We list the films that made us feel the dirtiest.
What's the difference between scary and disturbing. Can a film be one and not the other? Which movies really make you go home from the theater in fear or cower into your couch considering some awful truth, squirming uncomfortably at some hideous sight or sound? We here at IGN Movies have put together a list of the 15 Most Disturbing Movies, looking back over the last few decades of cinema to find the films that made us feel dirty or voyeuristic or ashamed to be human, offered to you here in no particular order.The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Alexandre Aja's remake of the Wes Craven thriller The Hills Have Eyes both maintained and modernized the raw, gritty feel of the original, telling the same story of a family of terrorized travelers with unrelenting intensity and gore. There's certainly no lack of blood and guts to be found early on in the film, though it isn't the movie's gore factor that makes it so effectively disturbing. Rather, the assault on the camper about half-way through the film will undoubtedly test your horror-film resiliency. A gun is held to the head of a newborn while one of the attackers – a mutated redneck hill-dweller – suckles at the mother's breast. Meanwhile, a second attacker rapes the younger sister just inches away from the corpse of the gut-shot grandmother. All of which concludes with the brains of the new mother blown across the walls while the father, tied to a tree outside, screams and cries as flames engulf his body. It's a gut-wrenching, harrowing scene filmed with unflinching honesty, and never sentimentalized by director Aja. In many ways, it pulls fewer punches than Craven's original, which seems almost tame in comparison.
The Exorcist
There are definitely images to be found within The Exorcist that will both chill and disturb you, but perhaps nothing about the film is more disturbing than the simple conceit: There are forces of evil beyond our ability to control, beyond the natural world, which can press themselves upon us at any moment, robbing us of our minds and hearts, defeating our gods in favor of our devils. It is to the film's credit that much of the movie is played almost entirely within reality. We are witness to the relationship between a mother and her sick daughter and the soul-searching of a troubled priest. That these characters are treated as humans, allowed to be fully-fleshed and offered the appropriate drama, makes the scares that much more effective. A little girl lurching upward from the bed, molesting herself with a crucifix. Her head spinning around in a terrifying 360-degrees. The spider-walk down the stairs and the deep, throaty voice of the devil speaking through her. Each of these elements chills us to the bone for all the time we've spent in the company of real, legitimate characters, leading lives so very much like our own, suggesting that this could happen, perhaps, to us all…
A Clockwork Orange
Kubrick's classic adaptation of Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange offers a more stylized and poetic dissertation on the violent side of human nature. The story of a man named Alex and his "droogs" – his companions in ultra-violence – the film depicts a relentless succession of seemingly unmotivated murders, beatings and rapes. No character emerges from the film unscathed by their own avarice. Most chilling, however, is the often strange juxtaposition between the film's violent imagery and music seldom associated with such brutality, such as when Alex frequently croons "Singing in the Rain" when committing some of his most heinous acts. Malcolm McDowell's cold, icy performance, Kubrick's distant, unsentimental direction and the imagery of the Ludovico treatment make A Clockwork Orange one of the classically disturbing films about the dark depths of the human mind.
Audition
Audition is the kind of film made legendary by tales of audience members fainting, vomiting or fleeing the theater in a rage. Japanese director Takashi Miike – known for any number of equally controversial films – has crafted a truly disturbing, though never quite terrifying, film about obsession. When Aoyama falls in love with Asami, he can't know the atrocities she's committed. He can't know about the men she's murdered, and the dismembered, tongueless, footless, fingerless man she keeps in the burlap sack inside her home. The same man who laps up the vomit she hurls into a dog dish every evening. Aoyama can't know what she plans to do to him, paralyzing him, torturing him with needles in his eyes and severing his foot with piano wire. And neither can we. Which makes the film all the more stomach wrenching as we watch these acts unfold on-screen.
Salo
Prior to his murder, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini crafted a film based upon the Marquis de Sade's classic work, "The 120 Days of Sodom." That film was called Salo. It told the tale of four powerful men – a bishop, a duke, a magistrate and a president – all of whom retreat to a palace in Italy with a number of kidnapped men and women, as well as a handful of prostitutes, and require the participants to debase themselves in the most horrific of ways. Rape and torture abound, as well as the consumption of human excrement. Those who do not participate are murdered – some burned, some scalped, some dismembered and blinded. Almost every aspect of the film is exploitative and horrific, and intentionally so, making the film truly difficult to watch and almost impossible to enjoy in any real sense of the word.
El Topo
There's no one image or moment in Jodorowsky's classic surrealist film El Topo that constitutes the singular disturbing element. Rather, it's the film as a whole – a bizarre, ethereal work brimming with violent, unsettling imagery – that confounds and challenges the viewer. A mystic play on the spaghetti western, El Topo doesn't have a story so much as a collection of sequences – strange religious depictions, deformed midgets, slaughtered animals, odd sexuality, etc. It's an offbeat (some would say pretentious) mish-mash of images and ideas, resulting in a rather disturbing final film.
Hard Candy
Aside from pedophiles, there aren't a lot of people who are comfortable when confronted with the subject of pedophilia, which is what makes the beginning of Hard Candy so damn upsetting. Watching the seduction of a child in a scene where both characters – predator and prey – are portrayed by such strong actors makes the viewer practically want to crawl out of their skin. The opening moments play out so convincingly, with such a sense of reality, that you can't help but cringe at the prospect of the web being spun. Nor can you help but feel a rush of excitement when the tables are turned and the child becomes the threat, feeling oddly challenged once again as the girl culls from her captive some sense of sympathy we simply don't want to give to such a monster. The whole film is a verbal round of cat and mouse between opposing immoralities where nobody leaves unmarked by the experience… including the audience.
Requiem for a Dream
Darren Aronofsky's adaptation of the 1978 novel by Hubert Selby, Jr. is a dark, stylized, unwavering depiction of four characters' grim descent into the world of drug addiction. What the film does most effectively is to make each of the four characters into people about whom we care tremendously, wishing for them a future we know they'll never see. Ellen Burstyn's portrayal of an aging widow, left alone to her televised infomercials, is the standout here and perhaps the most uniquely sympathetic. Though by the end of the film, which concludes with a caustic montage, we're made to watch as the widow is hospitalized and treated with electroshock, as one lover is made into an amputee and another is forced to prostitute herself for drugs, and finally as the fourth of the group is assaulted by prison guards while undergoing violent detox. It's a painful end to a violent and heartbreaking story.
The Last House on the Left (1972)
With the remake only days away, The Last House on the Left, written and directed by Wes Craven, was originally released in 1972. The film is essentially an exercise in brutality, an examination of three sociopaths and the trauma they inflict upon two innocent girls. The act of rape is automatically a disturbing, stomach-churning element to include in any film – a powerful, impactful image – but Craven compounds the sexual assault of the two girls by adding intense sequences of almost unwatchable humiliation. Alone in the woods, the killers force the girls, both virgins, to engage in oral sex, commanding one by cutting the other. They're made to urinate. One of the girls is disemboweled and beheaded; while the second has the name of her attacker carved into her flesh before being shot by the side of a lake. That the parents eventually enact their brutal revenge later in the film is almost an unenjoyable consolation by that point, having witnessed what we've witnessed. But watching as the father kills the group's leader with a chainsaw, we cannot help but feel a shiver of vindication, making even the audience complicit in the film's brutality.
I Spit on Your Grave
Meir Zarchi's exploitation revenge tale is notorious for various reasons, not the least of which is the seemingly never-ending rape scene involving the film's main character, Jennifer. But once Jennifer heads out on a mission of vengeance against her four assailants, it's one of these villains' fates in particular that weighs heavy on many a young (male) viewer's mind even years after seeing the film. We're talking, of course, about the dismemberment of Johnny's most important member. As Jennifer (Camille Keaton) steps into the bathtub with Johnny (Eron Tabor, never to act again), she massages his man-unit just below the surface of the water, while surreptitiously picking up a knife that she has hidden next to the tub. As Johnny enjoys Jennifer's ministrations, good times most certainly go bad as the viewer can see that the girl's stroking has turned to a sort of sawing. ("It's so sweet it's painful," says Johnny.) And then -- Snap! -- the deed is done, and the world squirms.
Oldboy
If you were kidnapped and imprisoned in a small room for 15 years without any explanation, you'd be rightfully upset too. So when our hero finally manages an unlikely escape, he re-enters the world in a fairly cantankerous mood. Cue the deadly karate fight in which the traumatized escapee battles 25 goons down a long, cramped hallway only to discover that the last man standing may possess some useful information. Best way to retrieve said information? Teeth, meet hammer. And so, in a relentlessly steady piece of cinema, we're treated to the removal of this poor man's teeth beneath the grooves of a rusty hammer, tearing from his gums into a bloody pile of bone on the computer keyboard below. Like the dentist says, "Rinse. Spit. Repeat." And that isn't even the most disturbing bit! Factor into the equation that the man sleeps, albeit unknowingly, with his own daughter, eats a live, writhing squid and you've got a truly cringe worthy movie.
Jacob's Ladder
Picture a man with no face flickering and vibrating his way down a long, dark subway car. Picture tentacles slithering between the legs of your girlfriend, dancing. Picture visions of your own death, bleeding on the floor of some distant jungle. Hallucinations are inherently disturbing to us, evidence that we cannot always trust what our eyes, our ears, our senses show us to be true. Proof that even our own minds can lie to us. Jacob's Ladder is a film filled with stylized, gritty images of sheer insanity, creating a dark, wet world in which nothing can be believed. And not only does it spend most of its runtime creating a film about the fallibility of the mind, but it concludes with a troubling meditation on the afterlife, on the space between Heaven and Hell and the process of letting go. It's ultimately a film about mortality, our own mortality, and questions our readiness to shed the mortal coil for the light at the end of the darkness... or the darkness at the end of the light.
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!