The 25 most disturbing horror films ever made

Identical twin gynecologists (Jeremy Irons giving one of the all-time great performances) spiral downward into depression, drug abuse and horrific acts of malpractice after one of them becomes infatuated with an actress (Geneviève Bujold) who seeks consultation from their fertility clinic. Though he would continue to explore the topic, “Dead Ringers” stands as the culmination of Cronenberg’s exploration of body horror; it is a film that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin and, ultimately, your head. We are all imperfect vessels, ugly and dying on the inside.

How disturbing is Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom”? It's the tale of a serial killer (Carl Boehm) who films his victims’ final moments effectively ended the legendary British filmmaker’s career. Released the same year as “Psycho," Powell’s film is every bit as well crafted as Hitchcock’s masterpiece, but it’s a far more acute study of voyeurism and psychosis, and it lacks the bravura showmanship of “Psycho” and denies us a cathartic finale. “Psycho” is an experience you savor; “Peeping Tom” leaves you feeling unclean and implicated.

Romero’s entire '60s-to-'70s run is a study in “disturbing” horror, and most of those movies (e.g. “Night of the Living Dead," “Dawn of the Dead," “Martin”) belong on this list. But given the increasingly contentious state of our country, the pressure cooker of 1985’s “Day of the Dead” feels more disconcerting than ever. The dynamic of mentally exhausted scientists and power-mad soldiers stuck in the belly of a nuclear missile silo is a depressing microcosm for what we’re going through today. Tempers are flaring, logic is inconvenient and hope is hard to come by. Oh, and people get torn apart by zombies on occasion.

Few horror films before or since have spoken to the national mood more directly and devastatingly than Tobe Hooper’s full-throttle 1974 classic. The formula is slasher-esque: a group of road-tripping 20-somethings head off the beaten trail and get picked off one-by-one by a chainsaw wielding maniac. The gritty aesthetic and daytime setting for much of the murderous mayhem rattled viewers; they didn’t like vivacious youngsters wandering unwittingly into a meat grinder. That there was real craft and thought put into the making of this brutal movie just made it harder to absorb. By the time Leatherface is whipping his chainsaw around in the middle of the road, as Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) screams from the back of a pick-up truck, it feels like the whole world has fallen apart.

The accidental drowning death of a daughter is the tragic incitement for a series of unnerving incidents and fatal visions in Nicolas Roeg’s gorgeously directed adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier short story. The presence of a dwarf in a bright red slicker — identical to the one worn by the daughter when she died — might just ruin you on the color for the rest of your life. Donald Sutherland gives one of his very best performances as a father trying to break free of grief.

Once upon a time, a talented director with no major box office hits to his/her name could get hired by a Hollywood studio to make a profoundly disturbing and erotic remake of a 1950s B-horror movie in which Vincent Price gets himself turned into a house fly. Co-written with Charles Edward Pogue, David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” is one of the most devastating metaphors for terminal disease ever made. Seth Brundel’s (Jeff Goldblum) accidental teleportation is spurred by a drunken fit of jealousy, and he gradually turns into a delusional monster, unwilling to accept his folly. A dying Brundel wordlessly begging Ronnie (Geena Davis) to put him down with a shotgun is absolutely gutting. 

While “Rosemary’s Baby” is easily Roman Polanski’s most accomplished work in the horror genre, he never made a film more disturbing than this meticulous depiction of a young woman’s complete mental breakdown. Catherine Deneuve is sensational as the manicurist who withdraws from public life and eventually reality. Polanski trots out a multitude of cinematic devices to drive home the claustrophobic terror; it’s a bravura work by a master nearing the height of his craft. 

The first installment in Lucio Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy is a tremendously upsetting vision of some vague apocalypse occasioned by the suicide of a priest in Dunwich. This is Fulci at his most dreamlike; the film is filled with bizarre portents and stomach-turning spasms of violence (e.g. a cursed vision causes a woman to literally vomit her guts, an incensed father drills a hole through a young man’s skull), while its ostensible plot makes zero real-world sense. You’re left to drift along on Fulci’s nightmarish imagery, which builds to an inexplicably cataclysmic climax. This is one that leaves deep psychic scars. 

German splatter auteur Jörg Buttgereit made a name for himself on the underground cinema scene with this mind-melter in which a sexually adventurous couple enters a three-way relationship with a corpse. This isn’t a tastefully shot art film; Buttgereit depicts the action with zero grace or restraint. The film was such a cult sensation that he made a sequel, which is just as twisted. But if you’re game for a second helping of “Nekromantik," the notion of being disturbed by a film left the station a long time ago. 

Robert Wiene’s expressionistic masterpiece assaulted 1920s moviegoers with nightmarish imagery the likes of which had never been seen on the big screen before. The surreal sets, twisty narrative and groundbreaking visual effects immersed viewers in a world quite unlike their own; this wasn’t an escape from reality, but it was a complete break with it. Roger Ebert called “The Cabinet of Caligari” the first horror film, and, amazingly, it still has the power to terrify a century later.

Ruggero Deodato’s “Cannibal Holocaust” is as noteworthy as it is repellent. The film is based around a documentary crew’s ill-fated attempt to interact with a native tribe in the Amazon rainforest. While the movie is a searing, generally spot-on condemnation of the so-called civilized world, it’s also laden with real footage of animal cruelty that immediately turns you against the production. Yes, the found-footage approach was novel and clearly influenced numerous films including “The Blair Witch Project," but Deodato’s unremitting nastiness renders the film totally unwatchable.

Wes Craven’s “Last House on the Left” is the anti-“Texas Chain Saw Massacre." Released two years before Tobe Hooper’s classic, it’s a misanthropic, shoddily made piece of exploitation that derives its power from its willingness to push further and go harder than just about any horror film before or since. As with Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes," you watch the film with an eye on the exit (or your finger poised over the stop button) because you don’t fully trust the filmmaker. You know you’re watching a piece of fiction, but aside from the jarringly inappropriate bits of comedy with two inept deputies, it feels horribly real and prepared to go places no sane human being should want to go.

Divorced of the prerelease hype (which delivered a box-office bonanza while stripping the film of its sucker-punch power), Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s “The Blair Witch Project” is a classic white-knuckler. The found-footage approach is sold to perfection by the three leads and skillfully edited by the directors. Though it’s superb in any format, it’s probably best experienced on a 4x3 television set off an old VHS tape with tracking issues. You want to feel like you’re in possession of something forbidden and possibly cursed.

This shot-on-video anthology flick from German filmmaker Olaf Ittenbach comes on like a twisted parody of “The Princess Bride." The premise: A mean-spirited young man decides to regale his kid sister with a series of scary stories. The first yarn is a silly bit of business about a blind date gone horribly awry; the second story is about an innocent simpleton being murdered for crimes he didn’t commit and then getting sent to hell to be tortured at great length for said crimes. The demented genius of “The Burning Moon” is that you expect anthology movies to present three stories at minimum; instead, Ittenbach gets hung up on the awfulness of the second story and literally strands the viewer in hell for what feels like hours. It’s an endurance test few can pass.

French horror took a decidedly gruesome turn in the 2000s, and it’s hard to think of a more disturbing example of this trend than Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s “Inside." The film centers on a home invasion carried out by an unnamed woman (Béatrice Dalle) who is hellbent on seizing another woman’s (Alysson Paradis) unborn baby. It’s a brutal piece of exploitation, but Maury and Bustillo infuse it with genuine style and an unexpected sensitivity.

Films based on witch trials were all the rage in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and they’re all pretty gnarly. But if you’re dying to see a tongue ripped out of a woman’s mouth, Michael Armstrong’s unceasingly brutal “Mark of the Devil” is the movie for you. Udo Kier stars as a witch hunter loyal to the sadistic Lord Cumberland (Herbert Lom, significantly less amusing here than in the “Pink Panther” films); ultimately, Kier discovers that the witch hunts are a scam, at which point he turns on his mentor.

“Kiri, kiri, kiri…” Takashi Miike’s story of a widower who sets up an audition process to find a new wife sounds like a romantic comedy, and, for a while, it plays like one. Then it doesn’t. Then it really doesn’t. It’s a remarkably restrained film for a provocateur like Miike (who, for instance, spelled out the title of “Ichi the Killer” with ejaculate), and that’s what makes it stick; you sympathize with the widower’s plight, but you also understand why he must suffer. Maybe not to the extent that he should have his limbs severed with a wire saw, but you know…

Marina de Van wrote, directed and starred in this monumentally disturbing film about a young woman who becomes obsessed with self-mutilation after accidentally injuring herself at a party. At first she’s able to hide her cutting compulsion from her friends and co-workers, but the cutting gradually spirals out of control. It’s a difficult film to nail down: Is de Van’s character defying society’s objectification of her beauty, or is she objectifying herself?

Neil Marshall’s mortifying horror classic did for spelunking what “Shoot the Moon” did for marriage. The story of six women who go caving only to discover that they’re being stalked by a monster of unknown origin makes nightmare-inducing hay out of the idea of being stuck in tight spaces with no possibility of escape aside from moving forward or backing the hell up. If you suffer from even the slightest bit of claustrophobia, be sure to take a Xanax before enduring this one. Or better yet, sit it out. Your blood pressure will thank you.

Gareth Evans took a break from the bone-crunching martial arts majesty of “The Raid” movies to make this “Witchfinder General”/”The Wicker Man” mélange about a young man (Dan Stevens) who infiltrates a cult on a Welsh island to rescue his kidnapped sister (Elen Rhys). Unlike the films that inspired it, there is a very real supernatural presence on this island, and it literally feeds on the people lured onto its soil by the nefarious Malcolm Howe (Michael Sheen). The roughest parts of the film involve ritualistic torture, most notably a scene in which a villager has his skull fractured and then bored into.

What’s grosser than a three-person human centipede? How does a 10-person human centipede strike you? Tom Six’s sequel to his try-way-too-hard cult film flies way over the top in an effort to offend the type of moviegoer who typically isn’t offended by this type of exploitation. This moronically meta reworking of the first movie is more of the ho-hum same until a woman accidentally crushes a newborn baby’s skull. That’ll do, Tom Six.

Yet another exercise in nihilism from the French wave of extreme horror, Pascal Laugier’s “Martyrs” outshines most of its stable-mates by seeming somewhat ambiguous about its own brutality. That it also outdoes them in terms of explicit violence suggests that Laugier might be commenting on this movement’s can-you-top-this nastiness. “Are we working through some residual World War II guilt, or is this a reaction to the rise of right-wing nationalism?” While “Martyrs” didn’t mark the end of this horror movement, it’s never been topped.

“This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition…” might sound like a ringing endorsement, but what this woman has to go through to reach this state of rage is cheap, sadistic and exploitative in the extreme. The rape-revenge sub-genre has often tilted toward the “rape” end of the spectrum, and Meir Zarchi’s infamous film is no different. We see the protagonist (Camille Keaton) abused and degraded for nearly a half-hour before we get to the revenge portion, which feels less like a triumph and more like a justification for the awfulness that preceded it.

John McNaughton’s superb character study was so disturbing it languished for four years without distribution. Unlike sensationalistic serial killer flicks like William Lustig’s “Maniac," McNaughton took a grounded, matter-of-fact approach to his material; there are no show-stopping Tom Savini f/x gags or awkward attempts at humor. This is a movie about a broken human being who cannot help or change what he is.

Srdjan Spasojević’s “A Serbian Film” is without question the most controversial film of the 2010s. It’s a film from a war-torn country that can be read as a condemnation of the post-Milošević era or a nihilistic revel in the inhumanity that continues in its wake. The film centers on a porn star’s unsuspecting involvement in a snuff film, and it depicts unthinkable behavior that makes your soul ache. It’s been banned in the kinds of countries that don’t typically ban movies, but it’s readily available in the United States. It is difficult to conceive of a more disturbing fictional film. It is just as difficult to conceive of a reason to watch it.