Horror movies might be filled with frights, but they're usually pretty fun to watch, too.
Every now and again, however, there comes along a scary movie that's so disturbing it's
hard to justify ever sitting through it again.
From extreme brutality to the true emotional torment of audiences, these are the movies you'll
want to opt out of re-visiting after the first run.
As always, beware the spoilers.
The Sacrament
Loosely based on true events, The Sacrament is excruciatingly tense and takes the story
and its characters to some incredibly dark places.
The faux-documentary features three reporters investigating a new religious movement in
Africa.
And the climax depicts the ritual self-sacrifice of the cult members, which does not flinch
from a single moment of the pain, confusion, and fear they experience.
It gets particularly difficult to watch when one of the reporters is tied down by his sister
and forced to participate in the ritual with her.
In terms of craft, The Sacrament probably is an incredibly well done movie.
"I tried.
God knows I tried."
But once you've watched the film and know the places it will take you to, it's almost
impossible to watch again.
Martyrs
The "torture-horror" subgenre hit a new benchmark with Martyrs.
The French film features characters experiencing every kind of agony imaginable, from suffering
intense beatings to being flayed alive.
And it's the existential justification for this cycle of sinister acts that's really
hard to bear.
The tormentors are attempting to gain knowledge of the afterlife by turning their subjects
into martyrs who are abused into transcendance.
And after so much anguish and gruesome violence, audiences are ultimately left to wonder what
the experience revealed, if anything.
It's an experience to watch this movie unfold, but it is also an exhausting one for sure.
Funny Games
Sometimes bad things happen to good people and there's no rhyme or reason to it.
Funny Games is a story about this very idea.
Two sociopathic youths, Peter and Paul, stage a physical and emotional assault on a family
in their own home.
Bones are broken.
Lives are ended.
A dog goes to doggy heaven.
And all of this is done in service of a sick game being played by the boys.
There is no backstory between the family and the men torturing them.
It's not a revenge scheme, and there is no plot twist revealing the boys to be the abandoned
children of the mother or the father.
Peter and Paul simply show up, commit countless atrocities, and then move on to the next family.
Funny Games might be tremendously made, but it is a horrifying film that presents sick
joy in senseless violence and probably won't leave you reaching for the DVD again any time
soon.
The Invitation
Even without its twist ending, The Invitation would be uncomfortable to sit through a second
time.
The film sets out to put the nuance of interactions between lapsed friends under a microscope.
Through a few hours spent at a tense dinner party, it analyzes the minute intricacies
of every awkward exchange between characters.
And it explores the efforts people will go through to save face and stifle survival instincts
when cordial social interactions go to places they shouldn't.
"Don't you guys think this is a little bit weird?"
Furthermore, it's a stunning meditation on grief and what people will do to cope with
loss.
These themes are explored very nicely, but they're so heavy that a second viewing is
likely out of the question for most moviegoers.
And this is all before the film's third act, which features the host couple trying to snuff
out all their friends and then off themselves in the name of a mysterious spiritual group
they've joined.
All in all, it's an immaculate film that is probably best left alone after a single viewing.
Lake Mungo
There are points at which Lake Mungo hardly feels like a horror film.
The imitation-documentary plays out as a look into how the loss of a loved one can devastate
the people around them over time.
There are supernatural elements to the film and some great frights to be had, but they're
comparatively sparse across the movie's hour and a half running time.
Those scares aren't what will keep viewers from coming back for a second viewing, though.
That falls entirely on the subject matter.
By staging the film as a documentary with no well-known actors to lower the audience's
suspension of disbelief, director Joel Anderson amplifies the emotional devastation the Palmer
family experiences after the loss of their daughter Alice.
And that plays directly into the supernatural aspects of the plot, too.
Lake Mungo is a superb film, but one that deals with some very heavy subject matter
and would be very hard to sit through a second time.
Audition
Takashi Miike has released over 100 films, and he could probably go on to direct 100
more with not one of them earning the reputation that Audition has.
It's the story of a widower who, at the urging of his son, connects with a young woman named
Asami.
As their romance develops, it becomes clear that there is more to her than she lets on.
Suspicions build slowly towards the film's serious climax, which features a horrific scene
of torture and a mutilated man Asami sadistically keeps alive in a bag.
Other films featuring torture might try to shock the audience with a wide array of methods,
but Miike instead pares it down to one excruciatingly simple, prolonged moment of pain.
Audition is a masterpiece, no doubt about it, and it's absolutely worth seeing.
But it's still a hard movie to get through the first time around, and knowing what the
end holds will not make rewatching it any easier.
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