A newborn killing nurse, a marble eating mother, and a pop star whose fame is
thanks to a school shooting. You'll never think of "disturbing" movies the same way.
The 2012 remake of Maniac had some mighty big shoes to fill. The 1980 original is one of the
most renowned and reviled slashers of all time. It's an appallingly intimate portrait
of a serial killer who stalks the streets of New York City in search of vulnerable women to
work his mommy issues out on. Cut to 2012, when the remake dared to ask: what if this already
skin-crawling story was shot almost entirely from the first-person point of view of the killer?
Working against type, Elijah Wood plays Frank, a deeply disturbed "nice guy" who
can't be reminded of his lack of a girlfriend without killing every woman in the vicinity.
While Frank makes an admirable attempt to date normally, he still has a bad
habit of draping women's scalps over vintage mannequins. The result is a film that succeeds
in making Frank pathetic without also making him worthy of our pity. And in the real world,
with the threat of violence perpetuated by the rise of incels, the horrifying
plausibility of Maniac has only become more and more disturbing all these years later.
2012's Excision follows a troubled young teen and aspiring surgeon named Pauline. As her hormones
rage, her corporeal interest proves far more carnal than clinical. Obsessed and outcast,
Pauline sinks deeper and deeper into her blood-soaked fantasy life, where she dons
scrubs and bathes in the blood of patients who are as much her victims as her lovers.
Wearing its depravity on its sleeve, Excision dives deep into unapologetic
teenage boundary-pushing with a pitch black wit and a scalpel in hand.
The film has no shortage of gore, but its true disturbing power lies in its portrait
of a neglected, ostracized teen. Pauline's steady slip into destruction has a clear and preventable
trajectory, so it's agonizing to watch the world fail her at every turn. A coming-of-age horror
that fully embraces all the bloody realities of morbid teenage angst, Excision is a fiendishly
offensive horror comedy about wanting to be loved and accepted for the little freak you are.
"Can you contract an STD from having sex with a dead person?"
On the grounds of a vague religious disagreement,
Thomasin and her family are banished from society. They build their cabin on
the fringes of colonial New England, right at the edge of a dark, forbidding forest.
One afternoon, Thomasin's baby brother vanishes without a trace. Suspicious of Thomasin,
the family reasons that the infant was spirited away by a witch with
dark intentions. As the days tick by and the child remains missing,
a devious combination of isolation and paranoia turn Thomasin's family against
her. As they descend into madness, it becomes increasingly difficult to parse cabin fever from
the rumblings of an ever-encroaching force that seems to be seeping out of the woods.
One of the key factors in the dread-soaked atmosphere of The Witch is its adherence to
historical accuracy, making the whole experience that much more
immersive. So when the supernatural begins its infiltration in the family's homestead,
their struggle with unseen forces begins to feel very real and threatening. Furthermore, the film
also invites you to see things from Thomasin's perspective. She stands accused of unthinkable
acts. And the self-fulfilling prophecy of the accusation is truly the stuff of nightmares.
"Baa, baa, baa, baa."
Run, don't walk, as far away as you can from We Are the Flesh! Or if you insist on toughing it
out, don't say we didn't warn you. Released in 2016, We Are the Flesh follows brother-sister
duo Lucio and Fauna, who are doing their best to survive in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. They're
then shocked when they enter a decrepit building on the edge of town and find a man named Mariano.
Ignoring the fire in his eyes, the siblings listen attentively to Mariano's devil's deal:
food and shelter in exchange for their help in transforming a building into a cavernous,
womb-like temple to depravity itself. With Lucio and Fauna firmly under his thumb, Mariano forces
the siblings to participate in unthinkable acts of violence and fleshy transgression.
The end result is a combination of sexual abandon and hallucinatory terror. We Are the Flesh is an
intense, explicit, and boundary-defying descent into madness. Is it daring, or is it disgusting?
"Why not both?", seems to be the answer of everyone involved.
It's relatively bloodless compared to the gorier entries on this list, but The Killing of a Sacred
Deer is nevertheless a deeply unsettling viewing experience. The film is a loose adaptation of one
of the most harrowing chapters in Ancient Greek fiction, Iphigenia at Aulis, which tells of King
Agamemnon's ritual sacrifice of his own daughter in exchange for favorable winds to sail to Troy.
Directed by Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, the film follows Dr. Steven Murphy, a successful
heart surgeon who appears to have it all. Then one day, he meets a young man named Martin,
and the two form a special bond. It's only after Martin inserts himself into the surgeon's family
life that he reveals his true intentions: he wants justice. Martin's father died on
the operating table because Dr. Murphy was under the influence. By supernatural
means that are never clearly explained and are all the more disturbing for it,
the surgeon's two children fall ill. Dr. Murphy is faced with an impossible decision:
he must kill one of his kids or his wife, or they will all perish.
"It's the only thing I can think of that's close to justice."
Much of
the uncomfortable atmosphere of The Killing of a Sacred Deer comes from Lanthimos' intentionally
stilted direction. This endows everything from the production design to the visceral
moments of violence with an unnaturally clinical distance. And the creep factor
of Barry Keoghan's performance as Martin cannot be overstated. From his candor to his voracious
appetite for spaghetti, everything he does feels slimy and calculated. The thought of
innocent lives being caught in the teeth of life's meat grinder is inherently upsetting,
and The Killing of a Sacred Deer makes an absolute meal out of it.
The death of children is a running theme on this list, and understandably so,
which is why we've got this film about a Satanic cult hellbent on snuffing out as many innocent
lives as possible. 2017's Belzebuth kicks things off with a possessed nurse massacring
a nursery full of shrieking newborns, and it doesn't get much better from there.
The young age of the film's victims will obviously be a major turn-off to some
viewers. But if you can get past the initial shock of the back-to-back sadistic set pieces,
you'll be delighted to find a sharp-edged supernatural procedural that pulls no
punches. Few films are this committed to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The main character is Emmanuel Ritter, a dedicated, gravel-voiced detective
with the physical presence of a bull and the constitution to match. Still reeling
from the tragic death of his newborn son, Detective Ritter finds himself embroiled in
an investigation into the Catholic conspiracy responsible for the mass murder of countless
children. An ancient evil is dead-set on clawing its way back into our world,
and the question of whether an emotionally shaken detective and a would-be priest turned paranormal
investigator are the right men for the job keeps the stakes high and palpable throughout.
If you've yet to come across Possum in your moviegoing adventures, we're about to ruin your
day. There are a number of reasons why this film will get under your skin: the oppressive mood,
the enigmatic storytelling, and the enormous, human-faced, spider-legged puppet monster.
The plot follows Phillip, a disgraced children's puppeteer who returns to his
hometown after losing his job for an ominously unrevealed reason. While he
attempts to destroy his grotesque marionette, he comes face to face
with his abusive uncle and the dark trauma that has loomed over him his entire life.
Possum was written and directed by Matthew Holness, whose short story of the same name was
originally published in the anthology collection The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease. Horror writers
were prompted to use an essential human fear and Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny as a
jumping off point. Holness ultimately drew from not one but two phobias: puppets and
doubles. Considering that the Possum puppet also boasts some freakishly horrible spider legs,
we'll go ahead and unofficially count that as three phobias. The result of this gumbo of fear
is some truly adrenaline-pumping nightmare fuel about a very sad man trying to destroy
something that's as much a representation of his own trauma as a reflection of himself.
"The black, long-legged Possum-man.
Children, run! He'll eat and smother, any child without a mother."
In the year 2000, the teenage Celeste is a victim of a school shooting. Somehow, despite a serious
neck wound, she manages to survive, although the same can't be said for all of her classmates.
In the wake of the tragedy, Celeste performs at the memorial service an original song she
wrote while in the hospital, which then sets her on the path to international pop stardom.
Vox Lux earns its place on this list thanks to its alarming and emotionally devastating
depiction of a school shooting. Considering the rage-inducing reality of how frequently
such tragedies occur in the United States, the opening scene feels like a gut punch,
one where the effects linger long after the credits roll.
That Celeste builds a career off of that horrific act of violence never sits quite
right. And it isn't until the film's final moments that the uneasy feeling comes into
clearer focus. Vox Lux is one of the few films in recent memory to truly consider the lasting
psychological and cultural aftershocks of school shootings, from the genuine,
lasting pain they inflict on survivors to the commodification of that very pain.
Many films depict mental institutions as creepy on the basis that older, better films told us
they were creepy. But 2018's Unsane proves that there's still plenty of substance to be found by
shining a light on the institutional abuses that continue to rage behind closed doors.
Shot entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus, Unsane breaks from the shuffling
white-robed visual language of its modern peers to underline the very real fears that
still plague the modern psychiatric experience. The story follows Sawyer,
a woman who unknowingly commits herself to a mental institution during a routine
visit to a therapist. Trapped in a situation where she's treated as less than a person,
she's horrified to learn that her old stalker works in the hospital as an orderly. But nobody
believes that she has an active restraining order against this man. Either that, or nobody cares.
"I'm trying to tell you- you're not even listening to me. I'm trying to tell you the man-"
"And I'm adding a course of risperidone and lithium to your meds."
One of the more striking entries in director Steven Soderbergh's ongoing
interest in recession-era anxiety, Unsane exposes the greedy cost of the American healthcare system,
which is keen to harm healthy people if it means a profit can be turned. Intentionally garish and
ugly to look at, this film is an unnerving viewing experience made
all the creepier by its politically charged approach to exploitation.
2019's Swallow follows Haley Bennett as Hunter, a newlywed former saleswoman who
feels increasingly stifled by her extremely comfortable and highly controlled domestic
life. You might look at Hunter's life and think she has it all. The loving
husband. The lavish New York villa. A baby on the way. So why is she so sad?
Under the increasingly crushing pressure of her husband and in-laws,
Hunter's deep desire to be obedient and submissive spills out in the form of a bizarre obsession:
a compulsive desire to swallow inedible objects. It's the only thing that makes her feel in
control. But as Hunter's addiction with eating hairpins, marbles, and tacks increasingly puts
her unborn child's viability at risk, her mental health crisis reveals her husband's true colors.
Easily one of the most squirm-inducing viewing experiences in recent memory,
Swallow is a haunting and isolating film about the domestic imprisonment and abuse of power many
women are forced to endure. Much of the film's disturbing power comes from its sound design,
which emphasizes the visceral quality of Hunter's digestive rebellion. The sound of teeth scraping
across batteries is both unmistakable and nauseating. There are plenty of movies that
are bloodier than Swallow, but not many that are more difficult to sit through.