Disturbing Behaviour by The Horror Queen

Hi guys!
My name is Rachael, and I'm your resident Horror Chick. Here's a compliation for you of some of the most disturbing films I have watched and loved. Why not try your hand, in here you may find a hidden gem that could stick with you for life.



Switchblade Romance
A one-time watch here, but one that will burrow beneath your flesh and stay there for days. ‘Switchblade Romance’ is a French slasher flick that proves to be both hideously violent and extremely unsettling. Two college friends travel to the countryside to visit family like respectable young ladies, but are forced to fight a gruelling battle to escape the clutches of a ruthless and mysterious killer. The pace is brutally fast from the outset – this film sets up its characters and situation in just 20 minutes. Although ‘Switchblade Romance’ vividly depicts scenes of torture, developed around one friend’s desperation to save the other, its goriness doesn’t detract from its overall poignancy. It is a tale of survival against all the odds, and possesses an acute sense of reality at its heart, and with a real tense, ominous score the ensuing gorefest is all the more hard-hitting.

‘Switchblade Romance’ is a modern stalk ‘n’ slash film with real suspense and a few aces up its sleeve, and definitely brings something new to the horror genre. The violence in this movie is, at times, extremely hard to stomach (for example, when the killer axes someone in the chest, then has to pull, crunch and grind her bones around in order to work his weapon free) but shapes the finished piece into an unforgettably visceral, harrowing experience.

Just one look at the still beneath this heading will show you just how blood-splattered this film is. An exploration of sadism, masochism and the inner workings of Japan’s criminal underbelly, ‘Ichi the Killer’ (or ‘Koroshiya 1’ as you will sometimes see it packaged) is a deliriously inventive piece of ultra-violent, ultra-debauched cinema from one of the world’s leading cult horror directors, Takeshi Miike. Any of his films could have made this list, but I decided on ‘Ichi’ because it has considerable depth and intelligence without letting you drift in and out of its plot for the first half of the film (think ‘Audition’). ‘Ichi’ is absurd and funny without compromising any of its nightmarishly visceral sadistic atmosphere.

This film not only pushes at the boundaries of cinematic violence and depravity, it tears them to shreds with its nail-biting torture scenes, leaving even the most strong-stomached of us with our hands over our mouths. An interrogation scene shows boiling fat poured over a man suspended by his skin on meat hooks slicing their way slowly through the flesh on his back. But that doesn’t hold a candle to the psychotic violence that Ichi himself is capable of, he even splits one of his victims in two!

So, if you’re looking for dark humour, sadistic onscreen cruelty and some major shock tactics, ‘Ichi the Killer’ is most definitely one to watch.

Another unique factor about ‘Se7en’ is that it succeeds in keeping an audience several steps behind its story, and there is none of the predictability and blandness so often associated with horror/thrillers nowadays. Instead, ‘Se7en’ is well crafted, ingeniously misleading at times with some of the most subtle and disturbing imagery I have ever seen on film. It is undoubtedly one of the best films of the 90s, with perhaps ‘Silence of the Lambs’ as its only true competitor when it comes to creating an original, inventive psych-horror plot. ‘Se7en’ is a must-see that will string you up and drag you along the dirt road with it – and you won’t even think to complain.



Requiem for a Dream
Okay, so this isn’t a horror film, or a thriller, or even a suspense drama. But who cares? ‘Requiem’ goes to the top of this list for the simple fact that it is the single most disturbing film I have ever seen (and that includes ‘Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom’!). This movie does not offer viewers the conventional system of horror, no. Rather, with its raw, unadulterated humanity, it horrifies by penetrating deep into our emotional and psychological cores – by stripping that humanity away from its central characters bit by bit until they are left bereft of hope, empathy and life. This is the most realistic onscreen depiction of the terrifying, spiralling descent into inner-city drug addiction I have ever witnessed. There are scenes that disgust; shooting up into a gangrenous vein, arm amputations, scenes of a sexual nature involving a shocking double-headed sex toy, but director Darren Aronofsky has so much more to torment us with than that.

The most heart-wrenching, gut-churning aspect of the entire film is the story of the protagonist’s mother, Sara Goldfarb. In the loneliness of her waning years, she falls victim to the false promise of glamour that television throws out to the world, receives an invitation to appear on her favourite TV show and so desperately tries to improve her diet in order to fit into a red dress she hasn’t worn in years. She becomes addicted to diet pills, and throughout the course of the film we draw back to her, her all-encompassing loneliness and desperate desire to be admired, loved and useful again. Ellen Burstyn’s performance of this character is absolutely stellar and it brings this film down to a humble level where its poignant message transcends its cliché anti-drug purpose.
               
As a viewer, you have no choice but to share a certain sort of desperation to see Sara recover, to see her escape the clutches of desolation that addiction brings. And she’s not even the main character! No film I have ever seen has connected audience to character as thoroughly and successfully as ‘Requiem’. Of all the horrifying events portrayed in this movie, it is the exploration of the total dilapidation of the soul that can come hand in hand with old age that is the most harrowing, most troublesome, and will never allow you to forge what you have seen onscreen.
 

Se7en
David Fincher’s 1995 suspense drama masterpiece may not be a conventional choice for a list like this; it’s not a horror film as such (though some of the prosthetics and make-up artists might have you believing otherwise), but the mechanics of this psychological onslaught will have you recoiling in your seat. Even the opening scenes fill you with a taut thread of tension, with Fincher’s depiction of the desolate, almost derelict streets. Unlike the vast majority of more recent Hollywood offerings, ‘Se7en’ does not stray from its focus – two detectives desperately searching for a killer who, inspired by the seven deadly sins of Dante Alighieri’s ‘The Divine Comedy’, turns the everyday sins of his victims against them. This film is incredibly striking and unique, constantly drawing an audience in to become captivated and thoroughly entertained by the plot unfolding around them – a perfect vessel for the shocking, uncompromising vision of its director.