Kids, Ken Park and
Bully (Larry Clark)
Audition (Ôdishon) and
Ichi The Killer (Takashi Miike) – I’ve only watched this twice, but it sits in the back of my head like a thorn.
Seul Contre Tous and
Irreversible (Gaspar Noé) – because people like that exist.
Eraserhead (David Lynch)
Dumplings (Fruit Chan) – ouch: the visceral sound of crunching foetus bones.
Breaking The Waves (Lars Von Trier)
The Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg) – both these dogma films touch really dark nerves
Repulsion (Roman Polanski)
Dans Ma Peau (Marina de Van) – is actually amazing, just amazing: but deeply deeply uncomfortable and almost unwatchable because of the vampyric gore.
Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo) – the powerlessness of the central character induces a heart attack of desperation in me.
Suicide Club (Shion Sono) – apart from the skin roll, the point it makes about meaninglessness in contemporary society is priceless and squirm-worthy.
But the most disturbing film I have seen (and continue to re-visit) is
Freaks (1932, Tod Browning). Its disturbia is a suburb of everything human: from the circus where the freaks are on show to the mirror it throws up to human conceptions of beauty.
I agree with Halim’s choice of Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, Breaking The Waves, and Lilja-4-ever.
I also include:
The Collector (1965) with Terence Stamp
Maya (2001) a story set against a practice of ritual rape still occurring in some parts of India.
Irreversible – by Gaspar Noé. (This film is tough tough tough, but I think the storytelling here is just genius)
Dancer in the Dark – by Lars Von Trier. (It kills me, it’s a straight shooter, just as it is hypnotic.)
The Birds
I agree with Toby on Johnny Got His Gun (1971) by Dalton Trumbo and with DKA on The Birds. The Piano (1993) by Jane Campion is pretty disturbing, too, but in a way that adds to the quality of the film. Luna Park (1992) by Pavel Lungin also falls under this category.
The Tin Drum and The Night of the Hunter must also be added to this list.
Saw the last 15 minutes of Marnie last night. I think the trilogy of Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie are really some of the most unnerving films ever made, in the same manner of David Lynch. That is, not unnerving for a rational/logical reason, but for just the opposite…
i highly agree tha dogma films are exceptionally disturbing that’s why i love them but the most disturbing film for me is mysterious skin .
i forgot salo
Salo is awesome but not the kind of movie that you want to watch every week. It must be the most disgusting movie ever!
I wonder why PPP made this film… I have a couple of hypothesis but because I’m not very good in english, it would be hard to write a little essay about that on this board…
“Salo” is a gross work by an ego detached from its brain stem and gone mad with delusions of grandeur. Samuel Beckett could have written a play about Pasolini. He’d have described him floating in an upturned belljar bubbling with the shit of dead poets, stirred with the head of a sodomized chicken. How someone gets from writing communist-flavored verse about the countryside to directing such a sagging, mysoginist, useless “allegory” is beyond my comprehension. It’s an exercise in self-hate.
I think Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” and “Julien Donkey-Boy” probably belongs to this list as well. Since they were both pretty disturbing and haunting, and also really good movies at the same time.
Repulsion
Battle Royale
Dead Ringers
Mulholland Drive
Oldboy
Through a Glass Darkly
Audition
Night of the Hunter – I will never be more terrified than when I first heard Robert Mitchum’s scream
Salo
Irreversible
Dumplings
Chinatown
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
and, of course… Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Agree with y’all on:
Aguirre
Night of The Hunter
The Celebration
Idiots
Julien Donkey-Boy
BUT YOU FORGOT:
The Begotten
Fire on the Plains
The Eel
Insect Woman
Onibaba
The Sacrifice
The Idiots
Happiness
oh yes the idiots!!great film! halim i tried hard to like gummo and julien drunken boy buti don’t know i feel i cannot get them.
Marion, I can understand why you probably didn’t like Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy very much. They are sort of ‘hard to like movies and a lot of my friends didn’t like them either. I watched Gummo for a Film Class in College, and while I was watching the movie I didn’t enjoy it that much, though it was also an 8 AM class and I was barely awake. However, after the movie, once I had to write a paper about it, I had to think what I have seen thoroughly, and then I liked it much much better,as lot of the motifs and themes of the movie came together in my head. I also thought it was a very haunting for movie, since I still remember a lot of the scenes, even though it was a very long time ago that I have seen the movie. And I think thats why I like it, because I see a lot of movies and only a few of them stay with me as vividly as Gummo did.Same goes for Julien Donkey-boy as well.
Gummo
I Stand Alone
Storytelling
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
Happiness
Man Bites Dog
The Eel
re: Salo. If you disagree, maybe you should say why. Or someone could start a thread under Pasolini.
György Pálfi (“Hukkle”) has a film titled “Taxidermia,” which I think could be the single most disturbing movie I have ever seen. It is also a brilliant work of art. Though I have never seen this many people walking out of a film in my life, literally 50% of the whole audience left the film in the 20 minutes and by the end of the film only 10% of the whole auidence was there for the Q&A session with the director.
THE BEAST (Walerian Borowczyk,1975), POSSESSION (Andrzej Zulawski,1981), The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960), Teorema (Pier Paolo Passolini, 1968), LAS POQUIANCHIS (Felipe Cazals, 1976), Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971), NIGHT AND FOG (Alain Resnais, 1955). A HOLE IN MY HEART (Lukas Moodyson, 2004), TIDELAND (Terry Gilliam, 2005), I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (Meir Zarchi, 1978), RAPE ME (Virginie Despentes, 2000), PRINCIPIO Y FIN (Arturo Ripstein, 1993), Emmanuel in America (Joe D’Amato, 1977), Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, 1988), Visitor Q (Takashi Miike, 2001),
Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008),
Brazil. Se7en. Stalker. 2001 Space Odysee. Shining. Grave of the fireflies. Psycho. Blood Simple. Freaks. The Return.
“Romper Stomper”, “Henry – Portrait of a Serial Killer”
SOMBRE by Philippe Grandieux is the kind of film you can’t get out of your head easily. Powerfull and very disturbing. Watch the intense opening sequence here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuCYmGcYPwc.
- Salò by P.P.Pasolini (who, by, the way, is a masterpiece and one of my favorite movies, despite T’s superficial analysis of it);
- The Devils by Ken Russell;
- Querelle by Rainer Werner Fassbinder;
- The Isle by Kim Ki-duk;
- Eyes without a Face by Georges Franju;
- Don’t Look Now by Nicolas Roeg;
- Peeping Tom by Michael Powell;
- Repulsion by Roman Polanski;
- Eraserhead by David Lynch;
- Woman in the Dunes by Hiroshi Teshigahara;
- Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel.
Love is a strong word, but these films (minus the numerous aforementioned by others) certainly disturbed me in various ways to the point of being highly interested:
“Humanité”, “Twentynine Palms” – Dumont
“Ma Mere” – Honoré
“In a Year of 13 Moons” – Fassbinder
“The Blood of the Beasts” – Franju
“Benny’s Video”, “Caché” – Haneke
“The Doom Generation” – Araki
“Straw Dogs” – Peckinpah
“The War Game” – Watkins
“Come and See” – Klimov
“Casualties of War” – De Palma
“Bad Boy Bubby” – Rolf de Heer
“Persona”, “Hour of the Wolf”, “Cries and Whispers” – Bergman
“Baise-moi” – Despentes/Coralie
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” – Hooper
“All About Lily Chou-Chou” – Shunji Iwai
“Hypnosis” – Masayuki Ochiai
“Ring”, “Dark Water” – Hideo Nakata
“The Grudge” – Takashi Shimizu
“The Eye” – Pang Brothers
Eraserhead disturbed me, Persona too…
Irreversible, I stand alone from Gaspar Noe. Persona and Shame from ingmar bergman. Vengeance is mine by shohei imamura. Casulaties of war, dressed to kill by brian de palma. bully by larry clark. Natural born killers by oliver stone.
To this already impressive and disturbing list, I must most definitly add Fists in the Pocket. I recently saw the Criterion Edition of this movie on DVD. It was unbelievably disturbing and very hard-to-watch, but it was also equally well-acted, stylish and powerful!!!
INLAND EMPIRE
Halim Cillov
There are many movies that stay with us and haunts for a very long time, and there are others that pushes us to the edges of our seats or makes us grind our teeth with discomfort, and yet we LOVE these movies and watch them over and over again. Not because we have some sadistic disorder, but because, most of the time, these movies reveal something about the human condition that affect us profoundly. I was wondering what are some movies that you watch and you like that also distrubs or haunts you.
Here are some of mine:
Funny Games and The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke)
Requiem For A Dream (Darren Aronofsky)
Breaking The Waves (Lars Von Trier)- Especially the ending of this movie traumatizes me for days each time I watch it.
Irreversible (Gaspar Noé)
Lilja-4-ever (Lukas Moodyson)
Audition (Ôdishon )
Oldboy (Chan-wook Park)
Head-On (Fatih Akin)
Dumplings (Fruit Chan)
Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay)
and the movies of David Lynch, especially his short films.