The Strangers

You could make the argument that The Strangers isn't so much a disturbing film as a scary one, and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong. It's not particularly gory. It's about two lovers trapped in a house with some crazy people outside. All of which describes a handful of similar, fairly generic movies. But it's a high-quality scare-fest that disturbs for one very real reason – it's plausible. When you really consider the matter, the reason that any good horror film sends us home at night to lock our doors and leave the lights on is the knowledge that all that separates us from classic movie victims is the willingness of a few crazy killers to come knocking. For all our sense of safety, we're largely defenseless. And if somebody should set their mind to come for us – to kill us, to torture us – would we really be able to stop them?





Videodrome

Director David Cronenberg has given us more than his fair share of stomach-churning cinematic moments during the course of his career, from the head-exploding exploits of Scanners to the head-exploding exploits of The Fly. But Videodrome, his 1983 meditation on sex, death and technology, stands as perhaps his most troubling picture. While the film can't hold a candle to modern so-called "torture porn" in terms of its make-up effects and gore, it's the disquieting undertones of the overall movie that really sticks it in you and twists. James Woods plays a cable TV channel operator who, while scouring the airwaves for new and ever-more exploitative programming, stumbles upon a show called Videodrome – a plot-less, character-less, single-shot kind of portrait of torture and death. He loves it, a little too much eventually, but the film's evocative imagery continues to haunt the rest of us to this day. The low-rent scenes of murder and torture that Woods happens upon on the hidden airwaves of 1980s underground cable TV aren't particularly bloody, but they become increasingly disturbing as Woods comes to realize that they're really happening and not fictionalized in any way. And when his masochistic girlfriend (played by Deborah Harry – Blondie herself) shows up in an episode as a "contestant," the film becomes truly disturbing. Still, the most troubling part of the whole film is probably the finale, when Woods pulls his gun out (from inside a hole in his stomach) and mimics what he's just seen on TV, namely putting a bullet in his own head. "Long live the new flesh!"




Cannibal Holocaust

Ruggero Deodato's 1979 Cannibal Holocaust has been known to fans of the genre for many years thanks to its is-it-real-or-not premise and intense (sometimes mondo) gore, though the low-budget Italian picture briefly penetrated the mainstream consciousness back in the late '90s when it was suggested by some that The Blair Witch Project had in fact ripped off the film's premise. True enough, both pictures share the same basic logline: A group of explorers are lost in the wild, with their last days and final moments being relayed to the audience via found documentary footage. But whereas Blair Witch turned out to be a not very gross (but kinda scary) gimmick, Cannibal Holocaust was a completely disgusting (but not at all scary) hoax. A mondo gore film either depicts or claims to depict actual images of mutilation and mayhem, and unfortunately Cannibal Holocaust falls squarely in that category. (As a matter of fact, Deodato had to prove in an Italian court that the scenes of human brutality were not real.) Beatings, murders, rapes, castrations, beheadings, impalements – it's all here, but it's all fake. But the moments of animal murder in the film are apparently real, with the most heinous being the killing of a giant turtle.




Obviously, dear readers, these aren't the only disturbing movies ever made. Chime in below with the movies that upset you the most, for better or worse!