Horror Movies You'd Never Want To Watch Around Your Parents

Throughout history, horror films have always been social activities — manageable mini-adventures to be experienced in kinship with a friend, a group, a date, a significant other. There's something perennially appealing about sharing a scary and disturbing movie with someone you love, seeing them react alongside you, feeling bound by a collective sense of dread, encouraging each other to shrug off the fight-or-flight instinct, and ride it out when a scene gets too horrifying. A good horror film can even bring people closer. But horror films are seldomly family events.

To be sure, there is a certain logic to watching specific horror movies with family members. The urgency of a survival adventure like "Train to Busan" or "A Quiet Place," the simmering intensity of a creature thriller like "Jaws" or "Alien," the roller-coaster-ride excitement of a game transformed into an exercise in terror in "The Conjuring," or the unspooling mysteries of a Jordan Peele or M. Night Shyamalan flick can all be enjoyed by a group of parents and their children. But horror is also a genre that deals in shock, disgust, taboo, purposeful discomfort — emotions and concepts that some might not want to contend with around their folks, especially when they're expressed through horror's similarly frequent symbiosis with trenchant sexuality. 

To help avoid gaffes when planning a Halloween movie session with your family, here are 16 horror films you definitely wouldn't want to watch around your parents.

The only contribution of the great Claire Denis to the let's-break-every-taboo cinematic movement known as New French Extremity, "Trouble Every Day" tells the story of Shane (Vincent Gallo), an American man honeymooning with his wife June (Tricia Vessey) in Paris, who becomes obsessed with neurosurgeon Dr. Léo Sémeneau (Alex Descas) and his wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle). Coré, afflicted by an undefined craving somewhere between vampirism and compulsive cannibalism, keeps having intense sex with men and then gruesomely, animalistically killing them during the act.

If you're looking for gore, you'll find plenty in the (literally) visceral sex scenes — but neither the sex nor the violence are exactly fun. Ever the experimenter, Denis uses the film's horror elements to inquire on the instinctual, consumptive nature of desire. And, just as she always pushes her themes as far as they can be pushed, so too do the blood, sweat, and moans get pushed to appalling, nauseating heights.

To kick off the list, there's a pretty strong case to be made for "Titane" as the most twisted, upsetting, and uncomfortable film to have ever taken home the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Julia Ducournau's brilliantly disconcerting sophomore feature fuses body horror with outré sexual content and cultural taboos in a way rarely seen this side of Cronenberg — and decidedly unbecoming for the purposes of family movie night, even though it's about finding a family of your own.

Chronicling the roundabout self-actualization of Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a serial killer left with an intercranial titanium plate and a lifelong vehicular obsession by a childhood car crash, the film became notorious for the shockingly explicit scene in which Alexia has sex with a Cadillac — as well as subsequent sequences depicting the bizarre and painful resulting pregnancy. Even outside those scenes, Ducournau's mastery of sex-based audience torment is unparalleled; the tiniest moments of intimacy undercut by violence in "Titane" can still make your skin crawl.

American filmmaker Roberta Findlay became known in the '70s for using the genres of exploitation and pornography as fertile grounds for psychological probing. Her singular technique came to a head in "A Woman's Torment," a 1977 film that actualizes the archetypal, "Repulsion"-esque horror narrative of the woman-gone-mad through the unfiltered lens of adult cinema.

There are both R-rated and X-rated versions of "A Woman's Torment" out there to watch, and Findlay has said she prefers the R-rated one – which still features sex aplenty, just without hardcore close-ups. The X-rated cut has its merits as well, however, with pornographic sequences that Findlay pushes towards alienating stupor in order to accentuate the mental disarray of Karen (Tara Chung), the titular tormented housewife who takes refuge in an empty beach house to avoid being sent to an asylum. In either version, Karen's downward spiral of violent hallucinations is brutal, unforgiving, unforgettable stuff.

Here's a movie you might never want to watch, period — but, if you do, you certainly won't want to do it in the company of a family member. A splatter film with all the revolting abandon of the genre's '70s apogee, this 1998 film from Tamakichi Anaru is among the most disturbing and stomach-churning ever made. Among pornographic films, it might take the cake.

There's a simplicity, almost a purity, to the conceit: A woman named Kana (Kanako Ooba) is hired to star in an amateur porn film. Part one, the shoot gets increasingly intense, veers into BDSM, and she tries to leave. Part two, she's tied down and tortured to death. There's not much point in listing each heinous act that the film depicts via horribly convincing gore effects and amateur-looking low-res video; if that's your thing, it will be easier to just go ahead and watch it. Suffice to say, the title is very literal.

The title of "most inappropriate Paul Verhoeven movie to watch around your parents" has nearly as many claimants as there are Paul Verhoeven movies – even the man's blockbusters have a scuzziness to them — but "The Fourth Man," Verhoeven's only horror film, has the distinction of being a contender for his most racy and his most violent.

A pioneering film in its frank and explicit depiction of bisexuality, "The 4th Man" inhabits the full spectrum of Gerard's (Jeroen Krabbé) sexual identity, and deals very directly with the weight that Christian guilt imposes on him, in the process offering up some of the most blasphemous imagery in film history. But what really makes it a must-avoid for family movie night is the nexus that Verhoeven establishes between the sex, the guilt, and the spastic bursts of graphic violence that permeate Gerard's life and dreams as he deals with the potentially murderous Christine (Renée Soutendijk).

Arguably the film most responsible for codifying and catalyzing the so-called "elevated horror" subgenre (Ari Aster even purposely tipped his hat to it with "Hereditary"), Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now" is a bonafide horror classic — though it sets upon the genre in an oblique, deliberately stalling manner that might disappoint those looking for a front-to-back scarefest. In fact, for long stretches, it's really more of a somber psychological drama about a couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) dealing with the loss of their daughter in incompatible ways; the horror of their stay in Venice only emerges bit by bit.

As parent-friendly as that description may sound, however, "Don't Look Now" is also notable for featuring a detailed five-minute sex scene between Sutherland and Christie, which ranks among the most famous of its kind. Between its length, its realism (it contains one of the earliest depictions of cunnilingus in a mainstream film), and the way it epitomizes the film's themes and expresses the couple's dynamic, it's a crucial, unskippable scene — and also makes "Don't Look Now" difficult family viewing.

Brian Yuzna's "Society" made waves in 1989 for featuring unusually graphic, risqué, and creatively disturbing content by the standards of American mainstream horror. In fact, it was so unusual that it got shelved in the United States until 1992, while enjoying a healthy popularity in Europe. That cultural disparity probably came down to the film's focus on orgies as a plot point — and not only that, but incestuous orgies.

Sure, it's supposed to be scary — and, for the first 70 minutes or so, "Society" isn't much more inappropriate than an earlier '80s film like "Blue Velvet." It's not very good during that stretch, either; hardly anyone remembers the conspiracy plot about a rich boy (Billy Warlock) investigating his family's involvement in an underground ring of murderous orgies. But then comes the ending, in which Bill walks in on such an orgy himself, and "Society" delivers such a complete shock to the genre's system that Hollywood might still not have fully processed it. The less said about the supernatural fractal sexual ritual that goes on in that climax, the better. Let's just say that no American movie before or since has depicted bodies in quite the same way, and we'll leave it at that.

The criminally little-known and underdiscussed Christina Hornisher is among the best one-and-done filmmakers of all time, and her single feature film, 1973's "Hollywood 90028," shows that she could have become one of the horror greats if she'd been able to keep working. Sad as it may be that it's the only Hornisher joint we have, "Hollywood 90028" is a stirring film about the fundamental spiritual tragedy of Los Angeles, a city haunted by dreams never fulfilled — and it uses the world of underground porn production as a window into that tragedy.

Christopher Augustine plays Mark, a man driven mad by the disparity between his dreams of Hollywood success and the reality of his soul-consuming work as a porn cameraman. Distraught and filled with rage, he becomes a serial killer with a preference for strangling young women. The film is as seedy and grimy as that logline might suggest, but even though it features plenty of sex and ugly violence like many '70s exploitation films, Hornisher's concerns lie elsewhere. She angles for a diagnosis of an entire national malaise — and pulls it off, all the way up to a harrowing final image that should have a reserved place on any serious list of the greatest closing shots ever.