What’s the Most Disturbing Film You’ve Ever Seen?

Longlegs, Osgood Perkins’ unnerving serial killer horror film starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, has become one of the summer’s sleeper hits. The critically acclaimed thriller was bolstered by one of the savviest marketing campaigns of 2024, an intriguing hype cycle that held back much of the film’s true hook and played up its narrative as a uniquely terrifying cinematic experience. Distributor Neon released one clip that claimed to have recorded Monroe’s racing heartbeat as she shot her first scene with Cage, whose prosthetic-clad face was largely hidden from audiences in the trailers. It paid off, as Longlegs, at the time of this piece being written, has grossed over $62.2 million worldwide (from a $10 million budget.)

As with all films that dare to sell themselves as more frightening than the average horror, it’s inspired much discourse about whether or not it’s actually all that scary. Personally, I was more creeped out than scared, with the tense blend of procedural and speculative reminding me a lot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, but not as consistent. But it’s easy to see why Longlegs accrued this kind of buzz. It’s beautifully shot, memorable in its scares, and rooted in a world outlook so relentlessly bleak that it leaves you feeling just a little bit dirty. There is a difference, however, between a film being scary and a film being disturbing.

Scares can linger, sure, but it takes something extra for it to worm its way under your skin and hibernate there in the long term. Often, the switch from one to the other is minute, barely noticeable until you realize you can’t shake off the feeling of true distress. Bloodstained slasher films might not do much for you but then a woman is flayed alive in Martyrs and you know the line was crossed. Sad endings get the job done but there’s another step required to make it overwhelm you.

There’s a moment in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome where a character explains what makes the eponymous hypnotic channel so dangerous: ‘It has a philosophy.’ That’s what differentiates a scare from true disturbance for me. The most notable examples are films that strip away the artifice to reveal a painful or long-hidden truth about ourselves. Michael Haneke’s work forever plagues me in this manner because it’s all made from the distinct and thoroughly asserted perspective of pure nihilism and the malaise of human existence. His 1989 debut, The Seventh Continent, follows a seemingly normal couple and their routine lives, before showing them systematically destroy every object they own with the coldness of someone waiting in line at the bank. Then they kill themselves. No motivation is given. The clinical nature of this horrific act has stained my brain far more effectively than a dozen killing sprees in a slasher flick.

Fat Girl is a French drama written and directed by Catherine Breillat, a controversial filmmaker whose work has tackled unflinching realities of sexuality for decades. At the age of 17, she published a novel that was considered so shocking that the French government banned it for readers under the age of 18. In Fat Girl (known as À ma sœur! in France), two adolescent sisters explore their burgeoning sexualities. One of them, the older and more extroverted Elena, is preyed upon by an older man, who manipulates her into having painful sex with him. This happens in a long, drawn-out scene where the camera refuses to look away from an act of abject grooming. It’s one of the most honest and harrowing portrayals of sexual assault I’ve ever seen, as well as a committed view of how patriarchy has made it impossible for girls and women to truly know themselves and define their own concepts of longing and pleasure. By the film’s truly shocking conclusion, this message is impossible to ignore: the world has ruined sex for an entire gender. Fat Girl remains one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen because of this. It’s honest and that hurts.

And then, of course, there is Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a film frequently described as the most disturbing of all time and maybe the only one to have truly earned the honour. Loosely adapted from the novel by the Marquis de Sade, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film is a damning indictment of fascism and political corruption that is truly brilliant but also obscene and life-ruining. You name it and it happens in this film. To this day, many critics litigate over whether or not you should even watch Salò (I think you absolutely should, as long as you’re prepared for it.) You can’t really blame anyone for wanting to sit out a work that includes child torture, sexual abuse, degradation, coprophilia, scalping, and tongue removal. Eli Roth and many splatter-heavy horror filmmakers revel in this sort of ultra-violence to the point of fetishization. Pasolini doesn’t do any of that, and the sheer coldness of his perspective, fiercely moral but unflinching, is somehow worse than anything in Hostel. As John Waters succinctly noted, Salò is about ‘the pornography of power.’

I’m a hopeful skeptic. While an optimistic mentality largely drives me, it frequently clashes with my overwhelming pragmatism. So, blood and guts dark movies or extreme horror don’t leave much of an impact on me, even though I’m a massive chicken. What disturbs me are stories about the weary inevitability of human failure, tales where our terrifying endpoint is inescapable and enforced by broken systems that destroy time and time again. So, it’s no wonder that Haneke movies are like scabs on my soul, that Fat Girl haunts me so many years after I saw it, that scenes in Salò are more ingrained onto my brain than some of my favourite films. They’re all too real, and what’s scarier than the wholly plausible?

What are the most disturbing films you’ve ever seen? Let us know in the comments.