AKA where I do a list, a rant, a poem – basically anything goes on Freaky Fridays. And when I get more of you lovely people following my blog you can give suggestions for what YOU’D like on Freaky Fridays.

SPOILERS AHEAD!! AND VERY MATURE CONTENT.

Soooooo, first one. I’ve been thinking about this over the weekend, I decided I wanted to do a list for the first post. Then I spent a while mulling it over, the best villains? No, too ordinary. The best zombie movies? Gosh, not yet, that will take a lot of thinking – like, months. You know I love me some zombie flicks. So, I have decided on *drum roll* the most disturbing horror films of all time. In my opinion of course. I’m not going on gore or blood, i’m going on films that you will never forget, that are forged into your memory and branded onto your nightmares. Here we go.

#10 Goodnight Mommy (2014)
This is an Austrian horror movie that follows the lives of a mother and her twin boys after she’s undergone cosmetic facial surgery. The premise, leaving the mother’s face always wrapped in gauze and bandages, has a sort of ‘Eyes without a face’ ring to it. But the atmosphere is just unsettling throughout, paranoia seeps in and you become just as perplexed and fearful as the boys and – eventually – the mother. The utter cruelty that comes from a nine year old is a cause for unease as it is, he glues – yes, glues – his mother to the living room floor. He glues her mouth shut. He burns her face. He cuts her lips with scissors. He is just a little psychopath, basically. It turns out his twin was a hallucination all along. The ending is disturbing also, the three of them all embracing with these fixed, strange smiles in a freakin’ cornfield. I just cannot with this film. Something about children being evil is petrifying enough but one that has hallucinations, access to sharp objects and cockroaches (that was a tough and bizarre scene).

#9 Scrapbook (2000)
Jeesh I had honestly forgotten about this film until about ten minutes ago. Possibly my preteen brain blocked it out. I remember watching it illegally in about four sessions on the bus to and from school, hiding it towards me so nobody saw the horrific, sadistic sexual violence. This film has a fairly simple presence; girl gets kidnapped, gets repeatedly raped and beaten for several days. But it’s just the production of it is so gritty, so realistic – you could seriously believe that the ordeals were truly happening to this poor girl. It goes beyond just being hit once, it’s constant beating and various ways of raping and he even urinates on her. The only saving grace for this daring film, literally the only saving grace, is that in the end she manages to kill him and put it in his awful scrapbook of murder and blah. But otherwise this film is honestly a test to watch, if you can make it to the end – congratulations! You have no soul. 🙂

#8 The Sacrament (2013)
I’ve actually, recently, reviewed this film as I’m making my way through Eli Roth’s repertoire, and it’s a fantastic film – it’s done brilliantly, acted amazingly but damn is it disturbing. Watching a mother slit her own daughter’s throat, hundreds of people drinking the poison and the “painless” death becomes agony and the gasp for breath and beg you to help them. It’s a tense, somewhat slow burn. But it’s just somehow just effective. It barely has any gore or guts but it still manages to be disturbing so, bravo, you sick people.

#7 Mother! (2017)
No, just – no freaking way with this bloody film. Nope. A baby gets freakin’ torn apart and eaten like a freaking fried chicken. I just can’t with this piece of evilness. Honestly even thinking about this film hurts my heart a little bit. Don’t get be wrong the premise is bizarrely and horribly intriguing and original and the acting is fantastic. But just f**k off Darren Aronofsky!  

#6: 120 Days of Sodom or Salo (1957)
Why am I doing this list? I’m just mentally revisiting all of this devastation in one hit and it’s a strange mix of fear and just ‘nahhhhhhh’. Anyway, this film. Again it’s just a real test to watch, I barely managed to get through it and I’m good with shiz like this but holy hot guacamole. It’s so realistically done, filmed so naturally. And it’s just so brutal. We’re talking rape, all kinds of rape, forced marriage, murder, made to eat faeces, having to have orgies, being whipped and beaten. This film is scarring, cheers Italy.

#5: Requiem For a Dream (2000)
The second Darren Aronofsky appearance on this list. Okay, hands held up, the eagle-eyed amongst you will note that this isn’t a horror movie. Correct. If i’m admitting to the struggle of the mid-numbers for this category, I had to steer slightly off of course for this number slot. It dawned on me that I had a fairly clear image of the first five films and the top two but the middle numbers stumped me for a week or so. Apologies, but I had to put this one in here. For those of you who haven’t witnessed this sharp, muddy and honest portrayal of the rock bottoms of various drug addictions, crazed utopias that devolve into this sickening, beautifully eerie spiral. Four people, four interwoven story lines all set into motion by the haunting piano piece of the title. I was about fourteen when I first saw this film and, a while before discovering my particular penchant for violent horrors, I remember finishing it with this atmosphere of unease and discomfort thick around me. I’ve been planning in rewatching it lately as an adult, to see if I find it just as viscerally unsettling as I did then. Personally I think this movie is a piece of art, it is just phenomenally produced, shot and acted and it doesn’t shy away from the gritty subject matter nor does it romanticise addiction, quite the opposite in fact. For those of you nineteen years late to the game you may not understand what I mean by the ending! For those of you who do, there’s nothing more to say. And, despite it being more of a psychological drama than anything else, it does maintain the mood and craftsmanship of any great psychological horror – it’s minute detail, its shocking visuals, its uncomfortable dirty realism all combine into this murky, itchy disturbance. Personally this film effects me more, emotionally and pictorially, than any horror. It doesn’t rely, until the end anyhow, on massively shocking visuals or gore, it’s more about in-articulation, losing your humanity, losing everything to this living inferno dreamscape.

#4: The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011)
I’m unsure how old I was when I first endured this film. I remember being fairly nonplussed with the first instalment in this body-horror franchise. I thought it was over-hyped and sometimes just a bit dull. In fact the only scene that stuck with me, and still makes my stomach churn a little, was the infected staples image. On the flip side of the coin, the second movie was too much. Strikingly meta, albeit over-relying on monochrome camerawork – be honest with us, Tom Six, was this just so you could save some dosh on fake blood and use chocolate sauce instead? – it follows a repugnant man, Martin, in the same world as us, a world in which the first film exists, who obsessively studies it. Even more meta is the inclusion of Ashlynn Yennie, who played Jenny in the first film, playing herself. The main difference between this fella and the sick b***ard from the first time round is that this one has zero medical training and so his – much larger scale – centipede is haphazardly constructed and even involves a pregnant woman which, to be fair, was a step too far. Pregnant women and infants do not belong in these films (but, then again, wait until #2 on this list) can we just universally agree on that? That put aside, there are certain scenes in this movie that really are sickening for no other reason than to get people talking – sexual and physical molestation of children, masturbating with sandpaper, the severing of the knee ligaments, removal of teeth with a hammer, anal exsanguination, removal of tongues with pliers, laxatives (‘nuf said), barbed-wire-wrapped-rape (a sentence I never thought i’d write), a newborn’s skull being crushed by an accelerator pedal and a live centipede being inserted into Martin’s anus. Blimey, what a list.

#3/Honorary Mention: Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
Okay, this 1980 Italian found-footage film didn’t make it onto the actual list because, unpopular opinion, I don’t actually find it disturbing. I’m not sure why, maybe as it’s dated now? Who knows. But I had to at least mention it because it involves the actual slaughter of animals such as turtles, monkeys and fish. I find that more disturbing than any on here!
DO
NOT
MESS
WITH
THE
ANIMALS!!!

#2: A Serbian Film (2010)
This is one of those exploitation horrors that if you’ve never actually watched it, it’s likely that you’ve heard about it. It follows an ageing porn star who becomes embroiled in one last hurrah, as it were, but what begins as a last assignment in the adult industry soon becomes a grotesque extended metaphor for life in Serbia – that the country ‘screws its inhabitants from the moment they’re born’. Soon this flick becomes all about the shock factor, it’s filthy and bloody and just perverse. It’s no coincidence that I always see this film at the top of most banned and disturbing horrors lists. I can’t remember exactly how many countries banned this one for, I may be wrong in thinking it’s over 10? Correct me in the comments if you know. Anyway, this film includes necrophilia, incest, newborn-rape (you don’t entirely see it, thank God!) and lots of just…uncomfortable feelings. It’s not even that it necessarily makes that much of an impression on first or second watch, it’s only when you start questioning the whole morality of it that it starts to f**k with you head.

#1: Martyrs (2008)
Here we are, number one. The big uno. This French horror film is many things: unnerving, grotesque, haunting, scaring, banned and has even been associated with being responsible for the New Wave French Extremity movement. The plot follows a young girl escaping from a year’s worth of torture and abuse, then sees this young girl’s, Lucie’s, hallucinations of a ghost figure. Years later she arrives to a family’s house as a young adult and shoots them, believing them responsible for her miserable childhood. Anna is there (her childhood friend) and Lucie subsequently kills herself. Anna finds a strange cellar under the basement with a woman, Sarah, who is emaciated and translucent, with metal bolted to her temples – her eyes in permanent darkness. This proves Lucie was right about the family and Sarah was the ghost-like, psychological representation of her guilt. Anna sets Sarah free, after pretty hard to bare attempts at removing the metal. plates. Then people arrive, gunning down Sarah (cry – seriously this film is so messed up) and kidnapping Anna (Like, what the frick did Anna do?). It’s revealed that these people are a sort of academic, philosophical cult who believe that by inflicting the most extreme systems of agony and torture on the human body a person could “transcend” to a utopia-esc post-heaven. They flay Anna alive, again incredibly disturbing to watch, and she survives, in a euphoric type state. The leader of the organisation, Mademoiselle, eagerly returns to hear of Anna’s revelations. Anna whispers in her ear. She proceeds to kill herself. The film ends on Anna’s face in a catatonic state. It had really mixed critical response, unsurprisingly. I just remember feeling so violated afterwards. The physical horror of it all is just too much.