Most disturbing movies?

[Lee]

The original Cape Fear with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchem.  The sights, smells, and sounds, on a lake at night, still bring back "the fear" in me.

[JAlexander]

Freaks and The Fly (the remake, not the original).  I watched Freaks with a couple of friends, one of whom was pregnant, and it scared the hell out of her.

James

[280plus]

"The Wall"

"Rocky Horror" but that one was more disturbed than disturbing... 

[Unisaw]

280Plus: LOL.  When I was a little kid, the flying monkeys scared the crap out of me.

[grislyatoms]

"The Thing", scared the snot out of me when it came out. 1982 or so? Saw it with my Dad, but he wouldn't take me to see Alien. Go figure. Great movies, both.

The Shining. Kubrick was, indeed, twisted.

The scene in "Hannibal" where Dr. Lecter is feeding Ray Liotta's character his own brain, a little bit at a time. That scene made me physically ill.

Speaking of Dr. Lecter, the villain (Buffalo Bill, was it?) in "Silence of the Lambs" seriously creeped me out.

All I can think of for now.

[280plus]

When I was a little kid, the flying monkeys scared the crap out of me.

Me too man! Other parts that scared me was when the witch appeared on top of the house and threw that fireball at the scarecrow. Oh, and then when she was writing in the sky on her broom. Great kid's movie  

 

[Ron]

A couple of movies I have refused to see did their best to sympathetically portray pedophiles.  One is "The Woodsman" with Kevin Bacon and the other is "American Beauty" with Kevin Spacey.  Oh, there is another named "Happiness."  There is a term that ought to apply to those who produce and participate in such, "Not fit for polite society."

A long time ago I watched a movie with Clint Eastwood as a detective chasing a pedophile/killer. That movie made me depressed for days and I am happy that I can hardly remember anything about it now.

It was an early attempt at showing criminal profiling where the detective gets into the mind of the killer. Just creeped me out big time. I think Clint blows the guy away in the interrogation room at the end.

[Bogie]

After Requiem for a Dream, I felt like I had to take a really long shower. In lysol.
 

[wingnutx]

Just the trailer for "8mm" freaked me out pretty badly, so I did a bunch of research on snuff films and found that the FBI and Scottland Yard had never found a real one in all their years of searching. That was very reassuring.

Still no way I am ever going to watch that movie.

I won't watch movies like "Hostel" which are basically just about torture. Violence and gore I have no problem with as long as they are not the entire point of the film.

[Felonious Monk/Fignozzle]

Not familiar with 8mm, although the mere thought of snuff films reaches the heights of my personal taboos and fears.

The one that did a real number on me psychologically was Silence of the Lambs.  Se7en was pretty intense, too.

[grampster]

When I was a kid, I went with to see The Thing (The original movie) with my aunt and my dad.  I spent most of the movie down on the floor of the theater I was so scared.  I had dreams about that movie for months.  Iirc, the monster was played by a young James Arness.

Around the same time, The Creature from the Black Lagoon came out and then a bunch of warped critter movies where nuclear radiation made monsters of them.

It was the '50's.  Lots of scary movies.  Better than today as those movies built suspense up and up and up....not graphic, gratuitous violence and gore like today.

[Matthew Carberry]

I guess I rationalize myself out of most movie fears.  Either the set-up to get the characters into the jam is so contrived as to exclude me from ever seeing myself in that position (what idiot would go off with those strangers?) or the scenario is solveable and only the incompetence or bad choices of the protagonists keeps them from solving it.  So put into that exact situation, I'd solve it.

The harming of the innocent when the hero is actually unable to do anything about it is what gets me.  I don't fear much for myself, but the idea that I might be unable to help my loved ones is torture.

So the "wife disappears and the husband has to try and find her" movies get me.  Frantic, the one with Kurt Russell on the highway, those movies bug me. Se7en worked because the killer was good and the cops were playing by the rules of police work.

Horror movies that just tick me off are the ones with the actually unstoppable villian.  If the laws of physics (or even internal logic) aren't going to apply at all and there's no supernatural counter, what's the point of watching the movie?  I'm looking at you Japanese movies.  

Friday the 13th, Halloween, even vampires are not those kind of movies, they do go down occasionally (when hit with big enough stuff), and anyone with a lick of sense and decent resources would, instead of running off like a chicken, just cut off their hands and head and keep them in a bag for the rest of the movie and burn them to ash when they get the chance.  The monsters have not shown, in the continuity of the movies, the ability to regenerate those parts and all are more or less harmless without heads and hands.

Big animals or mutants?  If they bleed, we can kill them.  So no "horror" there, just a hunter/hunted scenario.

So, it's only the realistic, competent, human monsters that get me creepy.  Cape Fear is a good example.  You have to be at the top of your game to take a guy like Max Cady.  Though in the movies the protagonists very seldom take the expedient route of just aggressing against the threat and executing him first rather than waiting defensively.  given a similar "real-life" scenario, I'd rather worry about getting away with the murder than I would waiting for him to choose the time and place.  Which is why realistic movie protagonists are rarely modeled on former military and shooters.  We actually have the "hammer" for "nail" problems.

[gunsmith]

I would like to see a movie where, at the end of the film, the kindly ccw gentleman
shoots the bad guy ending the reign of terror.

[Monkeyleg]

grislyatoms, regarding the character Buffalo Bill in "Silence of the Lambs:"

The first time my wife and I watched that movie together, and Buffalo Bill was acting obviously psychotic, I turned to my wife and said, "reminds me of one of your old boyfriends."

The look I got was so cold that the furnace kicked in.

[Volt]

Few have seen it, but most anyone who has seen it will agree; one of the most disturbing films, and by a large margin, is the French film "I Stand Alone".

[Cosmoline]

Just the trailer for "8mm" freaked me out pretty badly, so I did a bunch of research on snuff films and found that the FBI and Scottland Yard had never found a real one in all their years of searching. That was very reassuring.

The irony is, in the post 9/11 world the once mythical snuff films are not only real, they've been seen by millions worldwide.  It shows how once was once unthinkable can become commonplace. 

One upshot is, the gore and sadism of so many films these days is laughable.  After seeing real people get they're heads chopped off by some muslim a-clown who can't even do it right, the shocker films are a joke. 

I find myself drawn more to films such as the original "Cape Fear," where the superlative acting and writing do the work. 

When I was a kid, I went with to see The Thing (The original movie) with my aunt and my dad.  I spent most of the movie down on the floor of the theater I was so scared.  I had dreams about that movie for months.  Iirc, the monster was played by a young James Arness.

It's a very good film, and was a cut above most of the 50's monster movies.  Howard Hawks himself had a big hand in it, and you can see his influence in the fast-paced, smart dialog and tight action scenes. 

[tyme]

The Shining
Suspiria
Session 9
Perfect Blue (1997) (anime)
Audition (1999)
Mercy (2000)
Hard Candy (2005)

For gore/fright, the ultra-modern Saw I/II/III, Hostel, Wolf Creek, and Hills Have Eyes (2006) are pretty bad.

[280plus]

As an aside, I was in a curio shop with the missus yesterday and I saw a sign: "Caution, I have flying monkeys and I'm not afraid to use them!"

 

[client32]

Just the trailer for "8mm" freaked me out pretty badly, so I did a bunch of research on snuff films and found that the FBI and Scottland Yard had never found a real one in all their years of searching. That was very reassuring.

Still no way I am ever going to watch that movie.

Not familiar with 8mm, although the mere thought of snuff films reaches the heights of my personal taboos and fears.

I did see 8mm and didn't know what it was about when I went.  That has been the only movie to disturb me.

There is a line in there where Joaquin Phoenix is accusing Nicolas Cage of enjoying the snuff films.  Nick says nope, not me.  Mr. Phoenix returns with, "well, you aren't exactly turning away."  The lines comes at a point in the movie where most the audience has hardened themselves and is able to watch the violence.  Many other un-nerving things in the movie, but that was the one that really got to me.

[mfree]

"Pet Sematery", but only one scene... when Gage gets run over by the truck. The rest of it is standard movie schlock.

[280plus]

Pet Sematery WAS good. The part where the possessed kid cuts Ed Gywnne's achilles tendon always got me. The truck scene too, I'll agree on that. My favorite line of all time is in that movie, "That's where my dog Spot is buried."

[280plus]

I remember another one from way back. Disturbing for a kid anyways. It was this old SciFi job where a flying saucer landed out back in the fields and glowed for a while and somehow it was discovered that the Martians were using some kind of ray gun to melt through the ground and were tunneling everywhere. We beat them in the end though. Anybody recall the name of that one? Then I recall an old Superman episode (the B&W kind with George Reeves) where these little guys came out of a really deep oil well shaft. Scared the living crap outta me. I thought scary looking little people lived under the ground. LOL...

[Chris]

The Buffalo Bill charcter from Silence of the Lambs, especially the scene where he's dancing for the video camera, makes me glad to this day that I have a firearm.

8mm was truly disturbing, thinking in terms of those kinds of people living in the same world as me and my children.

Blackhawk Down is disturbing, thinking of how politics cost so many soldeirs their lives.  But, at the same time, it is great to know and see the courage those same soldiers can, and did, exhibit when called upon.

Kiss the Girls as a film doesn't do the novel justice.  SPOILER ALERT!!!  The idea of a pair of serial rapists/killers working in unison, and feeding off of each other's "work" is frightening.

[DrAmazon]

Se7ven.  I won't watch it again.  The part that STILL disturbs me is the "lust" murder.  The idea of being forced to murder someone in such an awful way just turns my stomach, or maybe I'm more disturbed that the "killer" didn't say no.

Yech.

[richyoung]

"On the Beach", a depressing Better-Red-than-Dead post-appoclyptic propaganda piece.
"Dual" - the TV movie thta put Speilberg on the map - Dennis Weaver's traveling salesman verses the unseen psycho truck driver.
:The Great Vampire Hunters" - combination of the twist ending plus knowing what happened to Sharon Tate...