Blood, Guts and Violence: 20 Brutal Movies You Cant Unsee

Publish date: 2024-07-17

There’s a scene in Robert Eggers’ 10th century Viking epic “The Northman” where Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth bludgeons one of his opponents off a horse and then proceeds to kill another enemy by ripping his throat out with his mouth. To say these killings are brutal would be an understatement. The graphic violence on display combined with Eggers’ visceral filmmaking style (scenes often unfold in immersive long takes) all but guarantee the viewer will never be able to unsee the violence in “The Northman.” The same can be said about unshakeable movies from such controversial filmmakers as Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé, Takashi Miike and more.

Listed below are some of the most brutal movies ever made, each of which is chock full of blood, guts and/or extreme violence. If you can stomach them, they’re all worth a look.

The Northman
Robert Eggers’ 10th century Viking epic “The Northman” depicts graphic violence in a way that’s so visceral and matter-of-fact that the film can feel almost pummeling at times. Alexander Skarsgard plays a Viking prince who sets out on a mission of revenge against the uncle who murdered his father. Skarsgard hacks away at his enemies, leaving a tidal wave of blood and splattered body parts across the screen. Decapitations feel like they pile up in the dozens. “The Northman” is not for the faint of heart, as the intensity of the graphic violence is matched beat for beat by Eggers’ overbearing tone. Every moment of “The Northman” feels like it’s the jacked-up climax of the movie. It’s a staggering and unrelenting experience if you can stomach it.
The Painted Bird
Václav Marhoul’s black-and-white war drama “The Painted Bird” caused walkouts at festivals in Venice, Toronto and London due to its violent scenes of immense brutality, including one savage moment where a man’s eyes are gouged out of his head. The movie follows an unnamed Jewish boy who is exposed to the horrors of the world as he wanders around small European towns during World War II. Variety called the movie “a 169-minute panorama of a violent societal breakdown” and “a child’s-eye Holocaust drama of such unrelenting brutality as to make even the vaguest gestures of humanity — a held hand, a shared crust of bread — feel in context like miracles of grace.” Just a few of the film’s many horrors include a child being nearly pecked to death by scavenging crows, a pilloried woman being stabbed and kicked in the genitals and a man losing his own eyeballs to a jealous rival’s rage.
The Nightingale
Jennifer Kent’s “The Nightingale” stars Aisling Franciosi as a young woman who seeks revenge after the brutal murder of her family. Kent depicts graphic acts of violence and sexual assaults in unrelenting long takes that prompted outrage and walkouts when the film premiered at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. From Variety’s review: “This is violent, hard-graft auteur filmmaking that isn’t out to make friends or play nice…Far from cheap fake-outs or ornamental fillers, the film’s recurring, rhythmic slips into a tortured dream state serve to track the fraying, increasingly exhausted psyche of our heroine Clare (a terrific Franciosi), and to mark the film’s teetering pile-up of trauma, as separate acts and images of violence are replayed in her unconscious at varying levels of intensity: blood-distorted faces and bodies surging from velvet blackness, or pulling her under a tar-water surface.”
Antichrist
Lars von Trier’s experimental horror movie “Antichrist” stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple who descend into madness at a cabin in the woods following the tragic death of their son. The husband loses his grasp on reality as he’s plagued by sickening visions, while the wife starts to embrace violent and sadomasochistic behavior. Castration and bloody masturbation are only the start of the director’s warped vision. From Variety’s review: “As if deliberately courting critical abuse, he director packs on grotesque, self-consciously provocative images that might have impressed even Hieronymus Bosch, as the director pursues personal demons of sexual, religious and esoteric bodily harm, as well as feelings about women that must be a comfort to those closest to him…Most of the director’s usual fans will find this outing risible, off-putting or both.”
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Shinya Tsukamoto’s body horror nightmare “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” begins with a man cutting open his thigh in order to shove a metal rod inside it. The next scene finds the wound becoming infected with maggots. If you can’t stomach these sickeningly brutal images, then perhaps “Tetsuo” isn’t for you. Tomorowo Taguchi stars as a businessman who is turned into a grotesque hybrid of human flesh and metal after he accidentally kills a medal fetishist. The murdered spirit takes revenge on the businessman by warping his body in all kinds of twisted ways. The nightmare that’s created from Tsukamoto’s body horror imagery is heightened by the film’s relentless pacing. There are times when watching “Tetsuo” can feel like hysteria, but that’s also why it’s impossible for many to look away.
Revenge
“With her stylish and bloody rape-revenge thriller, French first-timer Coralie Fargeat turns a disputable subgenre upside down,” reads Variety’s review of “Revenge.” Matilda Lutz stars as a woman who is brutally assaulted by three men and left for dead in the desert. The woman survives, and once she recovers she sets out on a mission to kill her three attackers. The review adds: “Fargeat turns ‘Revenge’ into a tense, bloody, riveting cat-and-mouse game that embraces the slick tracking shots and can-you-top-this nastiness that’s come to define the French horror brand…it is pure violent fantasy, a nasty entertainment primed to rouse the self-selected few with the stomachs to handle it.”
Mother!
Darren Aronofsky’s allegorical thriller “mother!” features one of the most brutal final 20 minutes of a movie in recent memory. Jennifer Lawrence’s character has just given birth to her child, but the character’s home is overcome by invaders who basically throw a mass orgy of violence and mayhem while also seeking to tear the baby apart. The violence that goes down feels like whiplash, as Aronofsky piles on so many brutal visuals that it’s hard to even process and make sense of what’s going on (at least on the first watch). The sequence ends with Lawrence’s character being kicked, stepped on and beaten, with the film’s sound design making sure the viewer feels every bone-crunch of a punch. No wonder the film proved so controversial.
Videodrome
David Cronenberg is the master of brutal and disturbing body horror, and his masterpiece might just be 1983’s “Videodrome.” James Woods stars in the lead role of Max Renn, the president of a Canadian television station who becomes convinced that a new show called “Videodrome” can save the network. The show depicts the brutal torture and murder of random victims inside a red room, and Cronenberg depicts it all in such blood-curdling fashion that sometimes the viewer has no choice but to look away. When Max becomes obsessed with locating the makers of the show, his quest leads to his own psychological breakdown as two worlds of horror collide. It’s Cronenberg at his most surreal.
The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
Tom Six’s “The Human Centipede” is a grotesque horror movie, but its 2011 sequel is far more sickening and unshakable. Six promised fans he’d make a grosser sequel, and he delivered and then some by creating a story in which a man becomes obsessed with the first movie and makes it his mission to create his own human centipede chain consisting of 12 people. The results are far more violent, absurdist, minimalist, vapid and pretentious than the original “Human Centipede.” Variety called the sequel “stomach-churning” in its review, adding, “The film contains scattered scenes and sequences so far beyond the tolerance of the squeamish that it can’t be overstated; one, detailing the violent birth and death of a baby, is here simply to shock the most jaded of the jaded.”
Possessor
Variety film critic Peter Debruge called Brandon Cronenberg’s “Possessor” the most disturbing movie of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Brandon puts his own spin on his father David’s body horror legacy with this story of an assassin (a fearless Andrea Riseborough) who performs her assignments by possessing the bodies of other individuals. One mission takes an unexpected turn when she’s forced to fight back against a resistant new host (Christopher Abbott). From Debruge’s review: “The movie hews close to daddy David’s career-long fixations: the permeability of flesh, the malleability of identity, the physical threat of modern technology, the psychological oppression of modern architecture. At the same time, however, it shows Brandon to be a writer-director with bold ideas and a way of executing them that’s distinctly his own. ‘Possessor’ is a serious — and seriously unsettling — look at losing oneself in another person’s psyche.”
Audition
A truly shocking horror film about obsession gone evil, “Audition” is made even more disturbing by its haunting beauty. Takashi Miike’s roller-coaster of an invasion thriller stars Ryo Ishibashi as a widower who stages an audition to meet a new romantic partner. Enter Asami, played with a seductive pull by Eihi Shiina. As the widower becomes more interested in Asami, the woman’s dark past starts to terrorize him. The film’s lyrical pacing allows its most brutal moments to surprise the viewer, while the editing pulls surreal stunts with the timeframe so that viewers can’t be sure where they are in the sequence of things — or whether some gruesome events are really happening at all. Prepare to have your mind warped and your stomach churned.
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Variety critic Peter Debruge once called Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo” the “most disgusting, degrading and controversial film ever made.” Set during Italy’s fascist Republic of Salò in the 1940s, the movie centers on four wealthy libertines who kidnap 18 teenage boys and subject them to four months of sadism and psychological torture. Debruge added, “Pasolini’s pessimism extends to the bitter end, as the film’s sadists push the degradation to ever more unspeakable limits . Even so, the experience is beyond upsetting, testing the very limits of what many audiences can stomach…‘Salo’ holds no reward for viewers who keep their seats until 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.”
Irréversible
Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible” premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where reports surfaced that several audience members either fainted, threw up, and/or walked out. Vincent Cassel and Albert Dupontel play two men who seek to avenge the rape of a woman (Monica Bellucci). The allure of the film is that it’s told in reverse chronological order, but it requires enduring a 10-minute rape scene shot in one take that ranks as one of the most brutal film sequences of the 21st century. That the woman is beaten into a coma after her rape only makes the sequence more disturbing. The rape is presented in such frank and graphic detail that it makes other shocking moments in the film seem light by comparison, including one scene where a man is bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher.
Titane
Julia Ducournau dared to challenge the boundaries of sexuality and taste with her Palme d’Or winner “Titane,” a nothing-to-lose body-horror shocker about a woman who becomes impregnated by a car. That’s the simple way of selling the story, as Ducournau has a far more complex human drama on her hands about two lost souls with damaged bodies who find solace in each other. As Variety wrote in its review: “Ducournau uses the human body as a vehicle to deconstruct ideas of gender, desire and incredibly dysfunctional family dynamics. It’s a daringly queer and undoubtedly controversial ride, resulting in a most uncommon monster movie — a cross between David Cronenberg’s ‘Crash’ and the uterine horrors of Takashi Miike’s ‘Gozu,’ perhaps — where the main character hardly ever speaks and what Ducournau is trying to say is wildly open to interpretation.”
Raw
Before “Titane” made Julia Ducournau an international sensation, it was her cannibal horror movie “Raw” that first put her on the map. The film stars Garance Marillier as a young woman who tastes meat for the first time while attending veterinary school and develops an insatiable craving for human flesh. The film couldn’t go one festival screening without reports of someone fainting or walking out because of the film’s body horror shocks. From Variety’s review: “‘Raw’ is a deliciously fevered stew of nightmare fuel that hangs together with a breezily confident sense of superior craft…Hannibal Lecter may have selected appropriate wine matches for his meat, but the cannibalism on display here are more opportunistic — the equivalent, say, of being able to handily throw together a meal from whoever is lying around. Viewers will have had to sit up and take note, if not reach for the barf bag.”
High Tension
The violent slasher movie “High Tension” put a young Alexandre Aja on the map. The movie follows two female students who are forced to confront a serial killer on the secluded farm where they’ve traveled to study. The film takes the women-in-peril genre and twists it into an empowering and blood-soaked survival movie. Fans of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” know what they’re getting into more or less, but Aja has a deft ability here of juggling gore and suspense. When one of the women is brutalized, gagged and chained by the killer, it’s up to the other to rescue her with the help of a razor, hatchet and chainsaw. Let the blood rain down.
Martyrs
The blood doesn’t stop splattering in Pascal Laugier’s “Martyrs,” which follows two women who seek revenge for their abused pasts only to fall down a rabbit hole into something far more sinister. “Martyrs” is a hardcore genre movie that evokes a more violent and brutally serious “Hostel.” At the center of the film is a cult of wealthy savages who torture their captives to provoke a state of Joan of Arc-like grace. A woman who escaped the cult as a child returns 15 years later with her friend, but fighting back against the cult’s chopping block is no easy task. The film offers genuine scares early on before evolving into an orgy of blood-soaked violence.
Inside
Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s “Inside” is a gnarly home invasion thriller about a pregnant woman who battles a mysterious stranger hellbent on taking her unborn child. From Variety’s review: “For those who like their blood by the barrel, ‘Inside’ is just the ticket. Awash in red liquid that drips, oozes, spurts and pours, the movie restarts the French gore genre with an over-the-top sadism sure to please fans of schlock horror. Featuring a vengeful psychopath terrorizing a pregnant woman, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s helming debut relishes every chance to show sharp objects plunging into flesh.”
Bug
“The Exorcist” filmmaker William Friedkin crafts a grimy and claustrophobic horror movie with “Bug,” adapted from the Tracy Letts play of the same name. The movie is set within a single Oklahoma motel room and follows characters played by Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon who succumb to paranoia after becoming convinced the U.S. government has infested their room with bugs. Friedkin’s tight filmmaking makes “Bug” feel suffocating from start to end, and the film’s violent centerpiece features Shannon’s character pulling his own teeth out in gory, disturbing detail. But “Bug” is not a parade of endless gore and violence. It keeps its bloody moments minimal so that they have a maximum impact on the viewer. It’s the filmmaking itself that makes “Bug” so unbearable and hard to sit through.
A Serbian Movie
“Taking the torture-porn concept absolutely literally, the bluntly titled ‘A Serbian Film’ is a well-crafted, immensely disgusting slasher,” wrote Variety in its review of Srđan Spasojević’s nearly unwatchable 2010 horror movie. The movie centers on a struggling porn star who decides to take a role in a mysterious art film, only to discover the project is a snuff movie where he’s forced into acts of rape, murder, necrophilia and child abuse. One of the most degrading and infamous scenes in the movie features a baby in a sexual act that ranks as perhaps the hardest scene to watch in a movie ever. As the review added: “The movie promises a ride that makes ‘Antichrist’ look like ‘Leave it to Beaver.’ It’s actually heavier on the X-rated side than the gore, and its final reel of carnage will give hardcore horror fans their due.”

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Blood, Guts and Violence: 20 Brutal Movies You Cant Unsee

The Northman

The Painted Bird

The Nightingale

Antichrist

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Revenge

Mother!

Videodrome

The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)

Possessor

Audition

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Irréversible

Titane

Raw

High Tension

Martyrs

Inside

Bug

A Serbian Movie

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