Most Disturbing Movies

Billy feels as if he's different from his rich, privileged friends and family. How right he is. He's adopted, but there's more to it than that. Much more... Not only was Billy born into a different class from the rest of his family, he's a different species. He's human, they are not.

What makes this disturbing is its sheer weirdness. Contorting body-horror, incest and literally pulling people inside out are the order of things.

Jeffrey Beaumont is an inquisitive kid, who discovers a crime in his sleepy little town. Before he knows it, he's peeking behind the curtain, and is dragged into the seedy underbelly of the community, where murder, depravity and sexual violence reign.

What makes this disturbing is, again, weirdness (well, it is a David Lynch movie). Also, Dennis Hopper's legendary performance is terrifying.

A kind of mid-70s, David Cronenberg version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. It's David Cronenberg, so, of course, body-horror features heavily. This, in itself, is fairly disturbing, but the fact this features parasites, which make people sexually promiscuous, and which are spread by sexual intercourse, and the fact that exposure to these parasites leads to psychosis is why Shivers is really quite disturbing.

Almost everything about this movie is disturbing. There are things getting cut off and gouged out all over the place. In fact, there is so much gore and so much violence here, that it's actually tough to sit through.

Perhaps I find this movie so disturbing, not because of the buckets of gore, (I am, after all, a bit of a horror fan, and the violence is so over-the-top) but because the eye-gouging scene inspired one real-life nut-job.

This movie is fantastic, because, unlike Hostel and stuff of that ilk, this isn't disturbing just because of its violence, it also troubles audiences because it asks us to examine ourselves. Why are we so fascinated by horrific crimes, and why do we make killers into celebrities? Very unsettling.

What for most of its running time plays like a Hitchcock thriller, suddenly assaults you with a torture scene that would make even the most hardened horror fan squirm in their seat.

What's so disturbing about this is the raw, animalistic way the main character fights for his life. There is a particularly gruesome disembowelment, which has certainly stayed with me.

This is often in lists like this, and the reason is it's pretty damn disturbing. The reported copycat attack on a homeless man, just after the movie's release, led to Stanley Kubrick, its director, pulling it from the cinema and slapping a ban on it, only added to its power to disturb and unsettle.

The scene that stands out as the most disturbing is the scene in which Alex's Droogs rape a woman and beat her husband, while Alex dances around singing 'Singin' In The Rain'. I haven't been able to hear that song without thinking of that infamous scene since my first viewing.