These Are The 35 Most Disturbing Movies Of The Century So Far

This is not a fun list. 

No, this is not a compilation of movies you casually put on, hoping for a chill time on your couch. You don't watch the films on this list as much as the films on this list happen to you: they slip under your skin, slide into the folds of your brain, worm their way into your very soul. When the /Film team sat down to hammer out a list of the most disturbing movies of the century so far, we drew a hard line. Nothing could make it on the list unless we found it actively unpleasant to experience. There are no cornball haunted house movies or cheesy slashers contained here. This is the real nightmare fuel. The movies that pushed our buttons in profound ways. 

Some of these movies are masterpieces. Some are trash we can't really recommend. But all of them are disturbing. Buckle up — this is a rough one.

TRIGGER WARNING: this list contains descriptions of gratuitously graphic and disturbing movie scenes depicting sexual assault, self-harm, torture, murder, and literally anything and everything else you may find upsetting. Proceed with caution. 

Hideo Yamamoto is enjoying some celebration lately. His seinen manga "Homunculus" is enjoying a vivid adaptation on Netflix, and is one of /Film's selections for Best Horror Movies of the year. But one of the author's most famous works, about an unstable killer who brushes up against a sadistic Yakuza enforcer, has been shocking people for 20 years. Prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike got his hands on it, and a new flavor of the old ultra-violence was brought to mainstream audiences in the early aughts in a way that most J-horror at the time wouldn't touch.

 Like his contemporaries Sion Sono ("Suicide Club") and Kinji Fukasaku ("Battle Royale"), Miike was more interested in criminal underbellies and poking at taboos. He seems to be one of the few filmmakers working who has no problem translating brutalities in manga form (which has considerably different leeways than feature films do) to the screen, carrying tongue mutilations and mid-air suspension tortures from page to screen without batting an eyelash (to the disgust of audiences in 2001 and today). An interrogation scene has its victim tormented with boiling tempura oil and his cheek sewn through. A sex worker is mutilated before her death. Ichi himself gains sexual gratification from killing (though he's a pawn in several senses), and his nemesis carries snake-like slits extending from his mouth — the business of these men is violence, through and through. But it's not entirely the violence that viewers are truly upset with; it's their own inability to look away. Miike knows it, too. (Anya Stanley)

Eli Roth might not be your favorite horror director, but no one can deny the staying power of his gruesome romp "Cabin Fever." The sexy, bloody, and downright disgusting 2002 film was popular enough to power two sequels and a 2016 remake. While "Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever" and "Cabin Fever: Patient Zero" don't quite capture the magic in the bottle that was the original, the remake sticks close enough to what made the 2002 film work that it feels almost as affecting. 

The plot of both the 2002 and 2016 movies follows a group of conventionally attractive college students as they head into the woods to vacation in a cabin by a lake. They have a week of drinking, smoking, and sex ahead of them, but that dream is quickly cut short when they all begin to develop a mysterious flesh-eating disease. While both films are filled with more scenes of decaying limbs and oozing blood than you could ever want, there's one scene they share in particular that takes the cake. In it, one of the college girls draws a bath in an attempt to clean her bleeding sores. When she begins shaving her legs, her skin slides off with the razor, revealing a crimson slash of blood and muscle. It will 100% make you never want to shave again. (Kaylee Dugan)

Fruit Chan's Hong Kong horror film "Dumplings" is one seriously twisted tale of the lengths women will go to in order to maintain the appearance of youth. The movie follows aging actress Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung), who worries that her husband is losing interest in her and is having a hard time finding roles. She enlists the help of Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), a local woman renowned for her magical regenerative dumplings. The secret ingredient in her dumplings is a disturbing one: she uses human fetuses. Mei also moonlights giving people illegal abortions, which is where she gets her unusual magic ingredient.

Fetus dumplings are pretty horrific on their own, but the situations that drive characters to both provide for them and purchase them are what make the movie so disturbing. Initially Mrs. Li is repulsed by the dumplings, but once she thinks she sees results, she starts asking Mei for more potent recipes, which require even more ethical lines crossed. When one of Mei's patients dies after a botched abortion to "harvest" the most potent medicine for Mrs. Lei, it's hard to stomach more than just the idea of munching on pre-humans. The abortion scene is graphic, and the resulting suffering is even worse. By the time the credits roll, the horrors of anti-choice policies and patriarchal control seem much more disturbing than even this bizarre form of cannibalism. (Danielle Ryan)

Some folks would have you believe that childbirth is all magical and beautiful. But it's also violent and horrifying. Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's "À l'intérieur" (or "Inside" to English-speaking audiences) takes the turmoil and terror of childbirth, gives it uppers, and parades it around, drenched in blood, with all the lights on. The New French Extremity wasn't known for being subtle, but "Inside" became one of the genre's most definitive examples of how disturbing it could be. 

It's Christmas eve (yep, this one's a Christmas movie), and Sarah (Alysson Paradis) is having her baby the next day, four months after surviving a car crash that killed her husband. She's home alone, depressed, reluctant to be a single mother, and terrified of labor (as evidenced by a particularly disturbing dream). Then she shows up.

A strange woman known only as La Femme (Béatrice Dalle) has been stalking Sarah, and she wants to be let into the house. Why? To steal her unborn baby right from her womb with whatever implements are at her disposal.

What ensues is a psychotic, unpredictable bloodbath that's perhaps the most violent and provocative metaphor for the horrors of childbirth ever made. It stunned audiences at its Cannes world premiere and gave TIFF's Midnight Madness regulars a run for their money, raising the bar for disturbing content for years to come. 

Some say giving birth is beautiful. "Inside" has other ideas. (Ariel Fisher)

Depending on who you ask, "Martyrs" was so obliteratingly disturbing and soul-crushing that it effectively ended the New French Extremity, or what may become its first cycle. It's as if all there was left to achieve in the politically and culturally charged subgenre had been accomplished. There was nowhere else to go.

"Martyrs" opens on Lucie Jurin (Mylène Jampanoï), a young girl, escaping a derelict warehouse where she was systematically tortured and abused for more than a year. She's taken in by a local orphanage where she befriends a girl named Anna Assaoui (Morjana Alaoui), also a survivor of child abuse. 15 years later, Lucie is convinced she's found her captors, and she and Anna scope out their home to make sure. Paranoia begets murder which leads to Lucie's mental and emotional annihilation, and Anna's discovery of facts that should have been left undisturbed. 

With more tonal shifts than "From Dusk Till Dawn," "Martyrs" is disturbing not so much for its gore as for its bleakness and brutality. It anthropomorphizes intangible notions like guilt and fear, suggesting that the mind, once broken, is irreparable.

The power of "Martyrs" and the reason it's become one of the most infamous titles on this list lies not in the shock value of blood, guts, and gore. It wants to crush your soul and leave you hopeless, and it's more than up to the task. (Ariel Fisher)

An unnamed man and an unnamed woman are suffering. While they were making love in the shower, their unattended five-year-old child climbed out onto their balcony and fell to his death. He is a psychologist and immediately compartmentalizes, pushing his grief down and devoting himself to helping his wife through her mourning. She can feel only hurt. 

They retire to a cabin in the woods to heal, only the cabin is not too many steps removed from something one might see in an "Evil Dead" movie. As the two explore their sadness, they merely sink deeper and deeper into depression. She begins saying things like "Nature is Satan's church," and equates sex to death. His patronizing healing efforts also reveal a curious link to the history of men trying to cure "hysterical" women. By the film's end, their hopelessness and growing nihilism explode into several acts of horrifying sexual violence. 

The most chilling thing about "Antichrist" is that it may actually be recognizable. Not the torture or the death or the talking foxes that declare "Chaos reigns." Anyone who has suffered from extreme depression may recognize the film's bleak worldview. The world has become dark and full of death. Nature is inhospitable and wants living things to eat themselves. Earth is capable of nothing but destruction and misery and sorrow, and male-kind would have no solution than to shunt all Earth's negativity into womankind. Everything else has vanished, and sadness is all that remains. (Witney Seibold)

Where to even start with this one? "A Serbian Film" is one of the most difficult movies you will ever try to sit through. Not in terms of quality, mind you. It's a well-crafted film. In terms of content, though ... Hoo, boy.

The story revolves around a retired porn actor named Milos who takes one last high-paying job that is sold to him as the biggest, most artistic adult film ever made. This isn't to be a traditionally-shot film, but one that strives for naturalism above all else. Milos is just to live his life and at certain points "actors" will show up and initiate the sex scenes. Think of "A Serbian Film" as the most extreme version of David Fincher's "The Game" and you're close to the tone here. The weirdness escalates until lines are crossed. Like ... all the lines you think you know about and then a few more lines you never knew existed. All of them. Crossed

The most infamous scene in the movie, the one that probably cemented this film's position on this list, is when Milos realizes he's signed up for something he's in no way prepared for. His mysterious and rich benefactor shows him footage of a birth and then the subsequent rape of the newborn baby. Now, this all happens off-screen, but just the idea that it's portrayed at all was enough to get this movie banned in multiple countries.

Now, the craziest thing about "A Serbian Film" is that the infamous scene mentioned above isn't even the worst thing that happens in the movie. The ending is even harder to stomach. So bleak and disgusting and dehumanizing. "A Serbian Film" is a movie that is hard to sit through and impossible to recommend to just about anybody. It's the rare "extreme" film to earn its label. (Eric Vespe)

"The Human Centipede" is about a deranged doctor obsessed with the idea of connecting humans who surgically attaches three people by the digestive tract, mouth to anus. "The Human Centipede 2" is about a man named Martin Lomax that is so obsessed with the film he sets out to make his own centipede consisting of 12 people, including Ashlynn Yennie, an actress from the first film. After kidnapping, knocking out teeth, and crudely attaching his victims in a centipede formation with a staple gun and duct tape, he injects them with liquid laxative causing, well, exactly the kind of explosion laxatives are made for. 

Even today, "The Human Centipede 2" cannot be legally supplied anywhere in the UK after The British Board of Film Classification deemed it "sexually violent and potentially obscene" with "unacceptable material" that cannot be fixed with cuts. "The Human Centipede 2" is not for the faint of heart, but the most disturbing fact is that someone like Martin probably exists, meaning, there has to be someone out there absolutely obsessed with "The Human Centipede." Every movie is somebody's favorite movie, and that goes for "The Human Centipede." Thinking about that possibility is enough to make someone want to immediately take a shower. (BJ Colangelo)

Horror movies trade in gradual, compounded ignorance of warning signs. Sometimes they'll even warn you in the title, as the '79 disco-horror "Don't Go In The House!" can attest (itself an honorable mention in the disturbing movies pantheon). In Lynne Ramsey's slow-burn psych-drama "We Need to Talk About Kevin," former writer Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) is the one to look back on the signs that her son Kevin (played by Ezra Miller) is a sociopath in the wake of a school massacre he carried out that killed several classmates and faculty. Based on the 2003 epistolary novel of the same name by Lionel Shriver, the story unsettles not by its most salacious acts or any sort of gore — quite the opposite. There is a banality to every sign of things to come, and with no accompanying score most of the time, Ramsey draws menace from the silence. 

Eva has always struggled to connect to Kevin (she did not want to be a mother), but when things progress beyond late-stage bedwetting, a layer of dread fills the tonal space where jump scares and boogeymen normally dwell. The flags get red: one of Eva's motherly memories that live in cinema infamy is shocking not for the masturbatory act she witnesses, but for the simple thing Kevin does once he realizes he's caught. 

A devastating climactic reveal that would normally get an orchestral crescendo is only accompanied by the quiet spritz of the lawn sprinkler system. In large part due to Miller's vacant-eyed, intense performance, "We Need To Talk About Kevin" stays on the mind post-credits not with a scream, but with an insistent whisper. (Anya Stanley)

In the near future of Brandon Cronenberg's "Antiviral," celebrity obsession gets taken to its most extreme ends. Fans can purchase cloned meat of their favorite celebrity to cook up for the family barbecue, or if they're feeling especially adventurous, they can inject themselves with the illnesses taken directly from those same celebrities. That's right: they want to be so close to their celebrity idols that they willingly make themselves sick. In 2021, that seems even more insane than it did back in 2012, before the global pandemic.

An employee for the company that creates these products, Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), tries to exploit the system and make a little extra money. He injects himself with some stolen product only to discover that it's the same disease that just killed international superstar Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon). He is forced to solve the mystery behind the celebrity virus market, or else he'll meet the same fate.

"Antiviral" is shocking because it's not only gross (Cronenberg does his father proud, and there's plenty of body horror and practical effects on display), but the concept itself is innately disturbing. The idea of taking a parasocial relationship to the point of consuming your favorite stars or injecting their illnesses into your own body is a next-level dystopian nightmare. (Danielle Ryan)

Franck Khalfoun's "Maniac" remake is somehow more disturbing than its 1980s original. William Lustig's "Maniac" is a cesspool of back-alley New York City sleaze and Tom Savini's practical goriness on its own pedestal. Still, Khalfoun — alongside writers Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur — take an approach that's so vile, and so repugnant. Elijah Wood stars as Frank, a serial slasher with traumatic mommy issues who stalks women, viciously murders them, and steals their scalps for his mannequin collection. Hunting knives are plunged into mouths like an uppercut, hands constrict around necks as eyes bulge, and all because Frank is able to wear his "nice guy" personality like a mask in public.

The film employs first-person cinematography that inserts us into Frank's skin. We can hear his heavy panting, listen to his deranged thoughts, and become a slasher villain as asphyxiating, mutilating violence plays out with such unforgiving brutality on the screen. We're allowed into the inner workings of a madman, and dare I say there are brief, fleeting moments of empathy — I know, it's a nasty narrative trick. Expect the kind of horror experience that requires an acid bath afterward to feel clean again, which is intended as a compliment. It's as effective as it is revolting, which is precisely the intention of a remake that doubles the ante in the best-slash-worst ways. (Matt Donato)

Jonathan Glazer's bleak sci-fi horror mash-up "Under the Skin" doesn't have much in common with its source material. In the similarly titled book, author Michel Faber paints a cold and cruel Scotland infiltrated by a strange alien race that is solely interested in breaking humans down into meat, a delicacy on their alien planet. It's a strange, long, and appropriately sad metaphor for factory farming, but "Under the Skin," the movie, truly cuts out all of the fat. Instead we're left with a film thats primary goal is to manufacture unease and dread. 

Scarlett Johansson plays an unnamed woman who drives through Scotland, abducting male hitchhikers and trapping them inside the strange void within her house. Those scenes alone are disturbing, as the hitchhikers leer and make moves on Johansson's character. The audience knows she's essentially a venus fly trap about to swallow them whole, but they still act like they're the predators. In one particularly disturbing scene, a swimmer on a cold Scottish beach attempts to save a drowning couple as the pair's infant baby watches from the sand. After he fails, Johansson's character attacks him with a rock and drags his body off the beach, leaving the baby to succumb to the elements. Glazer lingers on the child, crying and alone on a cold, dark and rocky beach. Glazer never shows the baby's dead body, but those cries, those desperate screams, can't help but stay with you. (Kaylee Dugan)

Jessie and her husband, Gerald, plan a sexy weekend getaway as a last-ditch attempt at rekindling the fire of their marriage. The only problem is Gerald has himself a heart attack while engaging in some light bondage, leaving Jessie handcuffed to her bed alone with the corpse of her husband and no neighbors within earshot. Can she get herself out of this situation before she dies of dehydration? And is that towering figure she sees in the shadows at night really there or just a delusion of her perpetually panicked mind?

Mike Flanagan's adaptation of what was assumed to be one of Stephen King's most unfilmable stories is a soaring success, thanks in no small part to Carla Gugino's strong central performance. Getting out of her current situation depends on her confronting some buried trauma from her childhood, which is disturbing in and of itself when shown in flashbacks. But when you add in a disfigured apparition that shows up in her room and the climactic, dizzyingly gory solution to get herself out of those handcuffs ... you get a movie that manages to get under your skin and stay there.

On a deeper emotional level, any time sexual trauma is tackled in a film, it's going to be difficult for the viewer, so "Gerald's Game" is a double threat in terms of putting you on edge. It'll hit you emotionally and then when the big gore moment comes in, you'll be squirming on your couch, daring yourself to look at the screen. The term "degloving" will forever skeeve you out after watching this movie. (Eric Vespe)

The difference between a scary movie and a deeply disturbing movie is all in tone, and "Hereditary" gets you from frame one. Ari Aster's slow push-ins and smooth camera moves underline the horror of "Hereditary" in much the same way Stanley Kubrick's technique made "The Shining" the iconic horror film it is. 

Familial trauma is a common thread in Aster's films, and holy smokes is it front-and-center in this story about the shattering of a family already on thin ice. Toni Collette stars as the matriarch of the house, whose family is targeted by some kind of occult force after the death of her mother. The whole movie is a descent into madness for her character as she's hit by tragedy after tragedy that culminates in one of the tensest finales of any modern horror film.

There are precious few jump scares on display. Instead, Aster wants to work his way under the viewer's skin. He'd rather hold on a wide shot and let the audience spot something creepy as hell in the background than have something jump at the lens with a big musical stinger. Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro are wonderful as brother and sister. Shapiro's Charlie is an odd duck even at the best of times, and her tic, which is a clucking of her tongue, becomes the creepiest movie sound this side of the croaking ghost in "Ju-On: The Grudge."

Wolff is the central focus of most of the disturbing moments in the movie, which isn't gory or hyper-edited. It's simply a long, slow push-in on his face as he's sitting in the driver's seat of a car, trying desperately not to look in the back seat. 

"Hereditary" is top tier classy horror guaranteed to mess up your evening. (Eric Vespe)

"The Golden Glove" enjoys a singular achievement in the drama genre, drawing its audience into a fully realized world — behind a repellent character. It's a routine move in the horror genre, where storytellers are more insistent that we identify with monsters, or at least observe them in their natural habitat. Such is the case with Fatih Akin's adaptation of Heinz Strunk's novel "Der Goldene Handschuh," about German serial killer Fritz Honka. 

Played by a hunched, lumbering Jonas Dassler under incredible prosthetics, Honka creeps through Hamburg's red-light district and picks up women victims, who are depicted wretchedly by Akin. What he does with them is captured by the film's unforgiving lens, which refuses to look away or give its victims dignity as they die — one unmistakably soils herself as she's being strangled to death. There is nothing nice about the story because the story is not nice: a man chopped up sex workers and hid them in his apartment, and was only discovered when firefighters found a female torso while responding to a fire in his building. There is nothing "transcendent" about the violence, it just is, as well as the collective inherited trauma of post-WWII West Germany. "The Golden Glove" is an ugly movie about a foul man in a filthy, ashamed world. (Anya Stanley)

Much attention has been paid to Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" as a satire on class and capitalism. Its most enduring meme — of a wealthy and elegant woman complaining on her phone in the back seat of a car, bare feet propped up on the back of the seat in front of her, unaware of her chauffeur's slumped expression of weary contempt — instantly communicates a very specific idea even to people who have never seen the movie.

Though it's not strictly speaking a horror film, "Parasite" is punctuated with imagery that's by turns stomach-churning (if you're sensitive to head injury scenes, you're in for a rough ride) and nightmarish (there's a truly unforgettable shot of someone emerging from a flight of stairs). But more disturbing than any of this is the tragedy of, as Bong himself describes it, "the have-nots and the needy clawing at each other and hurting one another."

"Parasite" hits hard because there's something profoundly real hidden away inside the farcical, tragicomic tale of the working-class Kim family scheming to siphon a living from the ivory tower of the Park family. The characters are allegories — each of them a parasite in their own way — but the rascally Kims are also charming and likable enough that the audience is persuaded to root for them even as they do some truly terrible things. Of course, there's no happy ending waiting for them: the movie steadily escalates into an explosion of violence, and at the end of it, no one can really say they've won. (Hannah Shaw-Williams)

Rob Jabbaz's 2021 film "The Sadness" might, on its surface, resemble any number of extant zombie movies that overwhelm the modern horror canon. The twist is that the zombie virus in "The Sadness" — called Alvin — doesn't turn its victims into undead ghouls, but into inhibition-free sadists. Alvin robs the infected of their morality, causing them to pursue murder, death, sex, blood, and every one of their basest appetites with violent fervor. Remember the torture and assault scenes at the end of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom"? Where the fascists are singing and dancing as they mutilate and murder their teenage captives? Think of that, but worldwide and in public. Eventually, the protagonists of "The Sadness" will witness literal blood orgies in the subway.

Generally speaking, zombie movies are appealing to specific base impulses in the hearts of their audience. Namely: with the world at an end, and most of the human population having been transformed into undead monsters, survivalists and murderers can now ply their violent, gun-toting skills and emerge as heroic lords of the wasteland. "The Sadness" robs audiences of that base catharsis, showing that lust for violence is actually the thing we need to fight ... because it seems that's what we all want. Humanity is already violent, and we long to murder our fellow citizens, hurt them, hurt ourselves. A virus is spreading that can kill us, and no one cares. How salient. How sad. (Witney Seibold)