Movies That Were Too Disturbing To Finish

Netflix's quick ascent to the top of the entertainment industry goes hand-in-hand with the rise of binge-watching. In fact, the company seems dedicated to trying its best to make sure that you never, ever turn off your television. That's what makes "Veronica" so surprising. In March 2018, Paco Plaza's Spanish-language horror film made headlines because people were so scared that they couldn't make it through the entire thing — and Netflix couldn't be happier.

Plot-wise, "Veronica" doesn't break any new ground. The title character misses her deceased father, her friend wants to talk to a dead boyfriend, and so the girls use a Ouija board and a solar eclipse to summon their spirits. As tends to happen when Ouija boards are involved, things don't go according to plan. If you've seen The Exorcist, Paranormal Activity, Ouija, or countless others, you know what to expect.

Or, at least, you think you do. Veronica succeeds where other films fall short through a mixture of real-life terror — "Veronica" is loosely based on a real-life story, although "loose" is an important part of that description — and pitch-perfect filmmaking. Plaza knows how to push all the right buttons, and that elevates a standard horror flick to what some people are calling the "scariest movie ever." After watching "Veronica," some viewers are plagued by nightmares for days. Others can only go to sleep with the lights on after watching — and those are just the people who finished the movie. Many don't make it that far. Life is short, after all. Why spend the rest of it cowering in fear?

Darren Aronofsky's "mother!" sn't a traditional horror movie. It doesn't have any monsters or supernatural threats, and the whole thing feels more like a traditional allegory than other, schlockier entries in the genre. That doesn't make the film any less troubling, however. Love it or hate it (many people seem to choose the latter), "mother!" is successfully disturbing, thanks largely to the brutal and relentless abuse heaped on Jennifer Lawrence's character.

As "mother!" unfolds, you'll get to see Lawrence's poet husband, played by Javier Bardem, completely ignore his wife and her needs. You'll get a firsthand view as Lawrence fights to defend her home from hordes of her husband's ravenous fans. You'll watch as Bardem takes his newborn baby outside against his wife's wishes, and be forced to look on as the frenzied crowd kills it and eats it. When Lawrence protests, the crowd turns on her and beats her. By the end of the film, she's burned, battered, and dying — and then Bardem rips out her heart and the entire cycle starts again.

Taken all together, it's kind of a lot. Too much, in fact. Some critics found the film's graphic depictions of infanticide, cannibalism, and both physical and emotional abuse supremely distasteful. Audiences agreed. People flocked to the exits during "mothers!'" theatrical screenings, and we can't say we blame 'em. When a movie relies on a picture of a battered woman to get attention? That's a warning sign that you'd better not ignore.

According to the stories, Caligula, who served as Emperor of the Roman Empire from AD 37 to AD 41, wasn't a nice guy. He started famines on purpose. He slept with other men's wives and bragged about it later. He had an affair with one of his sisters and prostituted out the others. He threw orgies, spent money on bizarre and frivolous pursuits while his subjects starved, fed criminals to wild animals and had suspected political rivals humiliated or outright killed, depending on his mood at the time.

Sounds like a great subject for a movie, right? Bob Guccione, who founded the hardcore men's magazine Penthouse, certainly thought so. In 1979, Guccione released Penthouse's one and only feature film: "Caligula," a historical epic featuring Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, unsimulated sex scenes, and all different kinds of bodily fluids. Guccione might argue that "Caligula" is art, but everyone else seems to dismiss it as little more than a big-budget porno.

It's not just that "Caligula" s as depraved as its subject matter (trust us — "Caligula" has pretty much everything). It's also that there's just too much of it. With a runtime that borders on three hours, the movie requires a major time investment, and all of that debauchery gets exhausting fast. Acclaimed film critic Roger Ebert couldn't sit through it, and that guy saw almost everything. We doubt you'll fare much better.

Writer-director Ari Aster describes "Hereditary," his critically acclaimed haunted house film, as a personal project. "I had gone through some stuff with my family," Aster said during a Q&A session. "I took my sickness and now put it inside all of you." Aster didn't elaborate further, but whatever the issue was, it must've been messed up. "Hereditary" isn't just the strongest debut from a horror director since "Get Out," it's one of the most terrifying films to come along in years — if you can manage to sit through the whole thing.

Not everyone can. While "Hereditary" received rave reviews when it screened at Sundance (at the time of this writing, it's got a whopping 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes), it was also scary enough to drive many viewers from the theater. Even people who stayed for the whole thing didn't really want to. "I was tensely perched in my seat the entire time," Vulture's critic wrote, "ready to pick fight or flight just as soon as I could figure out what the threat was."

"Hereditary" isn't unsettling because of its jump scares or supernatural creatures, although it's got plenty of those. It's hard to watch because the characters' pain is so real. In "Hereditary," Toni Collette plays an artist, Annie, who just lost her borderline-abusive mother to cancer. Meanwhile, her relationships with her husband, her son, and her daughter are slowly deteriorating. That's enough to make "Hereditary" uncomfortable from the start. When the scares start dropping, it becomes unbearable.

Director Eli Roth is no stranger to movies that are hard to sit through. His 2006 horror hit "Hostel" more or less invented the phrase "torture porn." With "The Green Inferno," however, Roth pushes things further than ever before — and unless you're a seasoned gorehound, chances are you won't make it to the end. In the grand tradition of the video nasties of the '70s and '80s, "Inferno" tells the tale of a group college-aged activists who head to the Amazon to protest a logging operation. They find cannibals instead.

You can probably imagine the non-stop stream of sadism, gore, and misery that follows, and if you can't last through the whole movie, well, that's kind of the point. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Roth said, "If I've really done my job as a director, nobody can actually watch your movie." He means it, too. "You don't want people walking out of a movie; you want them running out of the theater screaming," Roth elaborated. "When that happens, that's like a standing ovation for me."

Like "Cannibal Holocaust" before it, "The Green Inferno" achieves its unsettling dread by shooting on location in Peru, utilizing physical special effects, and casting members of the Amazon's native population in key roles. That's led some critics to (fairly) accuse "Inferno" of cultural appropriation, but Roth doesn't seem to mind. The amateur actors were all paid fairly, he's insisted, and while they didn't have much experience in front of the camera, "they got it right away and loved it."

You won't find everything that makes "Irreversible" hard to watch onscreen. Don't get us wrong: Emotionally, the movie is absolutely brutal, thanks in large part to the 10-minute rape scene — one of two in the movie — and the frank depictions and discussions of incest, abuse, and murder. It's bad enough that even its star, Monica Bellucci, can't sit through it, even though she hardened herself on a diet of "The Accused" and "Deliverance" before filming (understandably, her father found it pretty hard to watch too).

But that's not the only reason over 250 people fled the film's Cannes premiere, with many fainting and seeking medical treatment. The sound played a big role, too. See, "Irreversible" uses infrasound, or low-frequency sound waves, to augment its unsettling visuals. You can't actually hear the sound, but your body registers it anyway, leading to feelings of anxiety, unease, distress, and depression, in addition to the shivers and, sometimes, nausea.

It's a trick that many modern horror films use, including "Paranormal Activity," and while infrasound doesn't affect every member of the audience in the same way, it's credited as one of the reasons why "Irreversible" makes many members of its audience feel sick. In fact, many people who watch don't even make it to the film's infamous assault. Thanks to the soundtrack, a mere half hour of "Irreversible" is more than enough for many viewers, forcing them to turn the film off before its most horrific action even truly begins.

Is "Cannibal Ferox" too tame for you? Is "Human Centipede" a walk in the park? "Audition" is no big deal, and "I Spit on Your Grave" barely registers? If so, we've got good news for you. There's a new contender for the crown of the single most vile movie ever made. It's called "Melancholie der Engel," or "The Angel's Melancholy," and even if you've got a stomach made of iron and a will of steel, you may not make it through this one. If you're smart, you won't even try.

As for plot? "The Angel's Melancholy" doesn't need one. Oh, sure, there's some philosophical nonsense in there about a man who's decided that his life is winding down and wants to go out with a flourish — doing lots of drugs, raping teenage girls, killing animals, and indulging pretty much every sexual, scatological, masochistic, and beastialogical impulse you can possibly imagine, plus a few more.

Some nice cinematography aside, critics seem to agree that the main reason to watch "The Angel's Melancholy" is seeing whether or not you can last through it. "It is a depraved, perverse and nihilistic endurance test," Severed Cinema said in its positive review. "If anyone can sit through it all... I think that's pretty impressive by any standards," Cinema-Extreme's critic wrote. The Northern Light compared "The Angel's Melancholy" to sticking your face in a fire. "It will hurt all the time, it's just a matter of how much you enjoy the pain," it warned. "Stay away, stay far away."

Filmgoers at the Toronto International Film Festival should've known what they were in for. After all, its late-night "Midnight Madness" programming block has its name for a reason: anything goes. Unfortunately, not everyone got the memo, and one film fan found Coralie Fargeat's "Revenge" so intense that he had a seizure right in the middle of the theater.

Reportedly, it was a scene in which a man is forced to remove a giant piece of glass from his foot that did it. "We started to hear someone say, 'hello, hello,' from the audience," Fargeat told IndieWire. "I didn't know if it was someone making [a joke] in the room, then I see the paramedics in the cinema." Thankfully, the audience member was fine. He was in good company, too. "Revenge" lead Matilda Lutz admitted that the scene made her feel "weird" too. "And I shot it," she added, "so I can only imagine."

If that scene doesn't get you, the rest of "Revenge" very will might. Starring Lutz as a woman out for vengeance who's raped and left for dead by her lover and her friends — all of which is shown onscreen, naturally — "Revenge" is a lean, brutal, and extremely well-reviewed thriller that's just as thrilling as it is disturbing. Just don't take it lightly. If someone is willing to have a medical emergency rather than watch until the end credits, things must get pretty intense.

"Goodbye Uncle Tom" (also known as "Farewell Uncle Tom," in case you're crazy enough to seek this one out) has a legitimately interesting premise. An Italian documentary crew travels back in time to explore the horrors of slavery firsthand. Despite directors Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi's background in schlocky "mondo" films — a.k.a. "Shockumentaries" — "Goodbye Uncle Tom" is supposed to be a serious anti-racist statement. Its terrors are even based on real historical documents, giving the whole enterprise a veneer of respectability.

But it's merely a veneer. "Goodbye Uncle Tom" is just as exploitative as Jacopetti and Prosperi's other work, and the real-life subject matter makes watching it more uncomfortable. Over its two-hour runtime, it bombards viewers with images of naked slaves being mistreated, beaten, raped, and sold. At one point, a 13-year-old sex slave tries to seduce one of the documentarians. He accepts her advances and has sex with her while the camera rolls. On top of it all, occasionally the movie slows down and gives its abused subjects brief moments of humanity. It's nigh-unbearable.

"Goodbye Uncle Tom's" behind-the-scenes history doesn't help. Jacopetti and Prosperi worked with Haitian dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and were treated like his special guests. During filming, hundreds of anonymous Haitian extras were forced to suffer the same indignities as real-life slaves. It's cruel, shameless, and unabashedly racist, and it's been condemned by everyone from the Italian government to Roger Ebert to KKK leader David Duke. It's also hard to make it through the whole picture, although it's even harder to imagine why you'd ever even want to.

Many of the most disturbing movies share a similar setup: a man captures a woman, keeps her locked up in a remote location, and tortures her for the film's length. From that perspective, there's nothing particularly unique about "The Bunny Game." Behind the scenes, it's another story. Though the film was entirely improvised, star Radleen Getsic really was abducted and raped, and the movie is based on her actual experiences. Even worse? Aside from the drug use, everything that happens onscreen is unflinchingly real.

So, when Getsic appears on screen fully emaciated, she really is starving: the actress fasted for 40 days before shooting began. When her captor brands her with a red-hot iron, her screams are genuine. Gestic still sports the scars. During filming, Gestic was spit on, beaten, shaved, bound, gagged, and brutalized. Gestic was a consensual participant in the horror, but as a result, "The Bunny Game" toes the line between horror movie and actual snuff film, and it's not clear which side it ultimately falls on.

Accordingly, it's not an easy movie to finish. One blogger notes that she couldn't finish the movie in a single sitting. The Horror Society calls the movie "unwatchable," and says "you will finish it or you won't" — and that's in a positive review. Nobody's quite sure who Getsic director Adam Rehmeier made "The Bunny Game" for, but it's clear who it's not for: the faint of heart, and anyone with even a smidge of good taste.

Few movie promotional items drive home the idea that a movie experience will be intense more than a vomit bag. Movies ranging from "Mark of the Devil" to "Raw" gave away airline sickness bags to audiences to signal that the violence in those films would be so graphic that upset stomachs awaited. And while most of these efforts have been cheap but effective stunts, it appears that "Terrifier 2" actually justified their use.

When the horror sequel opened in October 2022, media outlets and social media accounts were flooded with stories of audience members fainting or becoming ill during screenings. The reports of such extreme audience response excited and alarmed writer-director Damien Leone. "Listen, I would have loved to have a couple of walk-outs," he told EW. "I think that's sort of a badge of honor because it is an intense movie. [But] I don't want fainting [or people] getting hurt during the movie."

Tod Browning's 1932 thriller "Freaks" remains one of the most controversial films — horror or otherwise — in motion picture history. The MGM release, which concerned a troupe of carnival performers who wreak terrible revenge on two of their members, eschewed special effects in favor of actors with real physical disabilities, including limbless performers Johnny Eck and Prince Randian, the Living Torso, conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, and microcephalic Schlitzie. Though Browning's film is essentially sympathetic to the sideshow talent, the sight of them in a horror-fueled scenario reportedly proved too much for some viewers and critics.

In "Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema," author Angela M. Smith cited third-party accounts of negative audience reaction, including a Los Angeles Times article that claimed that during a test screening in California, "some horrified spectators got up from their seats and ran – did not walk – to the nearest exit." The article also quoted the film's production manager, who claimed that a woman tried to sue MGM because the picture reportedly caused her to miscarry. Such frightful press, real or otherwise, caused the studio to cut nearly a half-hour of footage from "Freaks"; the film, which will debut on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection in 2023, exists only in this truncated form.

Though it's too soon to tell how audiences will react to "The Exorcist: Believer," there's a good chance that their response won't reach the heights of hysteria that accompanied the original film in 1973. When William Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's novel about a case of demonic possession in modern-day Washington, D.C. hit theaters in late December of that year, audiences lined up in single-digit weather to see the spectacle of Dick Smith's astonishing special effects makeup for Linda Blair as the possessed girl. Many of them also freaked out.

Terrified audience members fled theaters and became physically ill during screenings; the New York Times reported incidents of heart attacks and even a miscarriage, while the Chicago press claimed that six individuals were committed to psychiatric care after seeing the film. The Times article also noted non-stop screaming during the exorcism, like the sound "one used to hear at early Beatles and Rolling Stones concerts." News and documentary footage from theaters in 1973 features interviews with audience members who made it through showings of "The Exorcist." Responses ranged from flabbergasted to something approaching shellshock.

While several movies have made (or claimed to make) audiences sick due to their bloody or disgusting content, a select few prompted viewers to run for the bathroom because of motion sickness. The most notorious of this wobbly group? "The Blair Witch Project," the 1999 found-footage thriller that purports to depict a documentary about a research project into a supernatural myth. Much of the film utilizes the herky-jerky aesthetic of handheld camcorder footage, which when combined with the film's heartstopping scares and claustrophobic framing, proved too much for some moviegoers.

CBS News reported on the near-constant wave of vomiting caused by "Blair Witch," with some theater managers stating that at least one audience member got sick at every screening of the film. "Blair Witch" wasn't alone in causing such mass outbreaks of puking; people bailed in droves on screenings of "Cloverfield" due to issues of motion sickness and migraines, while feelings of vertigo overcame audiences who saw "The Walk," Robert Zemeckis's 3D feature about highwire artist Philippe Petit's tightrope between the World Trade Center's towers in 1974.

While most of the films on this list sent a handful of viewers in select locations to the restroom or even to the hospital, Danny Boyle's "127 Hours" caused audience members to drop like flies in multiple places. The film, released in 2010, detailed the plight of hiker Aron Ralston, who was forced to amputate his own arm when it became trapped under a boulder. Boyle unflinchingly depicted the amputation, and reactions were extreme.

A story in the Los Angeles Times addressed the scene's impact on audiences at various film festivals and screenings across the country: six people collapsed at one fest, while others reported extreme nausea, dizziness, and even an apparent seizure. The real-life Ralston told Entertainment Weekly that he attended several screenings at which audience members passed out, while Boyle told The Moveable Feast about a special screening at Pixar Studios that went awry. "There were people lying down on the steps of Pixar and this one woman, I was looking at her and she woke up and she recognized me and she said, 'Oh, good film,'" he explained.

Few films have divided audiences like Lars von Trier's 2009 film "Antichrist." While the surreal drama reaped a Palme d'Or nomination and Best Actress Award from the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, it also earned a special "anti-award" from the festival's ecumenical jury for "the most misogynistic movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world." Critics were also split about "Antichrist," with positive reviews balanced by true critical bile, the most amusing of which was Variety's assessment of the picture as "a big fat art-film fart" (really).

However, this divide paled in comparison to reactions from the Cannes audience, which outdid itself in adhering to the festival tradition of loudly booing disliked films. Out-there moments like its notorious talking fox were met with laughter, while scenes of genital mutilation and physical abuse elicited audible gasps. According to the Guardian, at least four attendees also fainted due to the film's graphic content.

Critics delivered a mediocre response to "Saw III" in 2006, but audiences turned out in droves to the third entry in the long-running horror franchise: "Saw III" is the highest-grossing entry in the series worldwide, with a total box office take of more than $164 million. However, some audience members in the United Kingdom got too excited about the film upon its release there in October 2006.

The BBC reported that three separate calls to emergency services were made in a single night during a Friday night screening of "Saw III" in Stevenage, a town north of London. Two audience members were treated by medics after fainting and released to "friends and relatives," but a third, a woman in her 20s, was brought to the hospital and later discharged. "Saw III" also reportedly caused a fourth individual at a different theater to collapse during a screening. A spokesperson for the East of England Ambulance Service who was quoted in the BBC item seemed to sum up the basic rule of thumb regarding violent horror movies: "If you know you're squeamish, don't go," said the spokesperson.

A screening of "The Conjuring 2" in India turned into a real-life horror movie after an audience member reportedly died while watching the Blumhouse supernatural thriller. A news item in the Times of India in 2016 claimed that a man attending a screening of "Conjuring 2" in the southern Indian town of Tiruvannamalai complained of chest pains before fainting. The 65-year-old was rushed to a nearby hospital where doctors pronounced him deceased. And that's where the story gets even weirder.

Hospital staff reportedly asked the man's companion, who also attended the film, to take the body to the Tiruvannamalai Government Medical College Hospital for a post-mortem examination. The body never made it to the facility: both the friend and the dead man were reported as missing, and local police conducted an investigation to determine both the cause of the disappearance and the possible whereabouts of both man and corpse.

No additional details about the case have surfaced since 2016, but the news item kicked off a minor social media storm about the film's dangerous potential, including a video on Facebook that allegedly showed a woman becoming possessed while watching "Conjuring 2." However, the video was debunked after reports surfaced that it had actually been filmed in 2013.

If you still believe that black and white horror movies aren't scary, it's time for you to see "Eyes Without a Face." The French film, directed by Georges Franju and released in 1960, is a foundational title in the "surgical horror" subgenre and concerns a doctor determined to correct his daughter's facial disfigurement. His intention is pure, but his methods — well, let's call them unsound. He and an assistant kidnap young women, removing their faces and grafting the skin onto his daughter. Unlike many films of the period, Franju spares no detail in showing the surgery in all its bloody glory.

Audiences in 1960 weren't prepared for such graphic gore in any film. Herschell Gordon Lewis's "Blood Feast," widely considered the first full-gore horror title, was still four years away. Reports about "Eyes Without a Face" from the Edinburgh Film Festival noted that seven people fainted during a screening. Franju reportedly responded by stating, "Now I know why Scotsmen wear skirts" (via TCM). Trimmed for American release, "Eyes Without a Face" was largely dismissed by mainstream critics and didn't earn its reputation as a horror classic until years later.

The 2009 Australian historical thriller "Van Diemen's Land" is based on the real-life case of Alexander Pearce, an Irish convict sentenced to a penal colony in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in the early 19^th century. Pearce and several other prisoners escaped the prison but harsh conditions forced them into starvation and cannibalism. Pearce, the only survivor, was hanged in 1824 and remains a controversial figure in Australian culture to this day.

Pearce and his fellow escapees were the subject of "Van Diemen's Land," which sought to view his actions through the lens of a desperate act of survival and not homicidal mania. Director Jonathan Auf Der Heide, who frankly depicted the murders and cannibalistic acts, was shocked to discover that audience members had become physically ill and even passed out during screenings.

"The vomiting thing is a real surprise to me," said Auf Der Heide to AAP (via The Sydney Morning Herald). "But [the movie is] nowhere near as intense as a lot of the cinema that's out there today because we did shy away from the gruesome stuff. What people find so gruesome about it is that it is approached as authentically as possible."

Any list of the most shocking and disturbing films ever made must include 1975's "Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom." The World War II-era drama, directed by Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, is a savage indictment of power and corruption: the abusers here are political, legal, and religious figures in Fascist-occupied Italy who subject a group of teenagers (including their own children) to nightmarish physical and sexual abuse before slaughtering the majority of them. Though Pasolini's sympathies appear to be with the victims, he also does not flinch from depicting their torture and degradation.

Numerous countries banned "Saló" and it remains a divisive subject for audiences and critics nearly five decades after its release. While many film writers praise Pasolini's vision, others find it too bleak to recommend or even endure. Variety critic Peter Debruge supported those who walked out of the film, stating, "'Saló' holds no reward for viewers who keep their seats to the end. To walk out on the film is to triumph over the impulses it critiques; to pause, rewind and zoom, by contrast, is to fall prey to that very nature."

Most of the people who took issue with Martin Scorsese's adaptation of "The Last Temptation of Christ" in 1988 refused to see the film, preferring instead to protest outside theaters (or completely shut down Los Angeles traffic, as 25,000 people did during a protest at Universal Studios that year). There were also extreme reactions, like the arson attack on a French theater showing the film that left 13 people hospitalized. But it also generated walkouts, most notably religious leaders in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. invited to special screenings.

A handful of invitees left the showings before the final credits, including the Reverend Frank Eiklor, whose decision to leave was motivated by the film's dream sequence which depicted Jesus as a normal man. "I see why Universal waited until the last day (before the nationwide premiere) to show this film to us," he said. "When you see Jesus portrayed this way, when you see Jesus Christ made the wimp, I could only walk out outraged."