ordinary nurse. He is a victim of Klaus', grown up and eager not just to get his revenge on the Nazi doctor, but to inhabit the identity of the Nazi doctor as literally as possible. The resulting narrative is punishing, disquieting, and psychologically fascinating; an effective dissection of the lingering traumas and effects that occur for both abusers and the abused.
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10Inside (2007)
Directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo
Of the many violating film experiences produced during the 2000s cinematic movement known asNew French Extremity(Martyrs,Trouble Every Day,High Tension, and more, French pieces of cinema that brutally render all things transgressive), none stick to my bones as horrifically asInside(known in France asÀ l’intérieur). The plot is beyond simple: Sarah (Alysson Paradis), a recent widow, is pregnant and alone. Then a woman named simply “La Femme” (Béatrice Dalle), invades her home, obsessed with the idea that Sarah’s baby belongs to her. And she’s gonna get it by any method she can. What results is a viciously nasty, physical, visceral experience of abject brutality and self-defense, swirled up aggressively with psychological provocations of trauma, entitlement, and motherhood — all involving an incredibly pregnant woman. The final moments of this taut, terrifying film make me shudder to this day.
