Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #4]

3. Last House on The Left (1972) 8/10

In the horror genre, Last House on The Left is the seminal modern Disturbing Film; it was to the downer hippie crowd sliding out of the bad trip of Vietnam what Psycho was a decade earlier to audiences covering their eyes during the shower scene. A gang of drugged-out killers, lead by Krug (David Hess, one of the standout exploitation roles of all time; far too convincing) drags a pair of upper class girls to the woods of suburban Connecticut after the teenagers are ensnared going to the big city to see a rock band. They proceed to viciously humiliate, rape, and dismember them in some of the grimmest and unsettling scenes ever put to celluloid.

Based loosely on Bergman's The Virgin Spring, Last House has slapstick “comic-relief” cop scenes (with a young Martin Kove, who would later command “finish him!” in The Karate Kid), some goofy music, and bad production values, but when Krug and his gang and their victims are hidden away in the idyllic woods with nothing but silence and the sadistic glee of humanity at its worst, nothing in film horror had reached that level before. 

Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #7]

6. Requiem For A Dream (2002) 9 (gross out)/8 (artistic merit)

Darren Aronofsky, the DIY auteur who burst onto the scene with the black and white religious-techno fable Pi, and more recently made the wrenching The Wrestler, may have reached a creative peak with this adaptation of a novel by one of the stars of the disturbing branch of the literary world: Hubert Selby, Jr., who also wrote the book Last Exit to Brooklyn. In perhaps the most jarring and skillfully unnerving chronicles of drug addiction ever made, we witness the destruction by heroin and prescription pills of a mother, her son, his girlfriend and best friend (Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans, all top-notch). 

Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #9]

8. Cannibal Holocaust (1980) 7/10
Ruggero Deodato's exercise in The Ugly American's confrontation with jungle cannibalism is an admired and feared placeholder on any respectable Disturbist's desert island list. Made a full twenty years before Blair Witch Project, Deodato's film cleverly played with the line between movie reality and reality-reality by using a story of found footage: film stock is found in the jungle that chronicles the self-made video diary of an intrepid naturalist/would-be documentarian and his cohorts as they cut a swath through the Amazonian jungle to capture the lives of a “primitive” and, unfortunately for them, cannibalistic tribe.

Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the previous 13). [<< #11]

10. A Clockwork Orange (1971) 10/7
A film of such high artistic merit that I hesitate to place it here, but Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's sci-fi novel must grace any list with "disturbing" in the title. Mainstream enough to have been seen by countless neophytes, but twisted enough to be treasured by the more perverse among us, A Clockwork Orange (even the title is unsettling in its somewhat arbitrary and colorful surrealism) evokes a not very distant dystopia that is both absolutely convincing and yet disorienting in its restrained mix of futurism and contemporary realism: Kubrick infuses the early 70s overt, garish style with "things to come" details to create an effect both familiar and strange.