The Horror, The Horror

I’m not what you would call ‘critical’ of any movies, really. But I’ve seen several that I’ve suffered through. Now don’t confuse my suffering with bad production values, horrible acting or just terrible writing. Even those types of movies most always have some sort of redemption in my eyes. My suffering stems from the subject matter, and sometimes the tone, of certain movies. I’ve got a list below of some of the movies I’ve seen that really bothered me in one way or another. Some I haven’t even been able to finish. Also, many of these movies below I love, but they’ve fallen further into my ‘Brain Bleach’ bucket. I can’t wash some of those images from my mind. I’ve even categorized them (don’t try to make sense of it. In my head it’s the way they should be). I will try to be spoiler free, because the shock of seeing some of these scenes for the first time is part of the joy of the experience.

Taboos – Hard to find any truly horrifying taboos nowadays, eh? Nope, not at all.

Aftermath/Genesis – The clinical gore is tame compared to what happens next in this tale of autopsy room love. Ugh.

Nekromantik/Nekromantik 2 – You don’t really need me to elaborate. Just look at the titles…

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and her Lover – The climax of this movie still makes me wince.

Torture – Most of the movies in the ‘Grim 70s’ section of my list would probably feel right at home here, but the masochism is overwhelmingly rough to watch in these.

Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom – You can pretend this is an art house film with insightful thoughts about class struggle and wartime etiquette, but you’d be lying to yourself and everybody else.

Clockwork Orange – Love this movie. Hate the way it gets under my skin. Damn you Kubrick.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial killer – Like watching a violent home movie, dirty and raw.

Natural Born Killers – Love the soundtrack, love the schizophrenic style shifting. Don’t appreciate the violence like I did when I was young and naïve. Oliver Stone’s work on this is bipolar and great.

Funny Games / The Strangers– Home invasion and the horror of inevitability…

Girl Next Door (Jack Ketcham) – Violence against children made all the more horrible because it’s based on a true story.

Cannibal Holocaust – Sure, people have it rough in this gore fest, but the real footage of animal cruelty is pretty hard to take.

Audition – Aaaugh!! This starts out as something that could easily be a romantic comedy, but no, no, it’s not that at all. Pretty graphic, but really the main actress’ look of joy at the torture is what makes this really unnerving. From the Japanese director Takashi Miike.

War – It really is Hell, but sometimes the entertainment made from conflict is much more disturbing than you expect

Men Behind the Sun – True story of Japanese war crimes against the Chinese and Russians in the latter part of World War II

Deer Hunter – The Russian roulette scene at the end still beats me up. Michael Cimino really hit it out of the park with this upsetting, sad movie.

Grim 70s – In the waning years of the Vietnam conflict, filmmakers were making some dark, dark films. None of this horror spiced with comedy here.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre – The original twisted, brutal classic that still bothers me and I still enjoy quite a bit. Tobe Hooper, whatever happened to you?

Last House on the Left – Brutal remake of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.  Loss of innocence for an entire family. Ditto Wes Craven; haven’t seen you in a while either, and I forgive you for Scream (there’s not really anything to forgive. You and Kevin Williamson kept the horror scene alive in the 90s, with your tongue in cheek take on the genre).

I Spit on Your Grave – I can’t think of any other movie where I asked myself during the first part, “When is this ever going to end”?

Straw Dogs – Dustin Hoffman’s weak, ineffectual everyman forced into a corner frustrates me at every turn. A nihilistic Sam Peckinpah working his magic.

Seedy Underbelly/Hidden Rot – The world isn’t always what it seems, and these movies drive that fact home in horrible fashion.

Blue Velvet – From the severed ear to Dennis Hopper’s over the top performance, this movie forces me to question the happy reality of everything around me. David Lynch, you deserve a list of your own.

Requiem for a Dream – Sure, TV shows like Intervention has numbed us to the depths of drug induced suffering, but God this movie is horrifying. Darren Aronofsky keeps me coming back for more despite difficult subject matter. I could talk for quite a while about how The Fountain affected me, but, once again, a story for another time.

Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance/Oldboy/Lady Vengeance) –   Kidnappings gone wrong, violence against children, and revenge, revenge, revenge. I love these movies, but they deliver a punch to the stomach. The end of Oldboy will leave your jaw on the ground. Chan-wook Park is a great director and I can’t wait to see his Night Fishing short.

Bad Lieutenant (not the pulpy and awesome Port of Call) - Oh God, Harvey Keitel. Why do you have to be so naked and disturbing?

WTF?? – Sometimes you just can’t explain it with any words.

Human Centipede (I think not) – With the exception of one scene (and if you watch it, you’ll know what I mean), this is full of more suspense and twisted imagination that you’d expect. Give it a chance, but be ready to retch a bit during the aforementioned scene.

Antichrist – Surrealist horror and a seriously painful take on the roles of men, women and parents in the world. This is on my list for its stylized mutilation, to the self and others. Lars Von Trier, as goofy and odd as he is personally, can make truly unsettling movies.

Eraserhead - As weird as cinema gets, and awesome in its sound design. The horror of the sight of the ‘baby’ is a nightmare on the screen.  There need to be more auteurs like David Lynch in the world, making cinema that requires more from the viewer than just the price of a ticket.

Pink flamingos – Deviancy and perversion galore! It contains sexual perversity, incest and a final scene that pales most others in the ability to make you gag. This is all done with a gleefulness that’s unnerving to say the least. Hell, we could throw in several of John Waters’ films and they’d be right at home in my list.

Dumplings (3 Extremes) – Horrifying premise, but it really is a great movie.

Crash – A group of people who get turned on by car crashes and the extremes that they are willing to go to. Mr. David Cronenberg, thank you very much.

Jacob’s ladder –  Fever dream craziness that left me walking out of the theater feeling beaten up.

Gore – when all else fails, throw in some blood and guts.

Guinea Pig – Gore, gore, gore. And then some more for good measure. The makers of this series of 7 films, with such names as The Devil’s Experiment and Flowers of Flesh and Blood, supposedly had a serial killer reenact one of their scenes in real life . In the early 1990s, Charlie Sheen contacted the FBI thinking Flowers was an actual snuff film.

Ichi the Killer – Absolute carnage filled insanity from Takashi Miike (see Audition above)

Utter Hopelessness/Circling the Drain – We live in a sad, sad world J

Dead Ringers – I left the theatre emotionally drained when this came out. I haven’t revisited it since, but I’m sure I need to.  Overly simplified, this is a story of two gynecologists who fall for the same woman. Drug addiction and madness ensue. I’ll leave it at that. On a side note, I’m very happy to have another David Cronenberg film on my list. He’s awesome!

Dancer in the Dark – Did I really put another Lars Von Trier movie on my list? This is just bleak and depressing and leaves me with a blank spot where happiness should be.

The Road – This is a great movie with terrible happenings. End of the world movies often have some hope etched in them (this one gives a small glimmer at the end, but, wow, talk about too little too late). This one is every parent’s nightmare:  raising a child in a nightmare world of radioactive fallout, nuclear winter and predatory cannibals. As emotionally grey as the color palette of the film. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic movie, just gloomy as can be.

Kids -  What did I say about every parent’s nightmare? This one is a little more likely for the average parent, which make amoral, pathetic teenagers all the more horrifying. You know, I’m going to throw in two more Larry Clark movies in for good measure: Ken Park and Bully are just as difficult to watch and Bully even more so, because it’s based on real events.

Seven – I remember feeling like I needed a shower after walking out of the theatre. Who ever said the seven deadly sins were fun?

The Bridge – Documentary about Golden Gate Bridge suicides. Sad in a completely hypnotic way.

I’m going to include 2 films that I still haven’t completed watching. They just completely messed me up. Both come highly recommended from other sources, but are lessons in endurance.

Irreversible – The director, Gaspar Noe, I like a lot. He has a really gritty, dirty way of filming that suits his subject matter. I recommend his ‘Enter the Void’, but, again, it’s a difficult watch. Irreversible is told in reverse, a tale of revenge and lost dreams. I’ve been told the end (beginning) make the horror of the first(last) part of the movie even more unbearable.

A Serbian Film – Finally, here’s a film that I started watching a few months ago, but have been unable to continue. It is directed by a Serbian filmmaker who grew up with atrocity in his backyard. It’s the story of a former porn star, now with a wife and son, who is lured into an increasing violent and bizarre world of sex, violence and taboo shattering ultra-violent sex (I’d like to copyright that and sell it to the distributor, if that’s OK). Any taboo you can imagine is thrown to the wind. I made the mistake of watching the final scene after being beaten to submission by the earlier parts, and was treated to a “How can it get any worse?” moment.

As Col. Kurtz would say, “The horror, the horror”.

Unseen Horror

Exorcist – If you don’t believe in such thing, this movie probably comes across as pretty silly. But this story of a man’s faith, questioned/lost/ restored, completely freaked me out as a teenager. From the subliminal ghost face images to the harsh language and pea soup, this one shows that a great movie can be made from disturbing ingredients.