CONTENT WARNING: Intense, graphic violence, sexual abuse, peodophilia, and rape discussed. This article was created to list these films, not endorse them. Read at your own peril.
Are you a fan of gore, violence and other disgusting things that make most common folk sick to their stomach? If the answer is yes, then you may need some serious help. But in the meantime, have I got a list for you.
Whether you use this list to avoid these movies at all costs or you just have too much morbid curiosity, these are definitely the worst of the worst.
I begin this list with the lightest film on here. I am sure many of you will have seen it as it gained mass popularity in 2009 for, err, interesting content. For anyone who hasn’t, the film tells the story of a creepy mad surgeon who abducts and mutilates a trio of tourists in order to reassemble them into a human centipede by connecting their digestive systems. It is truly a knee splittingly, face carvingly, ass eatingly, faeces swallowingly awesome film- which really takes the shock horror genre to new creative heights. Although at times funnier than it is scary, I have heard the sequel is even worse but never got around to watching it; once you have seen one human centipede you have seen them all …right?
Released in 1980, some would say this film is outdated in the gore department. But for its time, it was ground breaking. Banned in more than 50 countries, it still remains to this day one the most controversial movies in history. It was the first of the ‘found footage’ genre (think Blair Witch Project), telling the story of a search team looking for a lost film crew in the Amazon. The crew were working on a documentary about native tribes and cannibalism, but as the footage reveals, in an attempt to capture the primitive savagery of natives, they themselves turn savage. With plenty of rape, village burning and human shish-kebabbing, the scenes in the film were so realistic that the director, Deodato, was actually arrested under suspicion of murder. This film is not for the faint of heart.
The second film in the infamous Guinea Pig series, this work is one of the most lasting pieces of Japanese mutilation cinema, in that it never quite leaves your memory. Looking like a grotesque and realistic snuff film, Flowers depicts a woman on a bed being dismembered by a man in a Samurai outfit and that is it. An hour and twenty six minutes of nothing much more than slow-burning disfigurement. Surely that shouldn’t be so disturbing by today’s standards but really it is. There is something about the simplicity that makes it so harrowing, with little plot or dialogue to distract you from the act itself. This
is a very chilling movie that successfully depicts the calm detached nature of a killer.
When debut director Srdjan Spasojevic made A Serbian Film, it was like he said to himself ‘hmm what is uttermost limit of human debauchery that can even be fathomed, let alone shown on screen?” And that is just what he created. The film is about washed up porn star, Milos, who takes one last job in order to move his wife and son out of oppressive Serbia but his new director doesn’t tell him what the role entails, leading to a series of grotesque scenes, each worse than the other. The whole thing is just nonstop violent torture porn. I warned you this list wasn’t for the average Joe.
Salo, while not as shockingly violent or extreme as some of the other films on this list, is a film that is just relentless in its disturbingness and is very uncomfortable to watch. From start to finish, there is literally no end or even break from the violent gore and assault. After watching it you are left with this feeling of “why the hell did I just watch that?”. Based on the 1785 book The 120 Days of Sodom by none other than Marquis de Sade (the man in which the word sadism is derived) you’d expect nothing less than pure sadistic gluttony and that is what this film delivers. The film focuses on four wealthy, corrupt men who kidnap eighteen teenagers and subject them to four months of sexual, mental and physical abuse, followed by death. For those who like to look deeper in a film’s meaning, Salo centers around themes of political corruption, abuse of power, fascism and perversion. Basically it is about how absolute power creates absolute malevolence.