Disturbing Films Megathread

Come and See if probably the most accurate World War 2 movie and gets past that need for a hero or some kind of victory at the end. It's truly a work of art.

I can't remember if It's "City of Life and Death" or another movie about the Rape of Nanking but one of them stood out as especially grim and realistic. War movies don't really make me uncomfortable, however that one did.
 
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Errol Morris's documentary about a self taught engineer who builds all sorts of execution devices for prisons, such as electric chairs, lethal injection rooms, gallows, and gas chambers. The disturbing part is not so much that he designs and builds these death machines but the thought that goes into making them and handling it humanely. Anybody can pull a switch but nobody thinks about the guys who have to strap the condemned to the device or put the needle in or cleaning the mess after he dies. I found the first half so distressing I had to stop watching the Doc halfway though, I still haven't watched the second half, which is Leuchter's fall after meeting Ernst Zundel.
 
Disturbing films that have not been mentioned yet:

Last House on Dead End Street. A guy gets out of prison and makes snuff films as a means of revenge against society. Featuring a deer hoof blowjob scene.

Black Sun: the Nanking Massacre. The official followup to the director's earlier Man Behind The Sun and it holds absolutely nothing back. An epic of war time atrocity horror.

Star of David: Beauty Hunting. The most nihilistic Japanese Pink Movie ever made that acts as a sort of proto American Psycho.
 
Come and See if probably the most accurate World War 2 movie and gets past that need for a hero or some kind of victory at the end. It's truly a work of art.
The part that gets to me in Come and See is the Nazis burning those villagers. All the screaming, the gunfire, the roar of engines, barking dogs, and the Nazis laughing. It is a scene of pure madness. Yet you know that incidents like that happened, that it really isn’t an exaggeration.

At the same time, Come and See has one of the most human scenes. At the end, Flyora shoots a picture of Hitler, each shot going back in time throughout Hitler’s life, as if Flyora can erase Hitler from history. Flyora stops shooting as soon as we see a picture of Hitler as a baby. Flyora has complete justification to want Hitler erased considering everything that happened in the film. Yet Flyora keeps his humanity, refusing to kill a child, refusing to be as brutal as the Nazis.
 
In a Glass Cage is a Spanish Film from the 80s about the cycle of abuse (among many other things but that's the driving theme). It's not outright gory or sick like something like Salo but it really got under my skin, for some reason. The whole thing just felt really unnerving and it's one of the few times I've felt genuinely uncomfortable watching a movie. It's free to watch on Tubi if you want to (legally) check it out (and should work fine even with an AdBlocker. Tubi is really underrated imo, but that's off-topic).

Movies like 8MM and Hardcore about shit like snuff films and how seedy the porn industry is have always gotten to me too. Out of those two Hardcore is a lot more visceral imo. I like both for what they are. Wouldn't call them abjectly disturbing but they've always gotten a reaction from me personally.

Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo movies (especially the first one) are really good body horror. I haven't rewatched them since my first viewing because they literally hurt my brain. May or may not be considered disturbing depending on individual's tolerance for that kind of stuff.

Speaking of Jap shit Pulse and especially Cure are both directed by the same guy, and extremely good movies, on top of being pretty disturbing. Again, not so much in the sense that something like A Serbian Film is; these are both very quiet, contemplative movies that leave you alone with the subject matter that you feel like you shouldn't be seeing. I like both and find them really disturbing for different reasons: Pulse is very prophetic in regards to the Internet and how it inevitably evolved (or devolved) and Cure is just an eerie, evil movie (in a good way).

I know it's A24shit but I also have to mention Hereditary as the only movie that I've seen in theaters that genuinely unnerved me on a really deep level. I was seeing shadows/figures in the corner of my ceiling for like a week lol.

Also more contemporary, Skinamarink is really, really hit-or-miss with people but I thought it was effective. I think it was mostly the fact that it was about two helpless little kids stuck in a fucked situation they had no possible way of getting out of, rather than the filmmaking/scares or anything. I hate kids getting hurt in movies, even scary ones where it's to be expected, so it really got to me - a particular scene at the end especially.

Those are just some off the top of my head that haven't already been mentioned (at least not that I saw) in this thread. Some are kind of subjective as far as how disturbing they are but I think they're all movies worth watching one way or another. I think to a certain degree they all stand on their own without relying on the shock value of how disturbing or disgusting they are.
 
When the Wind Blows is up there with Watership Down as my reason for having trust issues with anything animated.

"Oh a cartoon, this will be so cool" Fast forward 25 years of waiting for the nukes to drop post cold war, and wondering if the Rabbits from the ship will kill me in my sleep.
It was written and illustrated by Raymond Briggs, who also did that short film The Snowman that has an extremely horrible ending for what is supposed to be a Christmas story for children.
 
This may be a bit tame. The Hitcher is an old school video nasty from when I was growing up and it still greatly unsettles me. I dunno, something about Rutger Hauer just creeps me out. I have always preferred psychological shit over gratuitous gore.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LQwuvbyb0_w
Yeah, I have always found myself unimpressed by films that intentionally spam the fuck out of gore/rape/literal shit/COCK-AND-BALL-TORTURE-FROM-WIKIPEDIA-THE-FREE-ENCYCLOPEDIA in order to be "disturbing" on the principal that any worthless hack can fill a runtime with this cawntent if they get enough pennies together to pay some cheapass actors and purchase whatever they need for cheapass effects, and basically just exist as glorified prototypical 2girls1cup experiences so you can tell people how you saw the super-duper forbidden movie and never even consider watching it again.

The best movies you could class as "disturbing movies" are usually just good horror movies in which the effects guy has been given extra budget and leeway for some well earned splatter moments, or movies that are well made enough to not even need to show this shit on screen to be freaky as fuck. Either way these are movies you would be happy to watch again if the desire to feel freaked out strikes you.

Crossed is a comic series created by the same creators as the boys but it's getting a movie soon. I hope it would be great but I'm sure it's gonna be watered down heavily.
*mutters furiously to himself and resists the urge to start ranting about how much he hates this fucking tryhard comic again*

It was written and illustrated by Raymond Briggs, who also did that short film The Snowman that has an extremely horrible ending for what is supposed to be a Christmas story for children.
Fun lil factoid I have probably sperged about before. One of the finest edgetard neo nazi black metal acts Grand Belial's Key randomly covered the main theme of The Snowman in their "cut that filthy faggot jew Jesus's dick off" album for reasons nobody seems to know as they are an American band about as far removed from Raymond Briggs as fucking tentacle hentai

Come and See if probably the most accurate World War 2 movie and gets past that need for a hero or some kind of victory at the end. It's truly a work of art.
Indeed, and it has continued to inspire creativity to this very day
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Disturbing films that have not been mentioned yet:

Last House on Dead End Street. A guy gets out of prison and makes snuff films as a means of revenge against society. Featuring a deer hoof blowjob scene.

Black Sun: the Nanking Massacre. The official followup to the director's earlier Man Behind The Sun and it holds absolutely nothing back. An epic of war time atrocity horror.

Star of David: Beauty Hunting. The most nihilistic Japanese Pink Movie ever made that acts as a sort of proto American Psycho.

Blacksun is the film I was thinking of about Nanking.

The part that gets to me in Come and See is the Nazis burning those villagers. All the screaming, the gunfire, the roar of engines, barking dogs, and the Nazis laughing. It is a scene of pure madness. Yet you know that incidents like that happened, that it really isn’t an exaggeration.

At the same time, Come and See has one of the most human scenes. At the end, Flyora shoots a picture of Hitler, each shot going back in time throughout Hitler’s life, as if Flyora can erase Hitler from history. Flyora stops shooting as soon as we see a picture of Hitler as a baby. Flyora has complete justification to want Hitler erased considering everything that happened in the film. Yet Flyora keeps his humanity, refusing to kill a child, refusing to be as brutal as the Nazis.

The scene in Come and See that always got me is when they put the Babushka on the bed and leave her there, god knowing what they did to her. I don't know why that scene gets me so much but it's just yikes.
 
The film Mother from 2009 is my pick for over the top Korean crime drama, a mother trying to prove the innocence of her retarded son in a murder trial. The actress who played the mom did so amazingly and I was left with a really bitter taste in my mouth once the film was done. Certainly not a gore fest but the film left an impact that ones like I Saw The Devil failed at.
 
For me the most disturbing moments are not found in violent films, but in children's when the tone suddenly takes a turn for the grim. Like a horrific storm it eventually passes and the light of day comes around as if nothing had happened. The juxtoposition of sweet safety and unexpected horror is much more memorable than any number of "mature" works. Certainly there is film you watched growing up that made your little brain go silent. Even if the film is shit, you remember it forever.
There's also Feed, the horror movie about a feeder fetish website owner that is honestly not a very good movie but the scenes of the fatasses eating were so disgusting it made me legitimately nauseous.
I wasn't aware someone made a documentary on Null.
 
Gummo (1987). It isn't gory or gross or blasphemous, but I could feel my soul shriveling while watching. It's basically about the daily lives of a select group of people in a tornado devastated town in Ohio, some of whom are obviously "mentally challenged" and others probably suffering from really bad PTSD. They simply exist for the sake of existing, never trying to better themselves or even being aware of the possibility, and unable to perceive of anything beyond of the basics of surviving. The dirtiness, squalor, and hopelessness on display will make you thank God that you live even a low middle-class lifestyle. The banality is overwhelming and will leave you feeling permanently stained, made all the more potent in the knowledge that such a place exists in one of the wealthiest countries on Earth.
 
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Errol Morris's documentary about a self taught engineer who builds all sorts of execution devices for prisons, such as electric chairs, lethal injection rooms, gallows, and gas chambers. The disturbing part is not so much that he designs and builds these death machines but the thought that goes into making them and handling it humanely. Anybody can pull a switch but nobody thinks about the guys who have to strap the condemned to the device or put the needle in or cleaning the mess after he dies. I found the first half so distressing I had to stop watching the Doc halfway though, I still haven't watched the second half, which is Leuchter's fall after meeting Ernst Zundel.
There's an interesting shift in the second half. I watched it back in the day and I was quite feeling bad for this smart guy who was getting attacked, or made some analytical errors, or was a fighter for truth. But the motivation I got from that portion is dude really really loved the adoration he was getting.

I tell people 'it's the most nihilistic Soviet World War 2 film. Think about that qualification for a minute.'

One off the wall one, WAY off of mainstream movies and in with the fallout crowd. There's a cartoon called "The Little Flying Fish Gets Sick", for Japanese school kids about the titular flying fish kid slowly dying of radiation poisoning. I genuinely wonder why it was made. What's the message? "Remember kids, don't get nuked!"
 
My personal pick for most disturbing film is Isao Takahata's animated feature Grave of the Fireflies. I don't call it anime or think of it as anime because anime connotes entertainment and 'Graves' is...something else. The film is notable for its utter absence of hope, as in there is none as far as the eye can see. You see two starving war orphans starve. I think the director was going for saddest movie ever made by man.

It affected me profoundly.
 
Martyrs, from 2008

I watched most of that movie literally covering my eyes, and it was still hard to watch because of the very realistic screaming and sound editing. The premise of the movie is effectively horrifying to think about as well, because you can 100% believe that there are nutcases out there who would do this.

Fucked up/10. Will never ever watch it again.

Se7en. Probably pretty tame compared to other stuff mentioned.
One of the greatest movies of the 90's (which is saying something because the 90's was a fantastic decade for movies altogether).

Se7en an effectively unnerving and disturbing movie because it knows when to show and it knows when to leave things to your imagination. The "sloth" scene genuinely made me scream out loud the first time I saw the movie, and that scene stayed with me for days because my imagination ran wild as to how a body still survives in that condition and in that much pain.

Another scene that still disturbs me greatly is the interrogation scene after the "lust" death. It's difficult to hear the dialogue of how the murder went down explicitly, and enough imagery is shown for everyone watching the movie to piece the horrific crime together.

David Fincher is a genius.

My personal pick for most disturbing film is Isao Takahata's animated feature Grave of the Fireflies. I don't call it anime or think of it as anime because anime connotes entertainment and 'Graves' is...something else. The film is notable for its utter absence of hope, as in there is none as far as the eye can see. You see two starving war orphans starve. I think the director was going for saddest movie ever made by man.

It affected me profoundly.
Arguably the most depressing movie ever made.

I don't know what else I can say about it. It's definitely a movie that leaves me at a loss for words.
 
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