No, this is not a compilation of movies you casually put on, hoping for a chill time on your couch. You don't watch the films on this list as much as the films on this list happen to you: they slip under your skin, slide into the folds of your brain, worm their way into your very soul. Nothing could make it on the list unless we found it actively unpleasant to experience.
There are no cornball haunted house movies or cheesy slashers contained here. This is the real nightmare fuel. The movies that pushed our buttons in profound ways. Some of these movies are masterpieces. Some are trash we can't really recommend. But all of them are disturbing. Buckle up β this is a rough one.
Proceed with caution. Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream" is a horror movie where the demon eating away at its four core characters is addiction. This unflinchingly bleak portrayal of the different ways in which drug abuse can tear people's lives apart is disturbing not because of any extreme violence or gore, but because it might be one of the most depressing movies ever made. By the end of the movie, Harry is lying in a hospital bed with his arm amputated, having contracted gangrene from infected injection sites.
His friend Tyrone Marlon Wayans is suffering through withdrawals in jail. Harry's girlfriend Marion Jennifer Connelly is performing in degrading sex shows in exchange for her next hit of heroin.
And Sara is near-catatonic after abusing amphetamines to lose weight for a television appearance that's never going to happen. Hideo Yamamoto is enjoying some celebration lately. But one of the author's most famous works, about an unstable killer who brushes up against a sadistic Yakuza enforcer, has been shocking people for 20 years.
