After watching High Tension, Craven approached director Alexandre Aja and his screenwriting partner Gregory Levasseur about the possibility of updating his film with the caveat that it has a new approach and something worthwhile in justifying its existence in the first place. The collaboration between the horror master and the new voices in French extreme horror resulted in one vicious remake that managed to top the original.

And, in a rare turn, The Hills Have Eyes is now streaming on Tubi.

The plot is essentially the same; the suburban Carter family are caravanning from Ohio to California with their two dogs in tow, but wind up stranded in the desert. There they are relentlessly hunted and killed by the twisted cannibal family that resides in the desert hills. In Aja and Levasseur’s hands, their version of The Hills Have Eyes is an onslaught of tense violence and the pacing much faster. The cannibal family is also much more monstrous.

When developing the script, Aja and Levasseur knew they needed to make their cannibals terrifying, so they began researching the effects of nuclear devastation. Using documents, photos, and footage from the nuclear fallout of Chernobyl and Hiroshima, the pair wrote extensive descriptions in their screenplay for the mutant characters and used the research in their direction to special makeup effects designers Greg Nicotero (look for Nicotero in the film as mutant Cyst, too) and Howard Berger. Their studio, K.N.B. EFX Group Inc., handled the extensive task of creating the cast of unnerving mutants to Aja and Levasseur’s specifications. The gore-heavy horror film also meant that the studio had to create gruesome death sequences as well.

It’s the way in which Aja shot many of the death scenes, combined with the makeup and effects teams’ work, that gave The Hills Have Eyes such an intense, nihilistic feel despite being a little less graphic than you’d think. For example, in the harrowing sequence that sees most of the Carter family outside trying to save family patriarch Big Bob (Ted Levine) from being consumed by fire, there’s a disturbing battle inside the trailer that culminates Carter matriarch Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan) and eldest sister Lynn (Vinessa Shaw) getting shot to death. Lynn is shot at point-blank range in the head, but it cuts away right as the trigger is pulled and instead shows her brain matter being splattered against her baby’s crib mobile. The shocking imagery of the aftermath is enough for the viewer’s mind to fill in the gruesome blanks, and it was all thanks to blood and viscera canons. And the horrific makeup on the actors, of course. Some deaths, however, were shown in unflinching detail.

The Hills Have Eyes is a great example of how to blend practical effects with CGI. The practical effects are still the star of the show, but the CG is used to augment it in a way that doesn’t feel dated. The visual effects team, with Jamison Scott Goei serving as visual effects supervisor, created over 130 visual effects for the film. K.N.B. EFX Group spent over six months designing and creating the makeup effects for the mutants, even while the film production was underway.

Aja and Levasseur transported their version of the cannibal family from Nevada to New Mexico, bringing a layer of nuclear fallout to the deformed clan. Their knack for intensity and distressing survival horror worked in tandem with the amazing talents of the makeup and visual effects team to deliver one of the most unrelenting remakes of all time. Aja’s take on Craven’s original vision still honored it while making it his own, a common thread among the best horror remakes.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on January 2, 2019.

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Catholicism and religion saturated horror in the ’70s, with The Exorcist leading the pack as the most popular of the decade. Yet the controversy it inspired couldn’t hold a candle to Ken Russell’s 1971 film, The Devils, a film so provocative and notorious that it was banned in many countries and released with an X-rating stateside. While nowhere near as polished or as coded in its imagery, Alucarda exists in the same realm of boundary-pushing religious horror, even sharing similar themes with The Devils. Satanism and possession are pushed to their absolute extremes, unleashing shocking nunsploitation drenched in blood, violence, and sex.

Directed and co-written by Juan López Moctezuma, this English-language Mexican horror film stars Tina Romero as the eponymous Alucarda. Since infancy, the orphaned Alucarda was raised by nuns at a repressive Catholic convent. Now a teen, Alucarda finally has a friend her age with the arrival of newly orphaned Justine (Susana Kamini). They become inseparable, perhaps even more so when they stumble upon a crypt and release a Satanic force that seduces the best friends and uses them as a conduit to destroy everything in their path.

Straight away, Alucarda sets itself apart from most horror films of the decade. The convent is cavernous and ancient, and its nuns wrapped in blood-soaked, gauze-like dresses. It’s an interesting visual juxtaposition against the budding romance between Alucarda and Justine, a clash between modernity and the harsh repression of Dark Ages. Sermons are held in an eerie stone room adorned with horrific religious iconography that would be enough to scare any susceptible youth into being a believer. All of which to say, that while Satan seduces Alucarda and Justine through blood rituals and debauched orgies, the convent offers an equally antagonistic and punitive life for the teens. Moctezuma exploits just about every religious symbol and icon he can, furthering the shock value.

As the girls demonstrate traits associated with possession, the head priest and his subordinate nuns take action. Though not with your typical exorcism; here they inflict Medieval torture. The results prove disastrous. The possession itself varies, and Alucarda seems destined at birth for Satan. As the nuns’ hysteria increases, so too does the violence, escalating into an insane finale full of literal blood baths, decapitations, and hellfire.

Its arthouse meets exploitation grindhouse, and the low budget does little to hinder the director’s style. Moctezuma plunges an almost fairy-tale coming of age story into sacrilegious nunsploitation. Released under titles Sisters of Satan, Innocents from Hell, and Mark of the Devil 3, Alucarda wasn’t received well upon its initial release. Especially in native Mexico. But like many films of this ilk, it has developed a cult following over the years. And for good reason. Even when you think this particular subset of horror has covered all grounds, films like Alucarda prove there’s still plenty left to say.

There’s possession, Satanic vows and rituals, and religious hysteria to be found in Alucarda. It’s also an exciting examination of the antagonistic relationship between dated religion and modern science, explored through the arrival of Dr. Oszek (Claudio Brook). Oszek is often horrified by the treatment of Justine late in the film, and it’s made all the more effective in that Brook also plays the role of the Hunchback Gypsy that lures the girls into darkness.

Young girls getting seduced by the devil in films that exploit all religious iconography tend to make for disturbing, controversial horror that ruffles many feathers in the process. Moctezuma takes it ten steps further with explicit sexuality, extreme imagery, and an explosive finale that brings shocking violence and bloodshed. Horror movies tend to break taboos, but Moctezuma shatters them with style.

You can pick up Alucarda on DVD from Mondo Macabro.

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3D movies have been around in some form since 1915, with a significant revival in the ‘80s, but the early aughts marked a mainstream resurgence of the 3D format. Technological advancements meant 3D looked better than ever, and family films took full advantage. It wasn’t until 2009 that horror finally hopped on board the 3D train; just before the bubble burst on the trend, of course. Among the first? The 2009 remake of My Bloody Valentine, the first R-rated horror film to be projected on RealD 3D.

The entertaining result, of course, is a gory slasher with in-your-face kills.

This update of the 1981 slasher favorite was co-penned by Todd Farmer and Zane Smith from John Beaird’s original screenplay. Directed by Patrick Lussier (Dracula 2000, Drive Angry), My Bloody Valentine 3D goes for broke in attempting to top the kills of its predecessor, while keeping the core plot nearly the same. In both, an unchecked gas level caused an explosion in a small town’s mineshaft. Most of the workers were killed; save for Harry Warden, who went insane and murderous in the aftermath. Many years later, the town’s Valentine’s Day celebrations are painted red, literally, with the return of a killer who looks an awful lot like Harry Warden. Love triangles just got even more complicated.

The new iteration of Tom Hanniger is played by Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles, with Final Destination’s Kerr Smith as his adversary, Axel. Caught in between them is Jaime King as Sarah Mercer. Horror vet Tom Atkins plays Sheriff Jim Burke, a character who wasn’t very prominent in the initial drafts of the script but got a beefed up role once Atkins joined the cast. And more Atkins is always a good thing.

My Bloody Valentine makes excellent use of the 3D technology, arguably more so than any other 3D horror movie, with eye-popping (sometimes literally) gore and scares explicitly crafted with the format in mind. From the opening scene, this remake boasts a much higher body count. After an exposition set up for the entire plot, Harry Warden paints a hospital ward red, with eviscerated corpses left in his wake. Because the killer’s weapon of choice is a mining pickaxe, many of the on-screen deaths explore different ways it can deliver maximum carnage. Skull impalements, stabbings, ripping jaws off and flinging them in the audience’s direction; it all makes for a bloody good time. The best on-screen deaths feature a dryer and a shovel.

Lussier and Farmer (who also appears as a trucker on the receiving end of brutal karma) tend to create gory fun horror together, and special makeup effects designer Gary J. Tunnicliffe brought the gore to life for this one. Tunnicliffe is no stranger to unbridled viscera and gruesome effects; he’s the special makeup effects creator behind notable horror movies like The Collector, Feast, Hellraiser: Bloodline, and he also served as special makeup effects supervisor on Candyman.

All of which to say, My Bloody Valentine 3D makes for a fun watch this Valentine’s Day. The love triangle doesn’t quite work – this version of Axel comes across as a complete jerk – but if you’re looking for chocolate boxes stuffed with organs and blood, well, this delivers. It’s also an interesting relic of the 3D format’s past popularity, and one of the rare entries to make full use of the technology. At the very least, it’s an entertaining slasher to double feature with Scream Factory’s new collector’s edition Blu-ray release of the 1981 original.

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The turn of the century marked the rise and fall of the J-Horror craze. Ringu sparked a popular wave of horror in the early aughts dedicated to vengeful long-haired ghosts hailing from Japan. Films released during that time included One Missed Call, Ju-On: The Grudge, Pulse, Dark Water, and more, along with a few American remakes as well. Amidst the sea of cursed spirits in long white gowns, though, came Audition; an extreme and unsettling entry in Japanese horror that eschewed the supernatural for something far more disturbing, garnering director Takashi Miike international attention.

Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is a middle-aged widower who’s urged by his teenage son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) to get back into the dating game. His friend, a film producer, offers to set up a casting call for a soap opera that he has no intention of making, all so Shigehiko can pour over the applicants of hundreds of young women vying for the part. Unbeknownst to the hopefuls, Shigehiko is looking for a new bride-to-be with specific criterion; someone quiet, pretty, and proper with a background in classical music or dance.

He’s immediately smitten by Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), a soft-spoken dancer with an enchanting life story. So smitten, that Shigehiko shrugs off his producer friend’s concerns about discrepancies in Asami’s resume and her strange behavior.

A sentimental romance begins between Shigehiko and Asami. She plays the part he envisioned, and he never seems to see her beyond his list of coveted traits. For a while, Miike does such an excellent job putting the viewer in Shigehiko’s shoes that it’s easy to forget this is a horror movie at all. Eventually, in small doses, the cracks in Asami’s persona begin to show. Signs that she’s more dangerous than the subservient girlfriend she appears to be. Though the movie is an adaptation of Ryu Murakami’s novel of the same name (he also wrote Piercing), Miike adds his own macabre touch. The creepy scene in which Asami sits in her almost empty apartment waiting for Shigehiko to call, for example, is all Miike’s doing.

When Shigehiko finally takes notice that something is seriously amiss with his lady love, the loose house of cards that he’s assembled crashes hard and fast. Miike kicks off the final act with one stomach-churning reveal; a scene of a man missing a tongue, his feet, and multiple fingers crawling out of a burlap sack as Asami vomits into a dog bowl. It splashes out as she sets it down in front of the man, who eagerly laps it up. It marks the beginning of Shigehiko’s nightmare incarnate that will make you look at acupuncture and piano wire in a new, ominous light.

“Kiri, kiri, kiri,” Asami gleefully says, and she digs needles into his flesh. The translation, “Deeper, deeper, deeper!” That’s before she garrotes his foot with piano wire; he’s paralyzed from stopping her. Special makeup effects artist Yuichi Matsui (Ichi the Killer, Kill Bill: Vol. 1) handled the grisly visuals and bloodletting, but much of what makes Audition so effective is the sound design. The sound of the wire sawing against flesh. The sound of Asami retching in the background followed closely by the moaning man slurping it up. Sound is just as vital to creating visceral horror as the gore and guts on screen, and sound effects editor Kenji Shibasaki (Akira, Battle Royale) and the sound department deserve serious praise for this one.

Twenty years later, Audition is still being discussed for its themes and critiques on gender and generational divides. It played an influence on the horror trend dubbed “torture porn” in the early to mid-aughts, too; Eli Roth cited the film as a significant influence on Hostel and even put Miike in his movie in a cameo role.

Audition is brutal and provocative, and it remains one of modern horror’s best.

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“Listen to me. A storm of hell’s coming down on this place any second. I don’t know what they are, I don’t know where they came from. All I do know is that these fuckers are fast, nasty, and hungry, and there’s four of ’em. They got claws like Ginsu knives and more teeth than a chainsaw.”

This is how Hero (Eric Dane) introduces both himself and the deadly creatures that descend upon the bar in Feast. Promptly before one of them decapitates him, his blood gushing forth and covering Honey Pie (Jenny Wade) head to toe. The bloodletting, carnage, and revolting body fluid spillage never lets up from there in this gory creature feature.

Feast is the result of season three of Project Greenlight, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck‘s movie-making reality series that aired on HBO. Its third season opened with Damon and the Greenlight team seeking out and hiring Wes Craven to produce a horror film. Of the scripts and teams they had to choose from, they selected director John Gulager and the script by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan, Feast. The nine-episode season chronicled the film’s production, from pre-production to its first test screenings. When it came time to the actual release, though, Feast deserved much better than the extremely limited release it received.

Granted, this particular horror movie isn’t the type that typically appeals to the masses or mainstream critics; it’s lean, mean, and saturated in viscera. The script cleverly bypasses lengthy character introductions by using humorous character cards to let the viewer know each player’s name, role, and survival odds. Then it wastes no time subverting those odds. The Hero? Dispatched first. The Vet, trained for combat and survival? Gone second. An adorable and innocent child? Feast smashes that taboo to smithereens posthaste. At the other end of the spectrum exists the characters that tend to die first in horror, characters like Bartender (the director’s father and notable horror vet Clu Gulager). They outlast.

From the outset, Feast presents an “anything goes” crass and raunchy attitude that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Except when it comes to the gore. For both the excess gore and creature effects, producers immediately sought out special makeup and creature effects designer Gary J. Tunnicliffe. His credits include Piranha 3DD, Scream 4, The Collector, Hellraiser: Bloodline, Halloween: Resurrection, Ginger Snaps, and many, many more. Meaning, you don’t have to look far to notice his expertise in creature design and bloodbaths.

Tunnicliffe’s creature designs were twofold; the skulls and hides that gave a slight insight into the monsters’ age and habitation, and their real faces underneath. Makeup effects artist Michael J. Regan played Papa Beast, while Tunnicliffe portrayed Mama Beast. Puppetry rounded out the rest of the creature effects, namely the baby monster.

The most significant component of the makeup effects for the film was the fake blood. Gallons upon gallons of it. Slime, maggots, and more. Judah Friedlander’s Beer Guy gets vomited on, coated in viscous green goo, pus and worms, and bloodied to a mushy pulp. No character, human or otherwise, has a gentle demise in this creature feature.

Feast delivers a campy creature feature with its tongue firmly in cheek, but with a breakneck speed and emphasis on practical effects and action. It’s a simple and straightforward story that doesn’t reinvent the wheel or do anything new, but it does offer up plenty of goofy fun and a few stomach-churning moments.

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Comparatively speaking, Neil Marshall’s widely-regarded survival horror film isn’t nearly as depraved, disturbing, or graphically gory as many of the movies featured on this column. It’s still worthy of inclusion in this particular space, though, for its unrelenting viciousness and high-level intensity that refuses to ease up. The Descent turns survival horror into a savage battle for the ages, and the deaths are just as brutal and bloody.

For his sophomore feature effort, Marshall wanted to scare the pants off of audiences. He felt his debut, Dog Soldiers, offered a lot of humor to offset the action and tension; The Descent needed to be through and through scary. A simple premise involving a group of six friends embarking on a cave adventure in the Appalachian Mountains becomes increasingly complicated, by design.

The opening sequence sets up everything, from crucial character dynamics between Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) and her friend Juno (Natalie Mendoza) to establishing the film’s tone. Sarah’s husband and daughter pick her up after a whitewater rafting trip among friends. The exchange of looks between Juno and Sarah’s husband lets the viewer in on the dirty secret of betrayal. It’s only a matter of when Sarah will learn the truth. A sudden, shocking car crash prolongs the inevitable, though. It’s the jarring way Sarah’s family is ripped away from her in a split second that sets a precedent for the film’s unflinching and violent grasp of death.

Above all, the opening sets up the dual nature of the film’s title. Physically, these six women are descending into a cave toward their doom. Metaphorically, it’s Sarah’s descent into madness. The central plot is set one year after her heart-wrenching loss, and her friends coax her into the trip as a means of healing. She’s distant and aloof, a clear sign that she’s still in a fragile state of mind. Juno’s appetite for adventure, leading the group into an unexplored and unknown cave system, becomes the inciting event when the cave collapses. Group tensions rise, while the viewer sees glimpses of something lurking in the background. Once the first member falls, it quickly becomes an epic brawl for survival against the Crawlers.

Whether it’s the gnarly bone break from Holly’s (Nora-Jane Noone) fall or an accidental pickaxe to Beth’s (Alex Reid) throat, and more, special makeup effects designer Paul Hyett (Attack the Block, Eden Lake) and his team had a heavy workload. Particularly in the prosthetics department. Full body casts had to be made for a few of the actresses, and many separate limbs were created as well. For Holly’s nasty fall, a leg with silicone skin was crafted, with bone fragment pieces that could be inserted in the open wound. Blood was pumped through it, making the gross bone protrusion even more horrible.

Hyett also took Marshall’s initial drawings for the Crawlers and tweaked the design from there. Marshall’s initial concept for the creatures had huge bug-like eyes that didn’t test well on screen. Hyett made them more human-looking. Between the creature designs and the actors that portrayed them, like Craig Conway as Scar, the Crawlers are unnerving and memorable movie monsters.

Ultimately, witnessing the gruesome demises of her friends and a harrowing truth reveal culminates in Sarah’s mental breaking point. It’s marked by a literal baptism of blood and a lot of Crawler slaughter. The ending changes depending on which cut you watch, but the result is the same; it’s a bleak conclusion.

The bloodshed, the primitive and instinctual fight for survival, the fantastic scares, and the unique setting and characters make The Descent one of horror’s best.

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“My brother keeps a human head in his closet. Every few days it’s a new head.”

That’s how 12-year-old Marty (Gavin Brown), through voiceover, opens 2012’s Found. It’s the precise type of opening hook that announces straightaway that this coming-of-age horror tale won’t be like anything you’ve seen before. Based on a novel of the same name by Todd Rigney, which he adapted for screen with director Scott Schirmer, Found is an indie effort with serious ambition. One that goes to some dark, depraved places and isn’t for the faint-hearted.

As Marty announces in the opening, his older brother Steve (Ethan Philbeck) is a serial killer. Steve keeps the severed head of his latest victim in a bowling bag stashed away in his closet. Save for his penchant for killing people, Steve seems like most teen boys. He’s away from home most of the time and has a contentious at best relationship with his parents. He loves his younger brother, bonded particularly over their love of horror, but treats him much the same way any older teen would an annoying younger sibling.

Because Marty knows about his brother’s nasty little hobby straightaway, the narrative digs into how Marty copes with that knowledge and presents an overview of his family’s life. Meaning that while it’d be easy to blame Steve’s psychotic nature on the horror movies he adores, especially the grisly nature of his VHS copy of Headless, the narrative slowly unfurls a more disturbing family portrait. Steve’s favored victim of choice is black women, the racist implication clear. Only the more we get to know Steve and Marty’s parents, the more we realize Steve learned racism through his father.

The further the story progresses, the more problematic those family dynamics become. It explains why Marty might choose to harbor Steve’s secret. He’s a loner at school and a frequent target to bullying; his only friend is growing more distant as a means of lessening the mark on his own back by association. Adults fail Marty at just about every turn. There’s no excuse for Steve’s psychotic nature, but Schirmer does an excellent job eliciting sympathy in a psychologically distressing scenario. These brothers may be hardcore horror aficionados, but it’s not the movies that made them who they are. 

Headless did, however, inspire an outlet for Steve’s rage. The film within a film offers up the goriest moments of the movie, as much of Steve’s murderous ways are offscreen. That is, until the grand finale; an ending so suitably bleak, violent, and blood-drenched that it’s bound to alienate viewers. It’s the finale that likely caused two significant roles to be recast before production; parents of the initial actors cast in the parts weren’t so comfortable with the subject matter after all, and they pulled out of the production.

Though the extreme shoestring budget sometimes shows, it’s clear that Schirmer treated the story with care and respect. He didn’t shy away from the touchier elements, either, and surely not the gore. What initially seems to be a love letter to horror of the VHS era quickly detours into something far more savage and visceral. The violence of Headless can’t compare to the uncomfortable violence in Marty’s family, both sexual and physical. It’s the type of film that leaves you with a lot to chew on, full of depraved imagery that lingers long after the credits roll.

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Often described as the surreal intersection of David Cronenberg’s body horror meets David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man is wholly unique. An influential piece of filmmaking in native Japan and a cult hit overseas, Tsukamoto’s take on body horror plays like a cyberpunk fable that disturbs at every possible turn. With a runtime clocking in at just over an hour, that’s saying a lot.

The plot premise sounds simple on paper: a metal fetishist gets hit by a car and killed in a hit and run. The metal fetishist gets revenge from beyond by slowly turning his killer, a businessman, into a grotesque hybrid of tech and metal that threatens to consume him entirely. It’s the way that Tsukamoto relays his cautionary tale of losing one’s humanity amidst a concrete jungle that makes this narrative complex. The black and white expressionism, the industrial setting, the aural assault by way of metal percussions and screeching metal synth, and the music video-style visuals make this body horror entry stand out.

The short run time means no time is wasted getting straight into the gruesome bits. The metal fetishist, played by Tsukamoto, opens the film with grisly imagery; he’s so obsessed with tech and metal that he cuts open his leg and inserts a metal rod. It’s rusted, though, and the crude surgical job means that the wound gets infected. It’s the startling sight of maggots writhing in the wound that drives him into the road, where the businessman’s car runs him down. The businessman’s transformation into a mutated bio-tech thing begins almost instantly.

Tsukamoto was a self-professed student of Cronenberg’s films, which might explain the prominent themes of sexuality in addition to the body horror. Like the sadomasochism of Videodrome or the voyeuristic arousal of Crash, Tetsuo uses sexuality to heighten the body horror. The businessman dreams of his girlfriend, who happened to be in the car with him during the hit and run, sodomizing him with phallic tech pieces. That’s before his phallus transforms into a massive drill. Yes, it’s as insane as it sounds. And all of it has a purpose in Tsukamoto’s message.

Tetsuo is an arduous display of DIY filmmaking. The first of Tsukamoto’s films to be shot in 16mm, Tetsuo was filmed primarily in his apartment over 18 months on a shoestring budget. Nearly all of the cast and crew lived with him on set for much of production, which meant tensions rose as time wore on and the budget depleted. Many crew members dropped out throughout filming, and by the end, Tomorowo Taguchi, who played the businessman, was picking up extra duties like running the lighting. Aside from writing, directing, and playing the Metal Fetishist, Tsukamoto also edited, produced, handled art direction, and shared cinematography duties with Kei Fujiwara, who played the businessman’s girlfriend on screen.

Fujiwara went on to stake a claim on shocking and gory Japanese horror with Organ and Id after this film’s creation.

In the end, Tetsuo remains a kinetic entry in body horror cinema, unlike anything else. Though the influences from Cronenberg and Lynch are overt, they’re mere stepping stones in the creation of something singular and far stranger. A cyberpunk metamorphosis into a living heap of scrap metal fueled by an industrial assault on the senses, it’s easy to see why Tsukamoto’s film remains a cult favorite all these years later.

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Lars von Trier films tend to be polarizing. They’re confrontational, controversial, and challenging on an emotional and psychological level, topped off with von Trier’s artful and languid pace. They also tend to be von Trier working through his feelings, either with humor or chaos, or both. Such is the case with Antichrist, a film that kicks off what’s been dubbed the Depression Trilogy (followed by Melancholia and Nymphomaniac). Written while hospitalized for a depressive episode, Antichrist was influenced by von Trier’s anxieties and despair. It shows. An unrelenting nightmare of grief and mourning, this film is an uncomfortable watch that crescendos in shocking violence.

The film opens with a monochrome prologue that sees She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and He (Willem Dafoe) deep in the throes of passion, so much so that they’re completely oblivious that their young son has freed himself from his crib and toddled his way over and out the window to his death. The grief consumes She to the point of hospitalization and a slew of prescription drugs. He happens to be a psychotherapist and decides to take his wife’s care on himself. He convinces her to flush her prescriptions down the toilet and come away with him to an isolated cabin in the woods to confront her fears. What could go wrong? His ego proves damning as her fears seem to be interwoven with the eternal struggle between man and woman.

Throughout the film, He learns more and more about She’s previous thesis studies in Eden; specifically, historical violence against women throughout the centuries, including witch hunts. But her interpretation of the research leads her to believe that woman is evil. He may have intended for the excursion to heal her, but instead, it lets loose her psychosis and anxieties. It culminates in her finally snapping, accusing him of wanting to leave her. Spoilers for those who haven’t yet seen the movie: She attacks, smashing his groin with a large grindstone and then sexually assaulting him while he’s unconscious from the pain. She then drills a hole in his leg to bind a grinding wheel to it. Because she perceives herself as evil, she takes a pair of scissors to her genitals in an unflinching act of self-mutilation.

For these key moments of violence, enter special makeup effects artists Morten Jacobsen (The House That Jack Built, The Square) and Thomas Foldberg (When Animals Dream), both regular collaborators of von Trier’s. They cast a silicone leg for Dafoe, soft and squishy like flesh with a bone through it. It’s effectively hyper-realistic, and it had to be- remember the part about von Trier’s film being confrontational? He zooms in on the acts of violence and uses long-takes. Meaning that he gets up close and personal with the gore. That also means that von Trier doesn’t shy away from showing She’s self-mutilation in intimate detail.

When Jacobsen and Foldberg read the script, they thought this moment would be a cutaway or quick shot and were surprised to learn von Trier wanted to show it in implicit detail. They crafted a silicone cast of Gainsbourg’s body double, from navel to mid-thigh. Multiple interchangeable vagina parts were created, and the silicone cast had a hollow tube through the core so they could pump blood through it during that crucial scissor snip.

Antichrist is a grueling experience. It has developed a reputation for its confrontational depiction of mutilation and sexual violence, but it’s done with purpose. Not that it makes the film any less of a bleak journey. There are a lot of layers to dissect, themes of nature and religion, and a depiction of mourning and depression that can feel oppressive. That it was conceived as a horror film pushes it even further into divisive territory. All of which to say, Antichrist is designed to be an uncomfortable watch and succeeds in that goal on every level.

Chaos reigns.

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In 2002, a horror omnibus consisting of three segments from directors across Asia released under the title Three. Two years later saw the release of its follow up; Three…Extremes. A film that lived up to its title with a trio of twisted segments by directors with a reputation for exploring the darkest corners of humanity; Hong Kong’s Fruit Chan, South Korea’s Chan-wook Park, and Japan’s Takashi Miike. Offering up tales of horror not for the squeamish, it made an impression in its U.S. release. Enough to prompt Three to be released stateside under the title Three Extremes II.

It’s often the first segment that sticks out the most in viewers’ memory. “Dumplings,” helmed by Fruit Chan, is also the only one of the three to get its own feature length adaptation. In it, Miriam Yeung plays Mrs. Li, an aging actress desperate to regain her youth. Mostly to attract her own husband, who has secretly become involved with a younger mistress. She finds her way to a seedy building to seek out Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), a woman who not only claims to be much older than she appears but has the secret to becoming youthful again; her special dumplings.

Mrs. Li is horrified to discover the secret ingredient to Mei’s dumplings: fetuses. Preferably around the 5-month old mark. Of course, she’s not appalled enough to stop eating them, because it seems to work. The more it works, the more Mrs. Li returns to buy more. The more she buys, the trickier it becomes for Mei to procure more from her stealthy visits to hospitals. Enter a few notable and stomach-churning abortions. Fruit Chan and writer Pik Wah Lee weren’t playing around with this story.

The next segment, “Cut” by Chan-wook Park, doesn’t hit the same levels of warped as Oldboy and his vengeance trilogy, but it does present an interesting moral conundrum for its characters. I Saw the Devil’s Byung-hun Lee plays the Director, a famous filmmaker held captive by an extra that appeared in five of his films. The extra is jealous of his wealth, and tasks Director with killing a young girl. If he doesn’t, Director’s wife- who’s gagged and bound by sharp wires- will lose one of her fingers every five minutes.

It’s both psychological and physical torture, and if you’re familiar with Chan-wook Park’s work, then you know it won’t end well.

The final segment belongs to Takashi Miike. “Box” is the most atmospheric and gorgeous of the three. In terms of “extremes”, Miike’s is more subdued and fairytale-like. Even still, it’s dark and there’s an implication of incest. So while on the surface level it’s less shocking than a lot of Miike’s output around that time, it’s still pretty warped.

In terms of gore, Three…Extremes starts out with the most gruesome of the bunch. It’s hard to top pulverizing fetuses to stuff into dumplings, anyhow. But hacking off limbs, bloodshed, and burning people alive still offers up enough horror to earn the “extreme” in the title. With their trio of terror, special makeup effects artist Hee Eun Lee (I Saw the Devil, The Host), the cast and crew, and the well-regarded directors of extreme cinema delivered one of the most visceral and memorable horror anthologies of the early aughts.

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When Saw was released in theaters fifteen years ago, it launched the careers of James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Moreover, it birthed a franchise of eight films and counting. Though Saw was at the forefront of the subgenre dubbed “torture porn,” the reality is that it has more in common with a grisly crime thriller in the vein of Se7en. Thanks to iconic moments involving the Reverse Bear Trap and Billy the Puppet, it was marketed solely as horror and made a huge splash at the box office. That set the tone for the rest of the series; Saw II fully embraced the horror and dialed up the gore.

In Saw II, written by Whannell and Darren Lynn Bousman, Wan handed the directorial reigns over to Bousman and served as executive producer. The plot follows Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) and a team of fellow officers and SWAT as they converge on Jigsaw’s lair to arrest him. It turns out that Jigsaw allowed himself to be caught as a setup for a new game. Eight people are trapped in a house playing a carefully orchestrated game of death, and one of them is Matthews’ son. Jigsaw tasks Matthews with a concurrent game of his own, if he ever wants to see his son again.

Right away it’s clear that the body count is going to be far higher than before. The opening introduces a Venus Fly Trap, a spike-filled head contraption that snaps shut on its victim when he can’t bring himself to carve out the key hidden behind his eye with a scalpel. The rest of the gruesome traps, for the most part, are focused in the old house where the eight unlucky contestants must play for their lives. As they move room to room, they have to solve deadly puzzles to retrieve antidotes for the nerve agent in their systems that will kill them in two hours. Which means working together or against each other as the clock winds down and puzzles get worse.

The worst and most memorable trap of the bunch is the excruciating pit of needles that returning player Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) is thrown into. The trap was intended for drug dealer Xavier (Franky G), to dig around in the pit to find a key to unlock a door that leads to an antidote. For two painfully stretched out minutes, Amanda struggles to simply maneuver. Syringes stick to her arms, legs, and back as she roots around for the key. Too late for the door, but she does it. It’s the worst trap created for anyone with a needle phobia, and it’s still a cringe-worthy watch even for those without a needle phobia.

The process of bringing it to life on screen proved just as excruciating. Over the course of four days, it took multiple people hours upon hours of doing nothing else but removing the needle tips from actual syringes and replacing them with fiber optic cable tips trimmed to resemble the needle. That’s it. For days. They’d replaced 40,000 needle tips, and it wasn’t enough. Then 60,000, and the bit would hardly be covered. In the end, it was about 120,000 needles and Styrofoam filler that ended up in the pit. Many of which didn’t have tips at all, for the sake of time.

Smith’s arms were covered in small prosthetics for the needles protruding from her skin, and her clothes had special padding in them for the needles in her legs and back. Prosthetic coordinator Francois Dagenais (The Blob, It Chapter Two, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) didn’t just rig the small pieces for the needles, but an entire silicone arm for the moment when the needles are ripped out of her skin.

Saw II is far from the goriest the franchise dared to go, but it is the bridge that connected the chamber piece crime thriller Wan and Whannell created to the torture-filled horror of later entries. Even still, it delivered one of the series’ best in terms of skin-crawling traps that’ll make you squirm over and over again.

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One of the best things about horror sequels, typically, is the expanded budget that’s usually granted. While that means a bigger scaled story, it also means more money available for special effects. When it comes to splatter films, that’s especially good news. Such is the case with Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead, the over the top follow-up to 2009’s Norwegian horror-comedy Dead Snow. More gore, a much higher body count, and way more whimsical usage of intestines.

Picking up immediately after the events of the first film, Martin (Vegar Hoel) is trying to ward off Nazi zombie commander Herzog (Ørjan Gamst) from the windshield of his car while fleeing. An oncoming truck causes Herzog to lose a limb, and Martin crashes shortly after. When he wakes in the hospital, he’s horrified to discover that the surgeon mistook Herzog’s arm for his missing limb and attached it. Meanwhile, Herzog is raising a massive undead army. It’s up to Martin, his new zombie arm, and a trio of American zombie experts to stop them.

Director/Co-Writer Tommy Wirkola stomps his foot down on the accelerator from the opening moments and never lets up for a second in this sequel. It might still be a conventional siege movie at its core, but the splatstick attempts Peter Jackson-levels of reckless abandon. In other words, it’s pretty entertaining.

Dead Snow proved itself to be a huge fan of gore gags that involved intestines, and Red vs. Dead makes sure to continue that motif. There’s an insanely goofy moment where the Nazi zombies are stealing a tank from a World War II museum. One that’s been out of commission for decades, obviously. So, what’s a nasty zombie to do but siphon gas through intestinal tracts stretched out as far as cartoonishly possible?

It’s gratuitous and well done. Not just the gore, but the zombie makeup as well. All thanks to the special makeup effects team that included prosthetic makeup designer Mike Elizalde (Stranger Things, Pacific Rim, Attack the Block), makeup supervisor Steinar Kaarstein (Dead Snow, Trollhunter), and a slew of fantastic artists from Elizalde’s special effects company Spectral Motion.

Red vs. Dead closes out with another major Jackson-style moment, which I won’t disclose for those who haven’t watch yet, but it’s clear that Wirkola just wanted to create an irreverent ode to his splatstick forefathers. With much of the action taking place so close to civilization in this outing, the body count is higher. The number of zombies far greater, too, most of them played by professional mixed martial arts fighters. Above all, the bigger budget meant bigger, better gore.

Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead and its predecessor are two halves of one preposterous premise. The type that doesn’t sound like it should work, and yet it does. It’s a modern splatstick bonanza that adheres to the workings of gore masters like Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. Sometimes you’re just in the mood for zombies siphoning gas by way of some screaming victim’s intestines – look no further than Red vs. Dead, a sequel that more than delivers.

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William Lustig and Joe Spinell’s 1980 film Maniac took a sleazy, psychological approach to its serial killer slasher that repulsed critics upon release. That its killer, Frank Zito, is the lead character with whom we develop sympathy for is contrasted by his gory modus operandi of gruesomely scalping his victims. That viewers spend all their time with the depraved killer, combined with Tom Savini’s gore effects, proved to be too much for many viewers at the time. In 2012, French extremity horror auteur Alexandre Aja and his screenwriting partner Grégory Levasseur took it much further with the remake, which makes the viewer complicit in Frank Zito’s slayings.

Directed by Frank Khalfoun (P2), Maniac doesn’t deviate much from Frank Zito’s origins. He’s still a psychologically disturbed individual who was abused as a child by his prostitute mother. He’s still a collector of scalps, of which he uses to adorn his mannequin collection. What’s changed, though, is that Frank Zito doesn’t look nearly as intimidating as he did when played by Spinell. Now played by Elijah Wood, this iteration seems like the harmless next door neighbor type, which in many ways makes Zito more dangerous. Not that you see him much, because this remake frames the entire story through Frank’s point-of-view.

2012’s Maniac is, essentially, a warped love story. Frank’s burgeoning friendship with artist/photographer Anna (Nora Arnezeder) seems sweet and normal. He’s smitten by her charm, and seems genuine in his offer to help her with an art exhibit. But it’s interspersed with Frank’s lust for blood. He seeks out victims through dating apps or even just women he haphazardly meets, and because it’s shot in POV, we see the acts of violence through his eyes. The gore feels even grislier because we’re now complicit. Even if Anna brings out the best in him, we know Frank isn’t stable. Their friendship is destined for brutal devastation, and we know Anna is in danger long before she ever has a clue.

The gore in this remake is much more explicit than before. It shows more than the original film, and posed challenges for the makeup effects team. Namely in the tricky nature of scalping- hiding the actors’ hair while making it look as though they’d been completely skinned. Khalfoun also wanted full hair pieces, not some little mohawk piece. So special effects artist and supervisor Mike McCarty (Hostel: Part II, Texas Chainsaw 3D), a prominent KNB EFX Group artist recommended by Greg Nicotero, had his work cut out for him. Especially given the tricky, technical aspect of this remake: the POV.

With everything shown from Frank’s perspective, a lot of blocking, planning, and choreography was required. That meant Wood was on set every day, working behind the camera and maneuvering his hands in front of it. In other words, it added complications to just about every aspect of the film, from building Frank Zito as a character when you only see him in flashes, to how to handle the special gore effects.

When the topic of well-executed horror remakes comes up, Maniac deserves inclusion. It retained what worked so well about the original while building upon it in effective ways. It pushed the envelope a bit farther on the gore, too. But above all, it’s a technical marvel, cleverly putting you in the shoes of its killer. And what could be scarier than that?

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Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s feature debut, Inside, set the bar high in terms of audience expectations. A visceral home invasion movie saturated in blood offered up unparalleled tension. Their follow up, Livid, was a very different movie altogether and more dreamlike in style, but it never received a proper release stateside so it remains mostly unseen. Next came Among the Living, Maury and Bustillo’s Amblin and Stephen King inspired story that once again took a different stylistic approach than previous films. The filmmakers drew inspiration from Goonies and Stand by Me, which means a much less violent affair than Inside. But this is still a Maury and Bustillo joint, which means it’s the most brutal Amblin inspired movie you’ll ever see.

Inside’s Beatrice Dalle appears in the gruesome prologue as a pregnant wife and mother in a somewhat rundown looking home, one that trick or treaters approach with severe hesitation. Dalle’s character snaps, tries to kill her husband, then her young son, and finally turns the knife on her pregnant belly before slitting her own throat. It’s a blood-soaked echo of Inside. As the film shifts to the present day, the tone and pace changes. We’re introduced to three school boys, tight knit friends who skip school to slack off and get into some mischief. They then stumble across an abandoned film studio lot and bear witness to a captive woman being dragged by a masked assailant. That masked assailant noticed them, too, and will stop at nothing to snuff out any and all witnesses to his crimes.

What if the kids from Stand by Me came across the demented family from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? That’s the thesis Maury and Bustillo seem to be addressing here. Because the protagonists are young kids, they tone down the violence and bloodshed. That’s not saying much, though. All of the characters face mortal peril in this movie, from infant to adult alike. While the deaths of any kids are tamped down, Maury and Bustillo still show their teeth with the adult demises.

Key special makeup effect artist Sabine Fevre, who previously worked with the filmmakers on Inside and Livid (as well as extreme horror Frontier(s)), teams up once more to deliver some gnarly moments. Also on the special makeup effects team is Olivier Alfonso, who’s handled makeup and gore effects on notable genre films like Raw, The Horde, As Above, So Below, Knife + Heart, and recently helmed his first gory feature Girls with Balls. In other words, while Among the Living may not be nearly as grisly as Inside, the moments of gore that do appear really pack a punch.

The strange mashup of nostalgic ‘80s Amblin mood and Texas Chainsaw Massacre grit likely makes for a jarring experience. The main narrative feels bookended by two brutal segments that hearken back to the visceral terror of Inside. But Maury and Bustillo aren’t really interested in retreading Inside; each new film of theirs is one dedicated to paying homage to the horror filmmakers that shaped them while exploring new corners of the genre. That means each film is vastly different than previous films, but with their very distinct stamp of brutality and style.

Among the Living is tame by typical extreme horror comparison, but for a Stand by Me type movie starring young preteens, it’s the most vicious, blood soaked coming-of-age story of all.

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When most people hear the name Peter Jackson, they think of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit series, King Kong, and blockbuster spectacles. For horror fans, he’s the director that delivered the fun horror comedy The Frighteners. And before that? A career debut with a trio of horror’s goriest splatter comedies, starting with Bad Taste.

The irony is that Jackson didn’t really have any interest in directing when he began. That interest came later. He was much more interested in special effects, and heavily influenced by the work of Tom Savini. So, he set out to make a 10-15 minute short film with an old 16mm camera. He shot on the weekends over the course of a year, just sticking tins of film under his bed as he went without much thought. After taking a week off of work to edit the footage, he realized he had a 60-minute movie on his hands without an ending. Which meant there was no other direction to go but to add on to the runtime and give it a proper ending.

Jackson also noticed that his rough first cut wasn’t very exciting. Since special effects is what got him interested in filmmaking in the first place, it was an easy fix- throw in all the gore he could manage. In addition to writing, directing, producing, handling cinematography, and appearing on screen in numerous roles, Jackson handled the film’s special effects and makeup effects. The most effective aspect of the movie, no matter how over-the-top the gore gags get.

The plot is pretty simple. The residents in the town of Kaihoro have gone missing, and Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) sends out four agents to investigate. They find the residents have been replaced by man-eating aliens disguised as humans in blue button-down shirts. Of the four agents, Jackson plays Derek, the most tenacious and persistent of the heroes. Derek is the comedic relief, and as such takes an insane amount of injury and abuse until he’s had enough of the alien menace.

Heads are blown to smithereens. Aliens puke neon green goo to be passed around and slurped up. And then there’s Derek. He falls off cliffs headfirst onto rocks. He survives and puts his brain back in his head, to be secured in place with a belt. It becomes a running gag for Derek to have to stuff those brains back in his skull in the midst of alien battle. Look for Derek to be “born again” via chainsaw in the film’s final moments; a precursor to Lionel’s bloody lawnmower triumph in Dead Alive/Braindead to be sure.

Four years later, and with the financial help of the New Zealand Film Commission, Bad Taste was completed and sold to many countries after playing at the Cannes Film Festival. A lighthearted comedy compared to Jackson’s immediate follow-up, Meet the Feebles. As it stands, Bad Taste is a goofy DIY splatstick film that has no aim beyond pure entertainment. There’s no hidden message or agenda, just an aspiring special effects artist teaching himself how to make a film. His love of gore and special effects foremost on display.

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Within a two-year span, gore master Lucio Fulci released his Gates of Hell trilogy; City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery. It’s an unofficial trilogy, as these films aren’t connected in any way in terms of plot. But there is a recurring Lovecraftian influence, a ton of gore, and actress Catriona MacColl plays a lead in all three. While the first two entries went large scale apocalyptic, The House by the Cemetery opted for a pared down haunted house story. Of course, in Fulci’s hands, a traditional haunted house becomes anything but. Instead of ghosts and walls that drip blood, this New England home paints the floors red with the entrails of unlucky victims.

Opening with a woman wandering an abandoned home in search of her boyfriend, she finds his bloody corpse hanging just in time to get a knife shoved through her skull and out of her mouth. If this isn’t your first brush with Fulci, then it’s no surprise that he gets up close and personal with the carnage. Cut to New York City, where our central family are setting up a move that will transport them to that very same New England home from the opening. Norman Boyle’s colleague Dr. Peterson was conducting important research in the house, but he abruptly killed his mistress and hung himself. Because this mysterious research is so important, Norman moves his wife Lucy (MacColl) and son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) into the house so that he can complete Dr. Peterson’s work. But Bob’s new babysitter Ann (Ania Pieroni) is behaving suspiciously, and a mysterious little girl named Mae keeps warning him away- though he’s the only one who can see her.

Naturally, the Boyle family will soon realize that vicious bats are the least of their problems.

Though The House by the Cemetery has a more coherent plot than many of Fulci’s supernatural horror films, it still retains Fulci’s preference of creating mood and feeling over logic. Meaning there are plenty of story and logic inconsistencies, as well as moments that will leave you scratching your head. Like Ann scrubbing up a big puddle of blood from the kitchen floor; neither she or Lucy seems phased by that. Ann, as a character, remains one of the biggest mysteries. She seems to be aware of the horrors lurking in the basement, or at least drawn to it, but it’s never explained- her decapitation ends any further character development or reveals. Bob’s ghostly friendship with Mae seems like it’s from a different movie altogether, quite likely part of an earlier version of the script from screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti, who drew inspiration from The Turn of the Screw.

So, between that, Lovecraft’s influence, and a bit of Frankenstein thrown in with Fulci’s splatter-filled sensibility, this one is a true collage of haunted house weirdness.

Eventually, the house’s secrets are revealed. It’s not ghosts to blame for this creepy New England haunt, but an undead Dr. Freudstein. The living, worm-filled corpse of a Victorian mad doctor, Dr. Freudstein long ago discovered a way to keep his undead body going with the blood of victims. He also happens to revel in his kills. Though not as gory as perhaps the previous two entries in the Gates of Hell trilogy, this film still has decapitations, brutal throat ripping, scissors to the chest, multiple stabbings, and one gnarly death by poker. The Boyle’s real estate agent gets the slowest, bloodiest death of all.

The effectiveness of the gore has as much to do with the intimate way Fulci lingers on it as it does the special makeup effects by Giannetto De Rossi. De Rossi previously worked with Fulci on fan favorites The Beyond and Zombie, and he’s the mind behind some of the most memorable kills in Fulci’s films. His stellar work eventually made him a commodity stateside, where he worked on films like Dune, Rambo III, and Conan the Destroyer. More recently, he delivered the splattery goods in High Tension. His gore earned The House by the Cemetery a spot in the prosecuted section of the infamous Video Nasties list. The film didn’t pass for uncut release until 2009.

No matter your ranking of this film in the Gates of Hell trilogy, it’s still a rare instance where the haunted house story goes full splatter. Most families move into a haunted house and flee after the supernatural presence proves too much. In Fulci’s hands, don’t expect the family to get out alive. Even if it borrows from familiar stories that came before, Fulci’s style and use of gore makes it feel fresh. And there’s always one of horror’s best screamers in Bob.

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1982’s The Slayer doesn’t come up in conversations about slashers too often. Up until Arrow Video’s 2017 Blu-ray release, it’d been relatively obscure and difficult to find. Also, with a small cast comes a small body count, therefore this slasher tends to be slower in pace than most. Then there’s the creature on the cover box; it doesn’t actually make an appearance until the final moments of the film. So those expecting a fun creature killer in the vein of Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger will wind up disappointed. But it does deliver extremely well executed deaths, and the non-chronological order of the narrative combined with ambiguity presents a unique choose-your-own interpretation ending.

The plot is simple, on paper anyway. Two couples head to an island for a vacation getaway, but being that it’s off season, they’re isolated and alone. The peace and quiet is interrupted by Kay, an artist plagued by nightmares that insists those nightmares will cause the group’s doom. Only her friend Brooke is somewhat sympathetic; Kay’s husband David and brother Eric are positive her imagination is running wild. Sure enough, they start dying one by one.

Directed and co-written by J.S. Cardone, the writer behind The Stepfather and Prom Night reboots, The Slayer foreshadows the character deaths in the opening scenes. From there it’s a waiting game for the killer to claim victims. The deaths aren’t exactly creative, but the gore effects are fantastic. Decapitations, fish hooks through throats, and a pitchfork through a chest all look realistic thanks to special effects makeup creator Robert Short (Chopping Mall, Beetlejuice, Legion tv series).

For the pitchfork sequence, Short created a replica of the actor’s chest, skewed in proportion to build a spike on rails type of system to pierce through from behind. The rain in the scene and the camera angle works to hide the rigging. Short also created the titular Slayer, which saw actor Carl Kraines (the actor who portrayed the creepy Workman in The Gate) wearing an uncomfortable mechanical head made of urethane foam with a foam latex skin. Being that The Slayer was filmed in Georgia, Short wanted to give the Slayer a very southern, almost zombie-like look.

The gore effects were apparently so well done that it drew the attention of the BBFC, and The Slayer wound up on the Video Nasty list, in the non-prosecuted section. A release with 14-seconds of gore trimmed out finally made it to VHS in the early ‘90s in the UK, and the BBFC eventually cleared it to release uncut in 2001. Like many entries on the Video Nasties list, The Slayer doesn’t really have a whole lot of gore to it to warrant its place on the list, even if well executed.

It’s not the great gore effects (but very low body count) that makes The Slayer stand out, nor is it really the scant appearance of the creature. It’s the weird way in that it presents multiple interpretations of what actually transpired. Cardone gives enough supporting clues and evidence that you could make a case that (SPOILERS) the Slayer was really behind it all, a character snapped and murdered everyone, or it’s all simply a premonition/bad dream. He leaves the ending completely ambiguous. This, with an effective atmosphere, makes The Slayer standout in a sea of slashers.

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The lines between thrillers and horror blur all the time, perpetuating the debate about what does and doesn’t qualify as horror. David Fincher’s Se7en, for example, is technically a mystery crime thriller, but the graphic depictions of the killer’s victims go beyond the norm for standard thrillers. So much so that a strong argument can be made for the film venturing straight into horror territory. In many ways, I Saw the Devil takes the thriller concept and pushes it to extremes, well beyond the normal bounds of the genre.

Directed by Jee-woon Kim, who’d previously terrified audiences with A Tale of Two Sisters, I Saw the Devil opens with a woman stranded on the side of the road on a snowy night thanks to a flat tire. A bus driver, Jang Kyung-chul, stops and offers to fix her flat. Instead, he killers her, scatters her body parts, and resumes his job as if nothing was amiss. The woman’s fiancé, Kim Soo-hyun, happens to be a secret service agent of the National Intelligence Service and vows revenge. When most revenge thrillers of this ilk would opt for a tense cat and mouse chase that results in justice, I Saw the Devil only uses that as a starting point for something much bleaker.

In typical revenge stories, the confrontation between protagonist and serial killer comes at the end, after a harrowing journey that sees the body count pile up. Here, Soo-hyun finds Kyung-chul almost right away. Instead of following protocol and having Kyung-chul locked up, though, Soo-hyun plants a tracking device and lets him go. In this cat and mouse chase, the cat continuously lets his mouse go so he can toy with him again and again in increasingly brutal ways. Meaning, Soo-hyun shows up, tortures Kyung-chul is grisly fashion, and lets him go again so he can repeat the pattern. In theory, that sounds like justice- director Kim makes sure it’s clear just how monstrous the serial killer is as he rapes and dismembers his victims in great detail. But, as the title indicates, sometimes you go looking for the devil only to find him staring back at you in the mirror. Soo-hyun quickly becomes just as disturbed as morally reprehensible as the serial killer that he’s hunting.

And if you haven’t guessed by now, things get hyper-violent and bloody. Aside from dismemberment and multiple sexual assaults, heads are bashed in, a hammer is taken to someone’s face, car crashes are visceral, and above all a slow, excruciating severing of an Achille’s heel will make you wince. The violence escalates into an explosive finale, and no one comes out unscathed.

Between the bloodshed, viscera, and depictions of the most depraved humanity has to offer, I Saw the Devil becomes less and less like a thriller and more like a full-blown horror movie. Just one that’s grounded in realism. Cinema has often explored the corruptive nature of seeking revenge, many different ways and times before, but never quite as primal or as immoral as this. South Korea has cornered the market on twisted, ruthless revenge thrillers- please check out Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and The Chaser if you haven’t yet- but I Saw the Devil is among the goriest and most emotionally disturbing.

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In the early aughts, mainly between 2003-2009, a subgenre of horror dubbed “torture porn” emerged thanks to a string of brutal, gory, and extreme horror films released during the period. This darker, more violent and torture filled style of horror was global in scale, too, not just relegated stateside. In the U.S., films like Hostel, Saw, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake were drawing large crowds at the box office. France was making waves with a series of transgressive horror films, like High Tension and Martyrs, dubbed New French Extremity. And the U.K. ushered in possibly the bleakest of them all in Eden Lake.

Written and directed by James Watkins (The Descent Part 2, The Woman in Black), Eden Lake follows couple Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) as they set out for a romantic camping trip in the countryside. It quickly devolves into a harrowing fight for survival that begins with a group of delinquent teens messing with their stuff that escalates into a bloodbath. Watkins grounds his film in realism, and has absolutely no interest in offering the viewer a reprieve from the tension and violence. If you want a happy ending, you won’t find it here.

It’s not just the ending that leaves viewers cold, but the entitled ruthlessness of the teens terrorizing the couple. They laugh as they torture Steve and Jenny, all the while the female member of the group records their exploits with her phone. It’s this brand of feral youth that frightens to the core, and that has been classified in a specific subgenre of horror known as “hoodie horror.” Hoodie horror arose as a reflection of British middle-class fears of hoodie-wearing disadvantaged youths. Films like Citadel, Cherry Tree Lane, Heartless, F, and even Ils (Them), all classify as hoodie horror, but Eden Lake remains the most notable and infamous. It’s a subgenre that’s come under scrutiny in the U.K. for what it might be saying about the lower class from which these vicious delinquents hail. Whether Watkins intended to infuse social commentary into his mean-spirited horror film or not, it sparked an intense debate regardless.

On a wider scale, the entitlement of the gang in this horror film feels a little too real for comfort, and their behavior chills to the bone; the group even burns one of their own alive. From the unflinching torture of Steve to Jenny’s injuries amassed from desperately trying to escape, Watkins only coils the despair tighter as the story progresses. The special makeup effects further sell the grim reality of this couple’s crisis. Special effects artist Paul Hyett (Attack the Block, The Descent, director of Howl) handled prosthetic makeup design, and notable special effects artist Stuart Conran (Grindhouse, Shaun of the Dead, Doomsday) was also on the team that handled the gorier elements of the movie.

The desolation and bleakness of Eden Lake means it’s a divisive entry in extreme horror. There’s no reprieve from the onslaught of torture, and the evil ultimately goes unpunished. The orchestrator, gang leader Brett, actually is rewarded for his heinous activity in a way. All of which makes for a film that serves to upset and anger its audience. Even if you’re among team “love it,” Eden Lake isn’t the type of film that makes for an easy revisit. The hyper-realistic gore, the themes, and the refusal to offer any redemption for its characters makes this film arguably the darkest horror movie to emerge from the extreme “torture porn” craze post-turn of the century.

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It’s often Saw or Hostel that credited as the first to usher in the way of excessively gory horror dubbed “torture porn,” but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake deserves more credit. It didn’t just beat them both to the theaters by over a year, but it started the wave of both extreme horror and remakes of well-known properties thanks to its massive success at the box office. While a much slicker production than the gritty documentary style aesthetic of the original, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre really went for the jugular in brutal kills and bloodletting.

In this version, the fivesome that will soon find themselves in a battle for their lives are traveling across Texas for a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. Even though it’s set in 1973, it keeps the modern audience in mind by addressing the horrors of hitchhikers straight away in its character introductions. Erin (Jessica Biel) is the clear designated final girl with a heart of gold, and her boyfriend Kemper (Eric Balfour) seems to be the group ringleader. There’s the nerdy friend Morgan (Jonathan Tucker), and horndog Andy (Mike Vogel) who’s getting intimately acquainted with the friendly hitchhiker, Pepper (Erica Leerhsen), the group picked up prior to the film’s opening. She certainly seems normal, so hitchhikers aren’t bad in 1973, right?

So, when they drive past a very despondent and pale young woman on the side of the road, Erin’s heart goes out. She looks more victim than dangerous, anyhow. Once in the backseat of their van, the woman (played by Lauren German) mumbles incoherently, pulls out a gun from between her bloodied legs, tells them they’re all going to die, and blows her brains out in front of them. The camera captures the horrified reactions from the group as it dollies out backwards through the gaping hole in her skull. It’s a visceral proclamation that despite the modern polish, this remake is not going to be for the faint of heart.

The remake dramatically expanded the size of the homicidal family (now named the Hewitt family), and switched up the third act, but it adheres closely to the original in a lot of ways. Leatherface’s first kill is nearly identical to Kirk’s death in the first film, and his second kill also involves a meat hook. The only difference is that the person, Andy, is left to suffer on that hook until the final girl can come put him out of his misery much later. Leatherface also cuts his own leg with his chainsaw in a final act chase sequence, just like in the original. John Larroquette reprised his role as the narrator, and Daniel Pearl returned to handle cinematography, bringing more masterful camerawork to the franchise that kickstarted his career.

But, back to the gore. The effects were handled practically, and it should surprise no one that they were done by Greg Nicotero and KNB EFX Group. If you want hyper-realistic gore, or impressive creature effects, you call the 35+ year veteran. Nicotero’s first brush with this series was with Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, as makeup supervisor. He and KNB’s exemplary work on the 2003 film meant that his company was involved in all of the subsequent Chainsaw films post reboot; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and Texas Chainsaw 3D. No matter how you feel about these films, the gore always delivers.

Before making his directorial feature debut in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Marcus Nispel (who also resurrected Jason Voorhees in 2009’s Friday the 13th) was a designer and painter. Between his artistic eye and Pearl’s always stunning cinematography, this remake exists in that weird crossroads of ugly and beautiful. It’s a gorgeous film with a vicious bite. When the question of why remakes have become so prevalent pops up, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the answer. Audiences ate this remake up, making this the highest grossing film of the franchise even with inflation. There were plenty of remakes before, and since, but the Hollywood reboot craze began in earnest with this one.

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Anytime a horror movie is touted to be “based on true events,” it’s usually met with some level of skepticism. Sometimes it’s an adaptation in the loosest sense, borrowing from actual people and events to launch an exaggerated fictional account, and sometimes the truth just really is stranger than fiction. Surely a film as notorious and sensationalized as the controversial Ken Russell 1971 film The Devils falls into the former category, right? Not so much. Sure, there’s a dreamlike (more like nightmarish) quality to The Devils, and Russell went for the religious jugular, but the events in the film are based on history and the film has its fingers on the pulse of truth.   All of which lent to the creation of one of cinema’s most controversial banned films of all time.

Based on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudun and its 1961 stageplay adaptation, The Devils is set in 17th century Loudun, France. According to history, Loudun was a town divided over those in favor of tearing down its surrounding walls and those who wanted the walls to remain. That division was exacerbated by a plague outbreak in 1632. Tensions and anxiety at an all-time high, hysteria spreads through the town when an entire convent of Ursuline nuns, led by prioress Jeanne des Anges, said they had been visited and possessed by demons. Their increasingly bizarre behavior of shouting, swearing, and barking in public drew enough attention that Cardinal Richelieu opted to intervene. The Cardinal, who wanted the walls down, found himself the perfect fall guy in Urbain Grandeur, a good-looking priest with an unsavory reputation and a public opposer of Richelieu. It kicked off the notorious witchcraft trial in 1634 that resulted in Grandeur’s being burned at the stake after being found guilty of being in league with the devil and seducing the entire convent of nuns.

So, plot-wise, Russell’s film adaption is pretty faithful. Oliver Reed stars as Grandeur, complete with the sex appeal that has all of Loudun’s ladies swooning, including the hunchbacked Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave). Jeanne is extremely lustful of Grandeur, which pushes over into wrathful jealousy when she learns of his relationship to the young and stunning Madeleine (Gemma Jones). Cue the demonic seduction accusations, and hysteria and chaos ensue.

In terms of violence, Russell doesn’t hold back on the torture inflicted upon Grandeur. Needles skewer his tongue, his bones are broken, and his excruciating death at the stake is unflinching. But then Russell doubles down with the brazen sexuality. Scenes that drew the most ire involved Sister Jeanne masturbating with Grandeur’s charred tibia, and the infamous “Rape of Christ” sequence that had the nuns devolve into a naked orgy that culminated in acting out their sexual desires with the statue of Christ. Shocking no one; The Devils ruffled a lot of feathers. The movie was deemed blasphemous and banned in many countries. It received an X-rating only after Russell cut out the most controversial scenes. The studio also trimmed scenes prior to submission to the British Board of Film Censors. Which explains why it’s a film considered tough to track down; there are various cuts in existence and some of the material removed now thought to be permanently lost.

The Devils was always intended to be incendiary. Russell had referred to this as his sole political film. The impact of the film tends to be the same no matter the version, because the corruptive collision of politics and religion and the wielding of hysteria as a weapon at the center proves horrific with or without the most infamous sequences. There’s a timelessness to that that shook critics and the Catholic Church upon release, and it’s still effective. It’s bolstered by a fully committed, immeasurably talented cast, Russell’s distinct style, and a stunning production design. Horror at its most depraved and sadistic tends to make casual viewers uncomfortable, and The Devils takes it to a whole new squeamish level with its nightmarish visuals steeped in historical accuracy.

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Before Wes Craven entered the world of genre filmmaking, he’d been a mild-mannered college professor sheltered in youth thanks to a strict Baptist upbringing. When students asked him to supervise a film they were making, he thought he’d give filmmaking a try as well, and a new passion was born. He moved away from teaching and into film industry thanks to a connection, working as a sound editor at a production company in New York City. It was there that he met producer Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th). The pair worked well together on Craven’s first credit, sex mockumentary Together, giving the business savvy Cunningham the idea to achieve the same level of success with horror. He asked Craven to direct, but I don’t think he (or audiences) were prepared for Craven’s first foray into horror.

For someone who had zero experience with horror movies or directing, Craven delivered one brutal gut-punch of a debut in The Last House on the Left. But Craven did have a lot of experience with repression and forbidden society, having grown up in a household where the only approved films were relegated to Disney. Craven penned a screenplay the drew from The Virgin Spring, which in turn drew from a medieval Swedish ballad, a tragic rape and revenge story. Craven’s approach was pure unflinching confrontation with humanity’s darkest instincts.

The plot follows teen girls Mari Collingwood and Phyllis Stone, off to the city attend a concert for Mari’s 17th birthday, despite reservations from Mari’s parents. Phyllis convinces Mari that they should stop for marijuana on the way, putting the pair directly in the clutches of escaped criminals Krug, Sadie, Junior, and Weasel- all extremely bad news. While Phyllis is gang-raped, Craven contrasts the brutality of it with scenes of the Mari’s parents preparing a surprise party- unaware anything foul has befallen their daughter just yet. Things get far dourer and harrowing for the teens until they’re viciously murdered. It just so happens to be in the woods near the Collingwood’s home, where the gang pass themselves off as salesmen and request to stay the night. When the Mari’s parents put two and two together, their quest for revenge becomes violent and without limit.

Craven never offers a reprieve. Instead of focusing on the rape, he instead makes the viewer complicit in the degradation and humiliation of the film’s victims.  When you think Krug and his gang couldn’t be more despicable, Craven pauses to examine their shame- he humanizes them. Conversely, Dr. John and Estelle Collingwood become savage in the latter half; their grief turned to vicious rage. Disembowelments, a bitten off member, amputations, and stabbings, on top of everything else meant that The Last House on the Left was designed to leave viewers feeling repulsed. Violence begets violence, and there’s no happy ending here.

Even though the violence was actually toned down from the original script, the final cut made even Cunningham a bit squeamish; this wasn’t the fun, bloody romp he expected, nor was horror this serious at the time. Those showing up expecting trashy fun were about to get their expectations crushed under a mountain of bleak reality. Be careful what you wish for, here. As more an more theaters picked up the film, Cunningham actually tried to edit out some of the more disturbing sequences to appease the local theaters riled up about the subject matter.

While the film was drawing ire and protests stateside, it was refused a certificate for theatrical release in the U.K. During the era of home video releases a decade later, it caught the attention of the Department of Public Prosecutions under the Video Recordings Act of 1984, and was banned on the Video Nasties list where it remained throughout the ‘90s. It wasn’t until 2008 that the film finally passed completely uncut, though.

The Last House on the Left is the result of a unique pairing between Cunningham and Craven. Cunningham’s strength is his ability to market and sell a film, while Craven challenged the very notion of what a horror film could be. The sadistic nihilism of Craven’s debut meant horror wasn’t just for children anymore. Not all movies are meant to make you feel good. The ‘70s were full of pioneering horror directors delivering graphic, groundbreaking horror, and Craven was among the first. His imprint on the genre loomed large over the decades, but the soft-spoken horror master grabbed horror by the balls from the get go with his gritty debut. But remember; it’s only a movie.

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Initially coined by critics as a derogatory way to describe the goriest and most violent of horror films, “torture porn” has been unfairly slapped on many great movies. Not to say that some films don’t deserve the moniker, but there’s plenty “torture porn” films that have a lot more depth than the phrase suggests. Such is the case with Sean Byrne’s bold debut The Loved Ones.  After a strong festival run that won the hearts of critics and festival goers, it received a quiet, small release stateside where other critics dubbed it torture porn. Granted, it does get far more nihilistic and gleeful in its approach to torture and violence than most mainstream critics can handle, but The Loved Ones has so much more to offer than that.

Opening with a harrowing car accident involving Brent (Xavier Samuel) and his father colliding with a tree to avoid someone in the road, the film cuts to six months later. Brent bears the awful weight of guilt on his shoulders over his father’s death. He’s withdrawn, brooding, and lashes out. He resorts to self-mutilation and smoking weed as a coping mechanism, though it’s hardly working. Enter Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy), a socially awkward classmate that’s set her sights on Brent. Though he politely turns her offer down to attend the dance together, she’s having none of it. Next thing you know, Brent is attacked from behind and knocked unconscious, only to wake and find himself trapped in Lola’s house with her and her father.

Tied to a chair, Lola immediately injects Brent’s throat with a syringe filled with bleach, rendering his voice box unusable. From there, poor Brent’s time at the Stone household becomes a horror-filled prom night from hell. Yet, one that provides an unexpected form of catharsis. Throughout all of the torture Lola and her creepy father inflicts upon Brent, be it carved flesh with salt rubbed in, knives pinning his feet to the floor, and more; what Brent learns about the Stones lessens his burden of guilt over the death of his father, therefore reinstating his will to live.

While the gore and violence are extremely well done, thanks to sfx makeup supervisor Justin Dix (Lake Mungo, The Babadook) and his team, including hair and makeup designer Zeljka Stanin (Upgrade, Thor: Ragnarok), it’s not nearly as overt and terrible as it seems. Well, that’s not completely true; the torture the Stones’ inflict on Brent is brutal. But it’s also bolstered by focusing on just how utterly creepy and unhinged the family is, and the use of implied violence. When the cellar full of Lola’s previous love rejects are revealed, all monstrous and starved, it’s revealed that the captives were lobotomized by drilling into their skulls and pouring boiling water into the hole. The Loved Ones shows us the first step, at least partway, but the implication of that second step provides a mental image that makes the gore on screen seem that much worse. That Lola’s father has an unhealthy love of his daughter, and that her mother was among the first of the lobotomized furthers the demented feel of what’s happening to Brent. The torture on screen is amplified by what we’re told.

Byrne’s debut is a love letter to his horror influences, from Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead to Carrie. It’s utterly brutal, and yet there’s a lot of warped humor, too. For all of the torture and the gleeful way that Stones revel in it, these are fully rendered characters. McLeavy gives us a rare, sadistic villainess in Lola, but Brent’s transformation from normal teen to suicidal to life-affirming acceptance feels complete. It took Byrne six years too many to deliver a follow up in The Devil’s Candy. Let’s hope it doesn’t take nearly as long for his next horror film.

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Sometimes you revisit movies from the infamous Video Nasty list and find them pretty tame, especially by today’s standards for extreme horror. Granted, some horror movies that were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act were targeted solely because of their title and VHS cover art, but some featured just enough gore that it drew the ire of the censors. Then there were the movies that flat out tested the boundaries of taste. The movies that definitively earned their spot on the list. The title of Joe D’Amato’s gory cult horror movie gives a hint of the madness within; anthropophagus is a synonym cannibal, after all. But still, if you were to go in blind, you’d probably start to wonder if maybe this was another tame horror movie undeserving of its Video Nasty status. Don’t worry. It belongs on the list.

The movie opens with a pair of German tourists enjoying a day together on a remote beach with their dog (don’t worry, the dog is smart enough to hightail it out of there when it notices something is off). They’re brutally murdered by an unseen foe. With that bloody opening kill out of the way, the movie introduces us to our core group of characters. They’re a group of friends touring the Greek islands by boat and find themselves intrigued by a remote island that seems inhabited, but upon further investigation find it to be completely empty of people save for one or two unhinged women. While there, the boat leaves them behind, and they soon discover why the island has been abandoned.

All of this takes time. D’Amato is trying to create an eerie atmosphere. We don’t see the killer for a long time, and at least a third of the film is the characters wandering the empty streets in search of answers. There’s one decapitation and a kidnapping of a pregnant woman, but again, we never see the killer and it’s fairly bloodless. But things to pick up, and the final act of the film delivers on the gore and then some; there are two particularly grisly, taboo-breaking scenes that earned this film its reputation (and Video Nasty status no doubt).

The group of friends start getting killed one by one in violent ways, and the anthropophagus finally makes his appearance known. They piece together that he’s the reason the island is empty; he’s eaten just about every living thing on it. He’s fond of gnawing on throats, eviscerating the flesh and gushing blood everywhere. But it’s nothing compared to the infamous scene that sees him tear out the pregnant woman’s fetus and devour it- umbilical cord and all. Yes, this scene was the one that no doubt turned the censors green, then red with rage. The anthropophagus’ final moments are also pretty extreme, but still doesn’t manage to revolt quite in the same way.

The anthropophagus is played by George Eastman, who also produced and wrote the screenplay based on the story idea he and D’Amato came up with. Makeup was handled by Pietro Tenoglio, an artist with a lengthy list of credits to his name, but StageFright and Castle Freak are the most recognizable titles for genre fans. D’Amato was a director that dabbled in all sorts of genres, but he was best known for his work in porn and horror. He approached shooting his horror films the same way he did his erotic films; simple and straightforward with a focus on the titillating bits. In this case, it meant a hyper-focus on slurping, munching, stabbing, and gruesome moments of gore.

Anthropophagus is a movie that’s been released under various titles; Anthropophagous: The Beast, The Grim Reaper, Man Beast, Man-Eater, and The Savage Island. That’s an important distinction here, as they indicate different cuts. For example, in the U.S., the film was initially released as The Grim Reaper, which was an abridged version of the original. As for Anthropophagus’ Video Nasty status, it finally passed uncut in 2015.

Whereas most of the notable Italian cannibal horror offerings took place in the jungle and presented a no holds barred frenzy of visceral violence, Anthropophagus takes a quieter, slasher approach to its man-eater. Like Cannibal Holocaust, many people believed it to be a snuff film at time of release. It’s not nearly as brutal, but it does offer some truly jaw-dropping moments.

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Chances are you’ll know if low budget exploitation horror film Street Trash is for you before you’ve even see it. Definitely within the first five minutes, which features both male and female full-frontal nudity. Set in a Brooklyn junkyard with a cast of characters comprised mostly of homeless people, the film follows their wacky adventures made even wackier when a local liquor store owner starts selling them Tenafly Viper, 60-year-old hooch that’s gone bad and melts any drinkers from the inside out.

Released in 1987, Street Trash takes the gory practical effects of the decade further by making the blood dayglo colors. Swapping out normal body fluid colors for something more befitting of an electric rainbow makes Street Trash seem a bit less extreme than normal melt horror films, but it’s a pioneer with great practical effects that aren’t afraid to balance the gore with sleazy, crass humor intended to offend.

Directed by James M. Muro, a cinematographer and Steadicam operator known for his work on films like The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and True Lies, Street Trash was initially intended to be his thesis for film school. Surprising no one, including himself, it wasn’t accepted. Besides melting homeless people, there’s a tyrannical Vietnam veteran (named Bronson) ruling violently over the junkyard, race-based arguments and jokes mid-grocery story theft, attempted rape, an overzealous cop, drunk sex, and more. There’s even a game of keep-away involving a severed penis. Because of course.

Fun tidbit: that scene featured three different fake members; the largest -the size of a football- was used for shots that saw the penis getting tossed in the air. The more you know.

Between the New York setting and the humor, Street Trash feels akin to a Troma movie. It’s not, but it does have something else in common with the film production in special makeup effects artist Jennifer Aspinall. Aspinall fell in love with makeup at a young age and moved to New York at the age of 18 to pursue it. But she really got her start in makeup effects on The Toxic Avenger, a low budget romp that taught her the basics thanks to creature work, huge blood gags, prosthetics and body parts. Her next job was special makeup effects on Spookies, a film where Muro happened to be working as a camera operator. They hit it off, and he hired her for Street Trash.

Aspinall designed and even directed a lot of the effects for Street Trash. Even though the colors involved with the melt sequences were abstract, she strove for authenticity in terms of texture and viscosity. The special makeup effects team had a few months to prepare, which went a long way in why Street Trash’s effects look so great despite a lower budget. The most complicated of all wasn’t the melting sequences, though, but Bronson’s death. Aspinall had to build an animatronic severed head that would smile as it looked up a girl’s skirt before dying. Cables, remote controls, motors, and a sculpted head that she’d never actually done before – and it all looks great.

If you’re a fan of sleaze and a whole lot of gooey, crass shenanigans, this formative Melt Movie is a must. It’s goofy, exploitative, over the top, and gory. Underneath it all lurks some wry social commentary, but there’s enough humor happening on screen to distract if that’s not your thing. Street Trash doesn’t hold a candle to the goriest that horror has to offer, but it does present a different type of extreme in envelope-pushing humor. It’s pure cult cinema.

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By the time Dario Argento made and released Tenebrae in 1982, he’d already perfected the art of giallo. Between his Animal Trilogy and Deep Red in the ‘70s, he’d already established himself a master of gialli before switching gears and dipping into the supernatural with Suspiria and Inferno. Tenebrae marked his return to giallo, and while it faced censorship in his own native country, it came along at just the precise moment of time to draw the ire of the Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK. Successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, along with 38 other horror films, Tenebrae was banned until 1999- where it finally released with a few seconds trimmed. It wasn’t until 2003 that it finally passed uncut. Stateside, Argento’s film wasn’t released until 1984, heavily cut under the title Unsane. By today’s standards, it’s fairly tame, but that doesn’t mean it’s difficult to see why it ruffled the feathers of censors- it gets extremely bloody.

The plot sees American horror novelist Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) in Rome promoting his latest release, with his literary agent Bullmer (A Nightmare on Elm Street’s John Saxon) and assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi) in tow. His arrival coincides with the start of a series of grisly murders, and the bodies bear pages of his novel Tenebrae. The police seek Neal out for questioning, then assistance, as a result.

Most of the victims are women, at least in the first half. Throat slashings, stabbings, and even a tense, drawn out dog attack sequence. Many of the victims are affiliated with Neal in some way. And then there are the weird flashback sequences, in which a woman is getting frisky with multiple unseen men until one of them slaps her. The rest chase that assailant down so the woman can get revenge by way of kicking him then shoving the heel of her red stiletto in his mouth. It’s every bit as violent and sexual as it implies. But halfway through, Argento gives equal opportunity for vicious slayings to the men as well. Axe swings to the head and back, strangulations, and surprise impalements means that the men get it just a brutally and the women. Another rarity is that the majority of the deaths take place in broad daylight. The killer has no qualms about stabbing his victims even in a fairly populated street square, under the bright sun.

The diversity in kills isn’t just gender specific; a pair of lesbian lovers fall victim to the murderer, and Argento wanted to depict their relationship openly, without judgment. Considering Italy was conservative toward homosexuality at the time, Argento felt this was the main reason Tenebrae was censored in its native release, not the gore. Sexual deviancy is the central theme here, both in how many of the victims are sexually liberated and how the killer is sexually repressed. The passages of Neal’s book, Tenebrae, gives massive insight to the themes and motivation, but it also adds a layer of culpability in terms of how we consume and digest art. All of which to say that there’s a lot going on in this particular Video Nasty, making it far more than the gorefest the censors labeled it.

If you haven’t seen Tenebrae, I won’t spoil the identity of the killer, but I will say it’s one of the most satisfying. And one of the earliest adaptors of this particular type of killer. Which leads to the scene that was mostly widely trimmed in its various censored releases – the blood spraying death of Neal’s ex-wife Jane (Veronica Lario). Seated by a window in wait, an axe crashes through it and chops through her arm. Blood sprays everywhere, painting those white walls crimson. The killer isn’t done with her, or anyone else that stops by her house after.

Like most horror films, it wasn’t widely regarded by critics upon release but has since found reappraisal in the decades since. Uncut releases no doubt helped that reappraisal. From a visual standpoint, it’s Argento at the top of his game. But more than just a well shot, stunning giallo, it’s clear Argento had a lot on his mind with Tenebrae.

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Even the premise bears Zahler’s fingerprint; a group of aspiring musicians work as cooks at a high security institution for the criminally insane, but a storm-induced blackout frees the inmates. The erstwhile musicians are forced to fight for their lives as the inmates prove how depraved they can be. The lead protagonist, George, is played by Rupert Evans (Hellboy, The Boy), and the most demented inmate of them all is played by fan-favorite Richard Brake (31, Mandy, Game of Thrones). Director Alexandre Courtès makes his feature debut; he’d previously been known for his music video work until this point. A Belgian-French production, you can bet Asylum Blackout gets brutal. Yet not nearly as brutal as you’d expect.

After a pretty graphic cut to the finger in the opening scenes that introduce us to George and his friends as they meal prep in the asylum kitchen, it takes its time before getting to the blackout. This is just as well, considering it can get a little repetitive once the lights go down. When it does go full throttle on the violence, we get scenes like a vegetable peeler grating away a victim’s skin, decapitations, metal rods to the gut, a nose gruesomely bitten off, and more. The blood flows freely, and it looks great. Key special effects makeup was handled by Jean-Christophe Spadaccini and Denis Gastou (City of the Lost Children). Spadaccini had previously worked on Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible and I Stand Alone, so he’s clearly well versed in cringe-inducing effect work. Most of the gore is practical, but there are obvious uses of digital effects as well.

Asylum Blackout also boasts one more secret weapon in its editor; Baxter. A frequent collaborator of Alexandre Aja, Julien Maury, and Alexandre Bustillo’s, Baxter has also worked on High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Inside, Piranha 3D, Livid, Maniac (2012), and more. In other words, if you’re ever working on an extreme horror film, Baxter is the one you want editing it.

In the end, Asylum Blackout is a straightforward exploitation horror film that fulfills its purpose. It’s violent and gruesome, but never quite gets as extreme as it could. By Zahler’s standards, it can be pretty tame for most of the runtime. There’s also a last-minute ending tacked on by writer Jérôme Fansten that undoes most of the goodwill earned up until that point, and it’s what drew critical ire during the film’s release in 2012. It also probably didn’t help that IFC Midnight snatched up this one following reports of people fainting during its screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. Nothing will overhype a horror movie and deflate it just as quickly than that. Existing at a cross roads of Zahler’s exploitation-based sensibilities and French extreme horror, Asylum Blackout is an entertaining movie worth the watch just for Brake’s performance alone.

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Hailing from Turkey, a country that doesn’t dabble in genre cinema too often, Baskin made an international tidal wave in 2016 with its arthouse meets Lucio Fulci and Hellraiser inspired descent into Hell. Based on Can Evrenol’s 2013 short film of the same name, Baskin follows a police squad contending with a night of pain, suffering, and the perverse horror of a depraved Black Mass from Hell when they enter an abandoned building. Turkish superstition, extreme imagery, and a deliberately paced journey for the unsuspecting antiheroes makes Baskin a unique entry in extreme horror.

At first glance the premise seems fairly basic; this is more of a sensory experience than narrative after all. But Evrenol layers in so much mythology, superstition, and meaning to parse out, if you can stomach multiple rewatches that is. After a nightmarish opening sequence set around a little boy and a nightmare come to life, Baskin introduces us to the five police officers oblivious to the hellscape they’ll enter later. It sets up their personalities, and how very flawed each of them are as they tell each other crass stories or pick fights with the workers from the restaurant in which they’re dining.

Of them all, Arda seems the most innocent as the newcomer, while the rest display varying degrees of cynicism and corruption.  But this key scene serves as more than just an introduction to the characters- it reveals a key sin that they’ll atone for later on. Officer Yavuz proudly boasts of a sexual encounter with a prostitute, amusing the others with great detail. His sin, obviously, is lust. Once the officers find themselves deeply entrenched in the gruesome Black Mass, Yavuz’ lust is thrown back at him as he’s tortured, has his eye is gouged out, and forced to have sex with a chained woman sporting a goat skull mask. The rest suffer fates befitting of the sins they represent; rage, gluttony, and so on.

The presiding Father over the Black Mass, Baba (played memorably by Mehmet Cerrahoglu), oversees and leads the way in torture and mayhem. Intestines are pulled out of bellies, throats are slashed, eye trauma, writhing bodies eat gross things that don’t remotely look edible, and pain and suffering run rampant. The blood flows freely. That the Father is named Baba seems fitting, considering Taram Baba is a boogeyman figure in Turkish folklore. Arda proves to be the counterbalance to Baba’s darkness, the one destined to destroy Baba and free his fellow officers from their looping Hells. The underwater scenes representative of Arda’s cleansing journey. There’s a lot of minutiae Evrenol embeds in his surrealistic nightmare, saturated in a sort of Fulci inspired dream logic. It’s just wrapped up in one gnarly package of perversion and gore.

Between Derya Ergün’s makeup design, Alp Korfali’s cinematography, and of course Evrenol’s direction, Baskin is both stunning and repulsive- it’s arthouse infused with gore and grime. It’s brutal, but it’s a brutality that Evrenol eases into, not the rapid-fire onslaught of gory imagery the early trailers indicated. This means that the pacing might be off-putting for some. But for others, it’s a vicious descent into Hell that would make Clive Barker proud, and has a lot going on under the surface, too.

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Somewhere at the crossroads of splatter and body horror exists what can only be referred to as “melt horror.” Horror where the victims ooze and dissolve, literally melting, from the inside out. Movies like The Incredible Melting Man, Street Trash, and Body Melt. Body Melt is an Australian horror comedy that lampoons the period’s health craze in gruesome and over the top ways.

But be sure to go in with an empty stomach.

Writer/director/composer Philip Brophy, a musician and composer, wastes no time introducing the viewer to the baddies behind the health company experimenting with a new diet drug. They’re well aware that it has horrible side effects, but they decide to use the suburban residents of Pebbles Court as test subjects for their new product. There are three major phases to the gross-out side effects of the drug. First comes the hallucinations, then a glandular attack, and finally full-blown body melt.

Save for one early victim, an employee who tries to warn the residents only to succumb to weird tentacled decay first, Brophy keeps emphasis on the wackiness of the cast of characters. Two horny teens on a road trip to donate sperm, only to run afoul of an inbred family at a service station. A neighbor who is plagued by multiple visions of the same woman, a sometime seductress and sometimes battered victim. It doesn’t make much sense, just go with it. There’s also a young, pregnant couple, the evil corporation villains, and a slew of other over the top weirdos, all mostly played by Australian soap and television stars.

Basically, you’re lulled into the comedy and forget all about the horror, which doesn’t really start to ramp up until a little more than halfway through the run time. Then it becomes a no holds barred splatstick affair with mutations, killer mutated placentas, exploding penises, every possible bodily fluid you can think of, and of course a ton of melting. There’s not as much blood as you’d think, but it more than makes up for that in the sheer volume of pus, snot, and slime green vomit. Released just a year after Peter Jackson’s Braindead (Dead Alive), the influence is clear.

Of course, there’s also one major connection between the two; special makeup effects supervisor and creator Bob McCarron. McCarron also worked on the gruesome special effects for Braindead, which still remains arguably the goriest film of all time. What’s interesting about McCarron is that he’s not just an award-winning special effects and prosthetic artist, but a medic with four degrees in paramedicine, nursing, pre-hospital medicine and wildlife biology. So, he’s well versed in anatomy and the extremely repulsive things the human body is capable of, and puts that on full display in Body Melt.

Brophy wasn’t just content to compose the soundtrack and score for the film he wrote, directed, and storyboarded, he’s even got a special effects credit – “testicles.” This singular word aptly sums up the type of humor that saturates this icky satire. The horror takes a while to kick in, but man is it the precise type of gooey, slimy, melty practical effect driven Ozploitation that will threaten even the steeliest of stomachs.

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Almost exactly 10 years ago, gore lovers found themselves a new horror icon in ChromeSkull. The masked killer made his debut in Laid to Rest, a brutal slasher that put major emphasis on putting creative kills back in the subgenre. Not bothering with traditional introductions, Laid to Rest picks up with one of ChromeSkull’s victims waking up in a casket with a traumatic head injury inducing both amnesia and major disorientation. She escapes, and spends the night fleeing for her life as ChromeSkull pursues to finish what he started. The body count racks up along the way and, being that this slasher is the brainchild of special effects artist Robert Hall, it gets pretty gnarly.

Hall has an extensive body of work in special makeup effects, from genre films like Dead Birds, Vacancy, Prom Night (2008), Quarantine, to beloved genre shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It was the latter where he met actors Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker, who both found themselves terrorized by ChromeSkull in Laid to Rest. The silent yet menacing ChromeSkull was played by Nick Principe (Hatchet II). With Bobbi Sue Luther in the lead role as ChromeSkull’s intended victim, The Girl/Princess, the rest of the cast is filled out with genre notables Richard Lynch (2007’s Halloween, The Lords of Salem), Johnathon Schaech (Quarantine, Prom Night), Kevin Gage (Strangeland, Heat, The ‘Burbs), and Sean Whalen (The People Under the Stairs, Hatchet III). Most of which fall victim in very gruesome fashion. While Laid to Rest is intentionally simple in premise and isn’t interested in breaking the slasher mold, it is refreshing that The Girl consistently finds herself aligned and supported by characters who are genuinely nice people.

But, of course, who cares about the characters or story? We’re here for the gore. While Hall wrote and directed Laid to Rest, he handed the special makeup effects off to his crew from Almost Human Inc., with Erik Porn (Dead Night, No One Lives, The Crazies) serving as special makeup effects supervisor. Because Hall comes from an extensive background in special makeup effects, he had a strong grasp of how the effects should look, so Porn had extra pressure when coordinating the lifelike kills and gore for the film. Between the team’s impressive work and Hall’s vision for how the special effects should work and look, Laid to Rest has been praised for its stunning practical effects. That’s because Hall understands how to use CG to enhance the practical effects; it’s so seamlessly done that it’s often been assumed this slasher is entirely practical.

Lena Headey’s character is one of the film’s earliest deaths; ChromeSkull skewers her head to the wall while she’s dangling upside-down out of a window. It’s made even more brutal by ChromeSkull’s twisting and wrestling the large blade out of her skull, the skin stretching and tearing as blood gushes from just about every orifice in her head. Headey’s face was digitally composited over the puppet and practical effects. Hall had designed this kill sequence to be equal parts practical and digital from the get-go. Yet it looks entirely real and wholly practical. The visual effects crew from Asylum VFX and Almost Human Digital deserve just as much praise as the practical team- all involved delivered visceral gore that looked incredibly realistic.

It’s easy to see why this series has developed a vocal following, and have long been clamoring for the third entry. It’s an unrelenting slasher full of glorious kills that will make gore-hounds happy. Exploding heads, severed heads, a disembowelment, and literal face melting, but all through the laser precision of someone well versed in delivering stunning special makeup effects.

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Three years before Eli Roth helped usher in the subgenre of horror dubbed “torture porn” with Hostel came his gory feature debut, Cabin Fever. For the group of five college graduate friends that embarked on a weekend getaway trip to a cabin in the woods, it wasn’t a demonic presence or masked maniac they had to contend with, but one gnarly virus that quickly escalates from minor skin rash to widespread aggressive decay. It also happens to be extremely contagious. The terrifying disease has catastrophic ramifications for the group in every possible way, from the physical to the social and psychological.

Roth wrote the script at age 22, while still in film school, based on his own gruesome experience with a mysterious skin infection at age 19 that left his skin coming off in bloody chunks when he scratched at it or shaved. Merging this life experience with a formative horror film, The Evil Dead, sparked the idea behind Cabin Fever. He gave an early draft to his college roommate expecting to terrify him, but he was perplexed to hear his roommate laughing instead. That roommate, Randy Pearlstein, wound up co-writing the script with Roth to deliver both scares and laughs.

The road to getting Cabin Fever made proved much more arduous and long. It took six years for Roth to find producers willing to take on what would be a sure R-rated bet. When he finally secured investors, the 2001 anthrax attacks featured prominently in the news made one of the film’s investors get cold feet and pull out of the project a mere 3 days into production. It was only the beginning of the constant financial struggle, often causing halts in production that would last months while Roth and team attempted to scrounge up more funds to continue.

Perhaps the biggest stroke of luck came from Roth’s previous working relationship with David Lynch, with whom he’d met while working on his NYU thesis film and handled research for a project of Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti. It was through Lynch that Roth landed the expert special makeup effects studio KNB EFX Group to handle the gore, rotting flesh, and free-flowing blood effects for Cabin Fever. With the core trio of Howard Berger, Robert Kurtzman, and Greg Nicotero as special makeup effects supervisors, and Garrett Immel as a key artist, it’s the gooey, grisly practical effects that elevated Cabin Fever into memorable horror that holds up over a decade later. The low budget meant that KNB EFX had to get creative with the makeup effects, and likely provided great experience with working on visceral gore on a small scale that would later come in handy when working on The Walking Dead.

After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, Cabin Fever sparked a bidding war from investors, including some that’d previously passed on the film pre-production, and went on to become the highest grossing film released by Lionsgate in 2003. All of this to say that while Cabin Fever came before the “Torture Porn” craze, its success proved that R-rated horror could sell, and sell well. It helped pave the way for the brutal wave of horror that emerged in the early aughts.

Cabin Fever takes the cabin in the woods subgenre of horror and gives it an unflinching body horror twist. There are few things as more horrifying as being a stranger in your own skin, especially when it involves a disease that rapidly progresses from benign rash to oozing ulcers to necrotic tissue sloughing off with the barest of touch, all in the span of hours. The concept alone can induce nightmares, but thanks to the uncanny talents of KNB EFX Group, these nightmares were brought to life in a visually traumatic way.

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In the early aughts, France made a bold entrance in the realm of modern horror with a collection of transgressive, brutal films referred to as New French Extremity. These films, like High Tension, Inside, Martyrs, and Frontier(s), took a visceral approach to violence, sexuality, and horror. One of the more underseen entries in this collection is that of Marina de Van’s In My Skin, a gruesome drama slash body horror film that draws inspiration from David Cronenberg, particularly Crash, and may have even served as an influence for Julia Ducournau’s Raw.

Aside from writing and directing In My Skin, de Van also stars as lead character Esther, a successful woman on the cusp of a major job promotion. While attending a house party of colleagues and friends, she takes a breather outside and winds up falling on a pile of industrial supplies. It’s not until hours later that she notices the fall gave her one gnarly wound on her leg. The doctor is puzzled as to how Esther didn’t register the pain of the wound until hours later, but she’s unphased by delayed pain and potential for scarring. The event triggers a new fascination with her own body. First, it’s small things like uncomfortably pulling away at the folds of her skin while in the bathtub, but then it escalates when she intentionally exacerbates her leg wound with sharp objects. Despite the growing concerns of her boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas, who also played Father in Raw), Esther’s self-inflicted wounds get more and more dangerous.

Like Raw, In My Skin sees its lead character on a path of self-discovery that also happens to cause pain and bloodshed spurned by social pressures. But whereas Raw’s Justine would bite and hurt her herself as a means of suppression, Esther revels in it. De Van gets uncomfortably up close and personal with Esther’s biting away at her arms, chewing and savoring her own flesh in her mouth, and basking in the blood from open wounds on her legs as it spills on to her face. Earlier moments of self-mutilation are mostly done off screen with disturbing sound left to fill in our imagination, but as Esther ups the violence, special makeup effects artist Dominique Colladant (Nosferatu the Vampire) lets loose with the wounds, blood, and excess fleshy bits.

There’s not really much in the way of a fully developed narrative or even a full character introspection in In My Skin; de Van would rather have the audience cringe from under Esther’s skin than inside her headspace. While she’s grotesquely tearing herself apart, her face remains impassive and somewhat serene. In that respect, it’s easy to see why this one slipped under the radar in the conversations about New French Extremity. But it’s also a new form of body horror that takes influence from the master of body horror, Cronenberg, and turns it into something that feels very different. There’s no shying away from Esther’s bizarre form of self-harm that evolves into primitive self-cannibalism. Not in de Van’s intimate closeups of it, nor in Colladant’s grisly makeup work.

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If there’s one thing you can count on in a Ryuhei Kitamura horror film, it’s the copious amount of bloodshed and gore. With Kitamura, gore is most definitely an artform. Based on Clive Barker’s 1984 short story of the same name, The Midnight Meat Train follows a photographer obsessed with dark subject matter getting in over his head when he discovers a serial killer that butchers unsuspecting night commuters in grisly fashion.

In other words, there’s probably not many movies as aptly titled as this one. There’s a lot of human meat, blood, brain matter, and limbs being carved up on the late-night subway train in this horror movie. Bradley Cooper stars as Leon Kaufman, the photographer that stumbles upon and then becomes obsessed with the ruthless serial killer. His concerned girlfriend Maya, a character not in the original short, is played by Leslie Bibb. But the real reason to watch this movie, aside from the gore, is the perpetually intimidating Vinnie Jones as killer Mahogany. Jones only utters one word of dialogue in the entire movie, but he’s such a strong physical presence that you’ll hardly notice. Or care. Also look for horror vet Ted Raimi in an eye-popping death scene.

Those unfamiliar with Barker’s original short story will be caught off guard behind the reveal of Mahogany’s motive. A gory cat and mouse thriller between photographer and serial killer doesn’t usually lead to a larger conspiracy theory involving sacrificial offerings to underground dwellers, but leave it to Barker, and screenwriter Jeff Buhler (The Prodigy, 2019’s Pet Sematary, Grudge) to go there. Along with it a not so happy ending, depending on your perspective.

Despite the carnage and mayhem unleashed at the hands of the butcher Mahogany, the kill sequences and gore took a lot of careful planning by Kitamura. Storyboard artist Todd Harris drew endless storyboards based on Kitamura’s direction and the script to meticulously plot out every shot. Though there were some digital effects, most of The Mightnight Meat Train’s gore was done practically. That meant a minimum of 3 gallons of blood needing to be cleaned up from the set daily; some days used at least 25 gallons worth of fake blood. But, the most impressive feat was the insane amount of prosthetics needed for this production.

Limbs, severed heads, and full-sized human bodies to be dangled like butcher meat or mounded in piles.

The extensive prosthetic work was done by Matthew Mungle (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and his team from his co-founded special makeup effects company W.M. Creations, Inc. Mungle, and his special makeup effects company specialize in aging and prosthetic makeup, one of the most challenging aspects of special makeup effects, and delivers some eerily lifelike human bits and pieces for The Midnight Meat Train. Look to the woman getting decapitated on the train, or Leon losing his tongue for great examples.

Barker, who served as producer on the film as well as provided paintings for set dressing, was pleased with the final film. Unfortunately, the movie was dumped onto brief limited theatrical release, showing only on roughly 100 screens, before DVD release shortly after. The move infuriated Barker, who notoriously blamed ego behind the scenes at Lionsgate for the less than ideal release. Luckily movies usually have a long shelf life and an ability to amass a following years or decades later, and the graphic reputation of The Midnight Meat Train along with Barker’s seal of approval means that we can board this bloody train whenever we’d like.

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Movies have a long-standing relationship with serial killers, from larger-than-life fictional personalities like Patrick Bateman and Hannibal Lecter to true-crime enigmatic killers like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy; it’s as though there’s an inherent need to delve into the pathology behind these twisted minds in film. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer exists far removed from the rest; based on real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, this horror film isn’t interested in the whys of its killer. Instead, it’s a voyeuristic window into his life, one so uncomfortable that the film sent the MPAA into a tizzy and wound up on the shelf for years until finally getting a release.

Co-writer/director John McNaughton’s feature debut, Henry doesn’t really have a story in the traditional sense. It opens to a shocking frame of a discarded dead woman, completely naked and covered in blood, before cutting to Henry (Michael Rooker), a seemingly normal man going through a mundane daily routine. As he quietly eats his breakfast before driving on through town, the film continues to juxtapose these ordinary moments with brutal shots of the dead bodies that Henry is leaving in his wake. It’s a chilling introduction to the casual, impulsive nature of Henry. This matter-of-fact style of slaying, combined with McNaughton’s choice to film in 16mm, gives Henry an overall gritty feel that seeks to drive home that the world’s scariest monsters have no motive behind their actions.

Henry shares an apartment with his former jail mate Otis (Tom Towles), who just picked up his younger sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) from the airport to stay with him for a while. Becky is the closest thing the film has to an audience proxy, a vulnerable young woman with a long history of sexual abuse who’s currently fleeing an abusive relationship. It’s through her that we learn a little more about Henry’s past, and it’s through her that we’re given just a smidgen of hope that there’s some kind of logic to Henry’s homicides. When Becky pries about Henry’s murder of his own mother, he can’t even get the details right. It’s a major red flag that hints at how many murders he’s committed, but also how very insignificant the act of murdering is to him. Becky’s too broken to notice; she instead relays her own traumatic past.

Once Otis embarks on a killing spree with Henry, McNaughton continues to ratchet up the tension, dread, and unease the more the pair gleefully approach their ruthless deeds with reckless abandon. It culminates in one harrowing doozy of a finale, and McNaughton brilliantly brings things full circle by having the film’s final victim unwittingly admire the guitar that belonged to one of Henry’s earliest victims, a hitchhiker.

The MPAA famously said that no number of edits would pass Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer with an R-rating. It’s a revealing statement considering how very little gore there is throughout the film, save for a couple of effective death sequences and cutaways to the bloody aftermath. When the film finally saw release a few years after its premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival, unrated no less, the reception was polarizing.

McNaughton delivered an unflinching portrayal of what a serial killer really looked like, saturated in realism and completely devoid of the entertainment value that usually sugarcoats the most depraved aspects of humanity. For some, being put into the voyeuristic role of watching Henry commit his heinous acts in all its ugliness was too much to handle. Brilliant direction and an uncanny performance by Rooker make Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer one of the most distressing, terrifying horror films of all time.

Sometimes it’s not gore that disturbs, but uncomfortable truths.

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Released only a week after Friday the 13th Part 2 in theaters, The Burning didn’t fare well at all. It didn’t help that the plot was similar, or that 1981 was a year in which the slasher boom was riding high in popularity. Within the roughly same month as The Burning’s release, slashers Final Exam, Graduation Day, and Happy Birthday to Me also dropped into theaters, crowding the market. All of this to say, The Burning slipped through the cracks and took many years to earn its reputation as a brutal, obscure gem thanks to home re-release.

Like Friday the 13th Part 2, this slasher also saw a lumbering killer that slaughtered teens at a summer camp in the name of revenge. Unlike Friday the 13th Part 2, The Burning was a fully running camp full of kids, which meant this slasher broke one of the biggest taboos- killing children and teens in the most gruesome fashion. The killer wasn’t some undead entity from the grave, either, but a seriously angry camp caretaker five years removed from the catastrophic prank at the hands of campers that left him severely disfigured from being set on fire. Had it not been for the timing of release, Cropsy’s memorable and unique appearance had the potential to launch another slasher franchise.

His look, as well as the gory kills, were handled by a talented artist well versed in slaughtering teens at the time; special makeup and effects artist Tom Savini. Having already worked on Friday the 13th and Maniac, and work on The Prowler and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter still to come, Savini was seasoned at creating effects that delivered believable, brutal death sequences in slashers. He very nearly worked on Friday the 13th Part 2, but chose The Burning instead.

Had he not taken this project, it’s difficult to imagine what this slasher would be without the shocking event that sets off the final act; the bloody raft massacre. When the counselors and their campers notice their canoes are missing after an overnight stay at Devil’s Creek, they build a raft. Five of the young campers paddle away to seek help and find one of their abandoned canoes. Their moment of elation is quickly deflated by the appearance of Cropsy, who pops up and brings his garden shears down upon each one again and again.

That raft scene further set The Burning apart from the Friday the 13th sequel by earning the film a spot on the Video Nasties list. The gore was heavily trimmed down to an R-rating for decades in both the U.K. and the U.S., which also played a major role in the slasher only gaining popularity when DVD releases in the early 2000s reinstated the uncut gore.

On a basic plot level, The Burning falls in line with many slashers of its era. Summer camp was a popular killing ground for rampaging maniacs with a vendetta. But The Burning is better acted than most, having a number of notable actors making their debut like Fisher Stevens (the most brutalized of the kids on that raft), Holly Hunter, and Jason Alexander. Cropsy isn’t a masked killer, but a disfigured one with a very recent trigger for revenge. But the reason we love slashers so much is for the kills, and The Burning delivers in a satisfying way thanks to Savini’s uncanny talent for gore.

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Very few filmmaker debuts evoke quite as visceral of a response as co-writer/directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s Inside. A brutal take on the home invasion sub-genre that masters the art of building suspense, Inside revolves around a fateful night on Christmas Eve, where a very pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis) is stalked and tormented in her own home by a woman dead set on stealing her unborn baby. The simple concept is anything but as Maury and Bustillo infuse the story with tragedy, deep grief, surprising revelations, and a shocking amount of bloodshed.

Long-time genre fans, Maury and Bustillo posed a simple question when penning the screenplay; what if the killer was a woman? In horror, it’s typically maniacal men chasing the women. With the major gender reversal of the antagonist, the writer/director duo then wondered what would motivate a woman to stalk and hunt another woman. That woman didn’t have a name; she was simply credited as “La Femme,” or the woman. And La Femme is one of modern horror’s most terrifying villains, in no small part due to having been played by the intense Béatrice Dalle. The actress had already demonstrated a knack for portraying unhinged yet fierce characters, like the ferocious cannibal Coré in Trouble Every Day. Dalle would reteam with Maury and Bustillo again in their films Livid and Among the Living.

La Femme doesn’t just torture Sarah, ruthless and unrelenting in getting what she wants, but she has zero qualms about slaughtering anyone else that might get in her way. This means that Inside gets extremely bloody. It flows, spurts, and gushes from the wounds inflicted. It really never stops flowing, only increasing to near geyser-like levels in the climax. Because the gore and blood effects were practical, Inside had to be shot in order. Cleaning up the sheer volume of fake blood would’ve proved far too tricky to film out of order.

The special makeup effects team had a lot of work cut out for them. The budget roughly around 2 million dollars, most of it went to the special effects. Knitting needles to the jugular, sewing shears to the groin, head explosions, a self-tracheotomy, and so much more. The team had to mold prosthetics and endless gallons and tubes of fake blood to be pumped through the open flesh wounds. The makeup effects supervisor was Jacques-Olivier Molon, who previously worked on genre films Horsehead and Orphan, and more recently on Mandy. Other notable names from the team include Nicolas Herlin (As Above, So Below, Livid, Leatherface), Sabine Fevre (Among the Living, Silent Hill: Revelation), Pierre-Olivier Thevenin (Jurassic Park, Blade II), and many more.

Christmas Eve doesn’t factor prominently in the plot; it’s another indicator of Sarah’s loneliness and profound grief after the startling opening scene. But there’s an emotional resonance there that connects with the holiday, and the blood red color consistently filling the screen also feels holiday appropriate in a very warped way. Maury and Bustillo unleashed primal rage on screen, and with it a torrent of violent bloodshed. Yet it’s balanced with emotional devastation that pulls it back from exploitation. For those that prefer their holiday viewings without cheer and merriment, Inside is among the very best in extreme French cinema.

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Growing up in the age of VHS and video stores it was a rite of passage for the hardcore to not only get ahold of Faces of Death, but be brave enough to watch it. By the mid-80s, the mondo shockumentary was the stuff of urban legend. A collection of deaths both human and animal hosted by Dr. Francis B. Gross, Faces of Death felt like something truly taboo. That it boasted to have been banned in more than 40 countries only further propelled this collection of violence and gruesome death into forbidden fruit territory. Initially released on November 10, 1978, it didn’t take long for Faces of Death to earn notoriety. Forty years later, this shockumentary doesn’t hold up to the reputation it once had, but its merits as an influential gamechanger is undeniable.

Faces of Death wasn’t the first mondo film, a name for exploitation documentary films that emphasized taboo subjects and often featured brutal animal deaths, and the first, Mondo Cane, served as inspiration. Writer/director John Alan Schwartz (he uses the pseudonym Conan LeCilaire) wanted to push the envelope further, though, and wanted to feature humans getting killed. He set about collecting as much actual footage of human death as he could find, most of which he purchased from news organizations. But what he cobbled together wasn’t enough to fill a feature length film. So, he decided to supplement the grotesque footage with staged death scenes.

The beheading, the electrocution, the alligator attack, and even the monkey brain scene that may or may not have inspired the dinner scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom all were shot in a month. The makeup effects were handled by special makeup effects artist Allan A. Apone, uncredited at the time. It’s these staged deaths that show their age the most; the effects don’t hold up as well and relegates the film as of its time. The monkey brain scene? Apone used cauliflower with food coloring and gelatin. Though the makeup effects may show its age, Apone has had an extensive, illustrious career with films like Suicide Squad and Captain America: Civil War under his belt since his early days working on the first two Faces of Death films.

After a hugely successful theatrical run in Japan, Faces of Death found its biggest success on VHS in America. The cover box may have stated it was banned in 46 countries, but the truth was that it was banned in only a handful. Not least of which was the UK, as it earned a spot on the prosecuted Video Nasties list. Shot and compiled on a budget of around $450,000, Faces of Death wound up earning $35 million in its home video frenzy. That profit meant that Faces of Death would continue on with seven additional sequels, though some were just “best of” reels of earlier films.

At least 40% of Faces of Death is staged, and the filmmaking techniques have become much more obvious in an internet-based age where death and violence is far more commonplace. We’re now much more desensitized to violence. But in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, there was nothing like it. Faces of Death paved the way for shocking horror to come, and traumatized youth from the comfort of their own homes.

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The major theme of 2018’s Halloween is trauma. Ignoring all other sequels past John Carpenter’s original film, this new sequel honed in on Laurie Strode’s inability to cope with her encounter with Michael Myers on that fateful night 40 years ago. It was something that Jamie Lee Curtis tried to explore with the character in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, as well. But in the discussion of Laurie Strode’s survivor trauma, there’s one major component that’s been left out: Rob Zombie’s brutal sequel Halloween II. While Halloween II is far from perfect, the sequel successfully resonates because of its honest portrayal of trauma and grief.

Picking up immediately after the events of the first film, Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) is found severely injured and detached from the world around her. Rushed to the hospital, Zombie gets intimate with her injuries as she’s sewn up and put back together. He wants it clear just how physically grueling it was for Laurie to survive Michael Myers. The team of doctors remove her dangling nail from its nailbed, viscerally reset broken bones, and painfully clean out her deep slash wounds. She’s barely out of surgery when the onslaught begins again (in her mind, anyway).

Cut to two years later. Laurie is seeing a therapist, suffering night terrors, and taking prescription pills. Her parents murdered in the first film, she’s now living with Sheriff Lee Brackett (Brad Dourif) and fellow survivor Annie Brackett (Danielle Harris). It’s here where Zombie’s portrayal of the aftermath of surviving a killer gets really interesting. Laurie and Annie are both dealing with the emotional fallout from that Halloween night. They’re both two sides to the same coin of trauma.

Whereas Laurie has become far less relatable bordering on being unlikable, because her coping mechanisms (or lack thereof) are self-destructive, Annie has become obsessed with healthy eating and mothering the two closest people in her life. She’s clinging to her life harder than before. More tellingly, though, is that we never see Annie leave the house at all. It indicates that while she’s holding it together better than Laurie, it’s only on the surface as she’s become a bit of a recluse.

While we’re getting reacquainted with the new, emotionally and physically scarred final girls, Zombie is peripherally working to remind us why these girls should be so messed up in the head. Michael Myers is coming back to finish what he started, and he’s upped the ante on his violence. This iteration of Myers is downright savage, and the body count exists solely to reinforce just why Laurie is spiraling out of control. This Myers is so vicious that it’s no wonder his survivors might lose their grasp on reality.

In keeping with the gritty, gruesome approach, artist Wayne Toth served as the special effects makeup designer. Toth previously worked with Zombie on makeup effects for Halloween and House of 1000 Corpses, and has also worked on films like Wishmaster, Drag Me to Hell, and Bride of Re-Animator. With a shorter pre-production period, Toth has his hands full with the gorier kill count. Howard Boggs (Jeffrey Daniel Phillips) head stomping is ruthless, and there’s plenty of violent stabbings and eye gouges to go around. None of it is as vicious as Annie’s demise, made more primitive by the performances.

Thanks to Zombie’s fearlessness in pursuing his vision, the underrated and fantastic performances by Dourif, Harris, and Taylor-Compton, and Toth’s contributions keeping this version of Myers merciless and gritty, Halloween II succeeds in demonstrating what trauma could look like for a Final Girl. For all its flaws, it’s this aspect of the story that Zombie nailed better than most. This is what surviving looks like two years after the inciting event that destroyed lives. Trauma like this changes a person, for better or worse (usually the latter), and the fearless way that Zombie and Taylor-Compton approached that truth over an endearing lead heroine deserves more credit than it’s received thus far.

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In terms of plot, The Prowler isn’t exactly a standout among the sea of slashers released during the early ‘80s. It makes a bold statement by having its killer wear a World War II combat uniform and use a bayonet as his weapon of choice, and that the killer is driven to homicide from a Dear John letter gives it a little more daring depth than typically found in the sub-genre. But the whodunnit aspect of the slasher formula is fairly dull and more of an afterthought, and the college Spring dance setting feels a little uninspired. Yet, it’s still one of the best simply for its stunning showcase of unadulterated gore and sadistic kills, thanks to director Joseph Zito’s highlighting of Tom Savini’s breathtaking special makeup effects work.

It’s the effects work that makes The Prowler such a satisfying slasher, and Zito understood that well. It’s the realistic deaths that make the film so memorable, and the production schedule was based around the makeup effects work, which often took a full day to set up. The killer was portrayed by three different people; assistant director Peter Giuliano in the stalking scenes, actor Farley Granger for the identity reveal, and Tom Savini for all of the closeup shots of the killer slaying his victims. Considering all of the deaths are up close and personal, Savini was a very busy man on this set.

One of the deaths that ruffled the feathers of the MPAA the most was the throat slashing of Cindy Weintraub’s Lisa in the swimming pool. All alone, the Prowler kicks her in the face as she’s climbing out of the pool before hopping in himself to drag his knife across the throat. She sinks down beneath the surface, blood gushing out through the gaping wound. The Prowler’s boot seen kicking Lisa was actually a rubber leg over Savini’s arm, which he swung to emulate the kicking motion. It was Savini that climbed into the pool and slash Weintraub’s throat with a fake knife while fake blood was being pumped through it. Prosthetics were used for the underwater shots, with more blood being pumped through the gaping throat.

The best double kill in the film was that of Sherry’s impalement by pitchfork, which thanks to Savini’s rigging of a fake pitchfork, looked startlingly real. It was preceded by her boyfriend Carl getting a bayonet shoved through his skull. Though Savini already proved himself a master of exploding heads thanks to Maniac, he duplicated the effect here in the finale. Stuffing a dummy head with apple cores, leftovers from lunch that day, and prophylactics filled with fake blood, Savini fired a double-barreled shotgun into the fake head to make it explode during the shot.

It was their work on The Prowler that lead to Zito and Savini getting the job on Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, the fourth installment of a franchise built around its kill count. It’s easy to see why; The Prowler doesn’t seem interested in characterization or even much in the way of plot. It wanted to revel in its visceral deaths, and very few in the genre manage to be as realistic and bloody as the ones Savini created here. Savini has an extensive list of credits that showcases his unparalleled work, but it’s the excruciating realism in The Prowler that sets it apart as his best.

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Director Drew Goddard’s sophomore effort, Bad Times at El Royale, comes six years after his fantastic debut effort, which in itself was held up for years due to studio bankruptcy issues. That feature debut, which he co-wrote with Joss Whedon, quickly shot to the top of beloved modern horror comedy classics thanks to clever writing, a meta dissection of horror tropes, and an insane amount of blood and creature effects. Considering Bad Times at El Royale is just weeks away from release, now seems like a perfect excuse to revisit The Cabin in the Woods.

As if we really needed a reason.

A simple premise, in which five friends find more than they bargained for when traveling to a remote cabin in the woods, is turned into so much more thanks to Whedon and Goddard’s script. Those five friends are unwittingly part of a grand sacrifice, forced to choose the form of their destruction from a pantheon of monsters locked away beneath the land on which their cabin sits. Though they select the Buckner family, or more lovingly the Zombie Redneck Torture Family, the audiences get a bloody taste of every imaginable creature and monster by the final act when all hell breaks loose.

Seeing just how insanely bloody the final act is, and the number of creatures loosed upon the underground facility, it’s a pleasant surprise that The Cabin in the Woods went mostly practical. Goddard and Whedon tapped David LeRoy Anderson (2004’s Dawn of the Dead, The Exorcist and American Horror Story TV series) and his company AFX Studios to handle the design and special makeup effects. At the peak of the special makeup effects teams’ production, there were 75 crew members working hard at creating the blood, gore, and monsters of the film. Just about every major film and monster received an homage in The Cabin in the Woods.

While nearly every monster gets a brief moment in the spotlight, from zombies to horrifically toothy ballerinas to violent unicorns, the creature with the biggest payoff in the film is that of the Merman. All Steve Hadley (Bradley Whitford) wants in the film is for someone to choose the Merman as their destructor. The adage “Be careful what you wish for” comes full circle as his wish is granted in his final moments.

The Merman was a combination of special makeup effects artist Joseph Pepe’s design, puppeteer Hiroshi Katagari’s sculpture and paint job, and Richard Cetrone’s performance. Cetrone also played the Werewolf, but that character wasn’t nearly as cumbersome as the Merman. Anderson’s contribution to the creation of the Merman? The blood-spewing blowhole. It wasn’t initially part of the script, but Anderson’s suggestion that the blood spew from the monster’s blowhole once he bites down on Steve was met with enthusiasm by Goddard. Being that this was practically handled, Goddard could really only get one shot of the Merman spurting blood from his blow hole as the set was drenched after and impossible to clean up. So, Goddard had the effects team hook the monster up to the largest batch of fake blood they could find, and it spews a steady geyser of blood upward out of the blowhole.

Cetrone endured hours of makeup to get into character, often curling up into fetal position and napping while the makeup team transformed him into the Merman. He then had to be carried via stretcher to set thanks to the lack of mobility. The effort poured into the practical effects is just one (albeit major) part of this film’s enduring charm. There’s a ton of bloody reasons this film is a fun watch, but the payoff between Steve Hadley and his monstrous Merman ranks high among them.

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For fans of gory slashers, it’s hard not to fall for the quirky splatter charms of The Mutilator. The opening scene establishes the movie’s strange tonal blend of obtusely sweet and darkly violent, and essentially sets up the entire plot as well. It begins with a quaint depiction of a family celebrating the patriarch’s birthday; mom is in the kitchen baking a birthday cake and only child Ed Jr. is in the living room cleaning dad’s gun as a surprise. Except, young Ed Jr. didn’t realize the gun was still loaded and manages to kill poor mom. Cut to many years later, where a well adjusted though not so bright Ed Jr. is in college and in need of a vacation spot for his buddies over the fall break. His dad unwittingly offers up the beach condo, and the friends are off. Too bad, of course, there’s a killer on the loose.

Directed and co-written by Buddy Cooper, his only film credit, and a cast comprised of actors who also only ever worked on this film, The Mutilator doesn’t play by many of the slasher rules of its era. In short, it’s kind of a mess, and yet it’s endearing because of it. The film’s lead protagonist, Ed Jr. (Matt Mitler), and his friends might win the prize as the most oblivious characters in a slasher ever. They arrive at the condo and seem to take no notice of how strange the décor is; massive fishing gaffs and weapons adorn the walls, and then there’s the weird photo of Ed Sr.’s dead friend. As in, his corpse. When Ed Jr. comments, “That’s strange. My dad’s battleaxe is missing,” with a shrug and then continues about his day, well, it’s no surprise his group didn’t catch on to the killer despite it being no secret at all.

There’s even an oddly fit theme song, “Fall Break,” which was also the film’s original title. Its upbeat, catchy tune and lighthearted lyrics is more apropos of an after school special than one of the decade’s goriest slashers. And boy is it gory. The slasher announces its killer’s identity pretty much right away, leaving only the intended victims clueless that they’re in any danger until it’s too late. Lucky for us this killer has a serious grudge and a penchant for mixing up his weapons.

The deaths are slow and gloriously brutal. A disembowelment by chainsaw, decapitations, machetes to the face, pitchforks to the throat, fishing gaffs where no fishing gaff should ever go, are drawn out in excruciating detail and yet none of it holds a candle to the insanity that’s the finale. The kills are fun, but more than that they look good. That’s because Mark Shostrom was involved. The mega talented artist behind the special makeup effects of beloved classics like Evil Dead II, Phantasm II, and so much more elevated a plucky slasher into something the MPAA was afraid of. Shostrom and special effects makeup artist Anthony Showe (Chopping Mall) split up the kills when it came to designing them.

The excessive gore meant the MPAA wanted to give The Mutilator an X-rating. Releasing it unrated meant it was difficult to secure screenings, and eventually Cooper trimmed it down to an R-rating. From there it fell into obscurity on VHS for years, only recently getting a legitimate high def release. The Mutilator is an offbeat slasher that stands out because of its unique sense of fun and its excessive gore. It’s the rare film where its flaws actually work in its favor, and the special makeup effects work is stellar.

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In 2007, an international trailer contest was run in promotion of the Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez double feature Grindhouse. Director Jason Eisener got together with collaborators Rob Cotterill and John Davies, wrote a script, and shot a trailer titled “Hobo with a Shotgun” for a mere $150 in a few days. It went viral on YouTube shortly after and won the contest. The exposure led to a feature film version getting fast-tracked, the second fake trailer from Grindhouse to earn one (after Machete).

The feature length film takes the highlight reel of the faux trailer and expands it to a brisk hour and a half story that replaces original Hobo David Brunt for a more recognizable genre mainstay; Rutger Hauer. Also gone is the scratchy, dusty vintage film quality and replaced instead with the vivid technicolor world that feels more akin to Suspiria. Though the visual style might have been updated, the film still retains that grindhouse DNA, dialogue and all.

The plot is a simple tale of an antihero taking matters into his own bloodied hands. When Hauer’s Hobo arrives in Hope Town by way of train boxcar, he soon finds the town is under the oppressive rule of The Drake and his sadistic sons. A public decapitation is Hobo’s introduction to the town’s deep-seated corruption, and eventually, Hobo snaps. If you surmised that the film’s title should be taken literally, then you win a prize; Hobo does indeed pick up a shotgun and begins a murder spree to remove the town’s pimps, drug dealers, pedophiles, and corrupt.

Eisener’s feature take on this character feels like a vivid colored Troma meets grindhouse film, so enjoyment mileage will vary depending on tastes for crude humor and gore, both of which there is plenty. Thanks to key special makeup effects artist Zane Knisely (Hannibal, The Void, The Monster) and team, the practical effects-driven gore is a huge highlight. Heads pop off and shower surrounding characters in blood. A character takes a hacksaw to the neck of a victim, slowly driving the serrated blade back and forth into their flesh. A doctor is impaled with a sword. An ice skate is used as a knife to someone’s chest. All were handled practically, and all reveled in excess violence and blood, which wouldn’t have been easy to contend with during production.

With both Hobo and his adversaries slaughtering their way through Hope Town, forcing the citizens to pick a side, a late game summoning of two armor-clad demons, dubbed “The Plague,” adds a new level of light-hearted weirdness to balance to grit. The gore, tone, and look of Hobo with a Shotgun makes for a perfect pairing to Turbo Kid, all the more fitting considering Eisener served as executive producer for the cult hit.

With dialogue like, “I’m gonna wash this blood off… with your blood,” and, “It’s a beautiful day for a skate-rape” and a ton of dismemberment (including genitalia mutilation), Hobo with a Shotgun is example of extreme splatter cinema with heart, humor, and Troma-like sensibilities that’s sure to offend the delicate.

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Prolific director Takashi Miike has directed over 100 films in his career, spanning all genres from family-friendly films to dramas. But he’s most known for his boundary-pushing films that are centered around extreme violence, gore, and a warped sense of humor. There can be an almost cartoonish quality to just how graphic and bloody his scenes of violence and horror can get, and Ichi the Killer may be the best example of that.  Perhaps the most controversial of all his films, and there’s quite a lot, Ichi the Killer cemented Miike’s reputation for torture and carnage.

Based on a manga, Ichi the Killer has two main characters, Ichi (Nao Omori) and Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano). The opening scene introduces us to both Ichi, and Miike’s unflinching style; Ichi lurks on the balcony of an apartment, masturbating while he watches the prostitute inside get assaulted by her pimp. His semen spills onto a house plant and forms the title card of the film. Yup. Ichi is a cowering, weak-willed character who’s progressively manipulated into becoming a reflexive, effective killer. Kakihara is a yakuza enforcer looking for his missing boss. He also happens to be a sadomasochist, and when Ichi’s gnarly body count starts piling up, Kakihara swoons over the potential pain Ichi could give him.

The kills in this movie are creative, painful, and very, very messy. The more Ichi is manipulated into killing, the more the body parts and blood fly. The yakuza clean up crew have to mop up not just the floors, but the walls and ceiling after Ichi has been unleashed. A master of pain, Kakihara delights in torturing victims for answers. At one point, he gets his hands on a rival yakuza leader and suspends his naked body up in the air with hooks. Then he skewers his mouth. Then, Kakihara pours scalding hot oil over him, until the skin blisters and peels off. It’s slow, methodical, and gruesome. There’s also a face severing and a groin to head slicing that serve as highlights to this tour de force of visceral gore.

Miike always seems to keep in mind the manga roots of the story, and the violence wavers from uncomfortably real to over the top comical silliness. It’s effective either way, thanks to special makeup effects artist Yuichi Matsui (The Grudge, Audition, Kill Bill: Vol. 1) and visual effects supervisor Misako Saka (One Missed Call, banned Masters of Horror episode “Imprint”).  Between Miike’s style and the gory effects, Ichi the Killer is often a tough watch.

Naturally, the extreme violence has meant that Ichi the Killer has faced numerous bans in many countries since its release; the British Board of Film Classification took issue with the violence toward women in the film, and it refused to allow the film to release uncut. It was banned in Norway and Malaysia, and banned for distribution in Germany. Ichi the Killer premiered in 2001 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the attendees were given barf bags prior to the screening, an effective and appropriate memento that some viewers might actually use when watching.

Ichi the Killer is Miike’s finest example of no holds barred extreme cinema. Though Kakihara is one of modern cinema’s most charismatic villains, the truth is that neither he nor Ichi are sympathetic at all. That’s more because Miike is making a point about how we consume violence in media. In other words, there’s more depth than meets the eye to this gorefest. It just might be hard to see it past the torrent of blood, viscera, and depraved mayhem.

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Italian director, screenwriter, special effects artist, and cinematographer Mario Bava has often been credited as birthing the giallo, which subsequently played a major influence on the rise of the American slasher. Bava’s major style departure from gothic to shocking carnage in A Bay of Blood in 1971 made the biggest impact, with popular slashers like Friday the 13th Part II borrowing heavily from the outline Bava laid out right down to some of the deaths. The plot is simple; a wealthy heiress is murdered in the opening scene, leaving her estate ripe for the taking and setting off a chain of murders as a result.

Also known as Carnage, Twitch of the Death Nerve, Blood Bath, and even Last House on the Left – Part II when it was released in drive-in theaters stateside, A Bay of Blood has a high body count at 13 kills, each death sequence topping the last. Fans and critics who previously admired Bava’s work hated this film, its nonstop brutal slaughter and gore without much in the way of coherent plot striking a nerve. Nothing had been released quite like this before. Actor Christopher Lee, who’d previously starred in Bava’s The Whip and the Body, was so disgusted with the violence on screen that he walked out of the theater when it opened. Though it may not have a familiar gothic aesthetic, the film still bears the marks of Bava’s eye for visual flair and a dark sense of humor. Bava establishes early on that it’s not one murderer behind the slayings, but quite a few greedy heir hopefuls. Very few endings have such a wry wink and a twisted sense of humor either.

Between the film’s title and the visceral deaths that included double impalement of a couple mid-coital, decapitations, impalements in the face with a billhook, throat slitting by billhook, and more, it should surprise no one that this film made the persecuted list of Video Nasties. Despite a low budget, which forced Bava to also assume the role of cinematographer, his experience in filmmaking and legendary special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi worked in tandem to create memorably effective gore for the deaths.

Rambaldi’s work meant for some gruesome viscera, and Bava wasn’t afraid to get up close and personal with it. Rambaldi has worked with the most influential of Italian horror directors, and his work with Lucio Fulci in the film A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin earned the special effects artist the rare distinction of being the first forced to prove in a court of law that his special effects work on a film wasn’t real. Rambaldi was a master of gore in the early to mid ‘70s, and would go on to win Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects for his work on Alien and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. All of this to say that A Bay of Blood brought two masters of horror together to create a unique bloodbath of a film that’s left an indelible mark on the slasher.

The slasher subgenre owes a lot to A Bay of Blood, particularly it’s body count. There are a few deaths in Friday the 13th Part II that seems to lift directly from Bava’s splatter filled slasher prototype, but the long-lasting influence continued for decades from films like The Burning to even Scream, and beyond. It’s a film that absolutely delivers for rabid fans of splatter, but it does so with some clever changes to convention and a twisted sense of humor.

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One of gore master Lucio Fulci’s most widely known and regarded films is Zombie. Or Zombie 2: The Dead Are Among Us, Nightmare Island, Zombie Flesh Eaters, or The Island of the Living Dead depending on the market. In native Italy, it was Zombi 2, an unrelated but intended sequel to Zombi (the European cut of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead). The basic plot follows a group of people searching for a young woman’s father, and they arrive at the island where he worked only to find its inhabitants in the throes of an epidemic that causes its dead to revive and attack the living.

Being that we’re smack between Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week and the upcoming mega-shark release The Meg, there’s no better time than now to get acquainted with this Fulci classic. Gory zombie movies don’t typically have anything whatsoever to do with sharks, but Zombie puts itself in the arena with spectacular results.  One of the most notorious scenes in the entire sub-genre of zombie films occurs in the first half of this Fulci classic. The underwater scene features an almost completely naked female scuba diver (of course) as she freaks out over a shark encounter. Then a zombie. It would’ve been sufficient to end there, but then the zombie had to get into a fight with the shark. I should mention that the budget for this film didn’t have room for fancy animatronics, so the shark was real.

But, this is a gore column, and as insane as the shark fight scene is, there’s not much gore in it. That’s ok, though, because the rest of the film more than makes up for it. The second most memorable scene in the film is the excruciating, drawn out death of Paola (Olga Karlatos), the wife of Dr. Menard who wants nothing more than to leave the island. Fulci consistently featured cringe-inducing eye trauma in his horror films, and Paola’s ever so slow eye skewering is the worst. The viewer is forced to watch as she struggles with a zombie intent on pulling her toward him, a large splinter between them. The tension is unbearable, as the viewer knows what’s going to happen, and Fulci takes his sweet time building up to the inevitable. When that splinter finally pierces Paola’s eye, it doesn’t stop. No surprise that it’s primarily this scene that earned the movie its status as a Video Nasty.

The entire final act is a gore lover’s dream, as the island is taken over by zombies both ancient and new. Our unwitting cast of characters get slaughtered in gruesome ways, ensuring that the eye gouge sequence doesn’t hog the gore limelight. Much of that can be attributed to special effects artist Giannetto De Rossi, who created a lot of the zombies, bite wounds, exploding heads, and even featured as the zombie hand responsible for Paola’s eye impalement. De Rossi teamed up with Fulci again to handle special effects for The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery, earning international fame in the process. He’s one of the world’s greatest special effects artists, and still kills it today with more recent work in films like High Tension. The brutal, lingering gore of Zombie makes it easy to see why De Rossi would continue one to have a lengthy career.

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Eli Roth’s Hostel was the first film to be dubbed “torture porn” by critics, one of many horror films released in the early 2000s that earned the label for their graphic depictions of violence, gore, nudity, torture, and mutilation. It was a term created out of derision, with some critics taking offense to the depiction of gore. It’s almost ironic considering that while the torture scenes are graphic and elicit visceral reactions, Roth spends a large chunk of the film’s run time intentionally driving the audience crazy with his breakdown of American stereotypes of Eastern Europe, and an uncomfortable depiction of a specific type of American. In short, you tend to wish for the characters’ deaths long before it happens. The college students in the film travel to Europe expecting to buy women and get bought themselves. It’s a clever treatise made further uncomfortable by sliced Achilles tendons, eyeball trauma, severed limbs, and blunt force trauma.

Hostel: Part II picks up immediately after the first film, wrapping up Paxton’s story before introducing the viewer to three new unwitting Americans. This time, they’re three female art students that are lured to their doom by a luxurious spa vacation. Like its predecessor, the sequel spends a lengthy bit of time introducing the key players. Roth keeps his theming of American naivety for his trio of intended victims, Beth, Whitney, and Lorna, but this time he shifts the focus to the killers as well. Part II highlights people that give in to their darkest impulses, and how these people can seem so outwardly normal. As a subversive counter to the naïve protagonists, these killers are Americans too.

The first major death (well, outside of the opening) is the notorious Elizabeth Bathory style torture and slaying of Lorna (Heather Matarazzo), and it happens to be the most brutal death of the series. Lorna is hung upside down while her killer lies naked beneath her, using a scythe to stab Lorna in the back repeatedly before finally slashing her throat, all the while Lorna whimpers and pleads. It’s bloody, ruthless, and drawn out. So, it’s no surprise that this scene was cut in foreign releases of the film; the uncut version showing Lorna’s death in its entirely is banned in Germany.

Save for Lorna’s death, it’s only the final 20 minutes or so of the 94-minute runtime that bears the brunt of the “torture porn” that makes critics cringe in disdain. Granted, Roth doesn’t shy away from the excruciating deaths of his characters, so I can see why it ruffles feathers. It also helps that Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, and their KNB EFX Group team, have returned to handle special makeup effects. Between Roth’s unflinching style and the roster of amazing artists, the series of events building to climax is gruesome. And that climax? Ouch.

Hostel: Part II didn’t fare as well with critics or the box office as the first film, but it’s a stronger film. It’s also a hell of a lot bloodier. From gnarly genital mutilation to deliberately paced throat slashing, the deaths in Hostel: Part II are the best of the trilogy (let’s ignore Part III, shall we?). The protagonists are bit more sympathetic, too. The Hostel films have more depth than they’re often given credit for, but I also can’t fault anyone for feeling squeamish at the gore. Like its predecessor, Hostel: Part II takes a while to build up to the good stuff, and then gets grotesquely creative. It’s a must watch for gorehounds.

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Even with the word “gore” in the title, it still doesn’t begin to touch upon the sheer volume of blood spray, viscera, and body horror in Tokyo Gore Police, a satirical horror comedy from Japan. Nor does it even hint at the complete insanity the film contains. It’s a simple tale of revenge at the center of absolute madness; young police officer Ruka is determined to track down her father’s killer. The catch is that she must hack and slash her way through mutant rebels called Engineers. What’s an Engineer? A breed of tumor infested mutant humans who can turn an injury into a weapon.

Think cutting off an arm and a toothy, razor sharped mouth grows in its place. Or perhaps an Engineer might lose his, uh, member, and a rifle pops up where the stump was. The ability to regrow parts with deadly weapons makes the psychotic Engineers even more lethal. The only way to destroy them is to sever a key-shaped part from their body. Naturally, this is a difficult and bloody affair. As such, society is reliant on the specialized police force issued with machine guns and swords to protect them from the Engineers. Yoshihiro Nishimura weaves in conspiracies and social satire with the over the top gore. Add one part Robocop, one part David Cronenberg body horror, and two parts excessive splatter and you have Tokyo Gore Police.

Fans of Japanese horror will recognize the lead actress portraying protagonist Ruka; Eihi Shiina previously terrified audiences as the unhinged Asami in Takashi Miike’s Audition. Playing her role straight, Shiina’s character gives the story more emotional depth than expected in a splatter film of this type. It’s sometimes perverse, sometimes zany, and sometimes even tragic, but all of it completely soaked in blood. Yoshihiro Nishimura makes a cameo in his own film, but eagle-eyed viewers should also look for notable Japanese splatter/shock director Sion Sono (Suicide Club, Cold Fish, Tag) in a cameo part as well.

Director and co-writer Yoshihiro Nishimura has an extensive background in special effects and makeup effects. He’s been dubbed the “Tom Savini of Japan,” and handled the gore effects for Japanese splatter films Meatball Machine and The Machine Girl. It was his work on the latter that directly lead to Tokyo Gore Police, with the director using his earlier short film Anatomia Extinction as the basis for the story. In addition to directing and editing, both consuming tasks on their own, Yoshihiro Nishimura also supervised the special makeup effects and handled some of the mold making. His first commercial film, Yoshijiro Nishimura was given free rein to go nuts. His scale for the bizarre, perverse, and violent is on a much bigger playing field than most, which means Tokyo Gore Police is a different breed of splatter that won’t be for everyone.

With an extensive background in special makeup effects and names like David Lynch, Salvador Dali, and Alejandro Jodorowsky as major influences, Yoshijiro Nishimura’s first major film is difficult to classify. Ruka is a strong heroine out for vengeance, but the plot really is far more convoluted than that. It’s a Lynch style fever dream narrative by way of cartoonish violence and humor. Yoshijiro Nishimura wasn’t interested in realism, he wanted something that was fun for the audience. Tokyo Gore Police is a cult film in every sense, and one of the bloodiest films in existence.

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Ruggero Deodato’s well-known cannibal exploitation film wasn’t the first in the cannibal film boom of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and it was far from the last. It is, however, the one with the biggest reputation and the most controversial. Cannibal Holocaust is an uncomfortable watch, and the on-screen animal deaths and extreme violence makes it one of the rare films that earned its prosecuted and banned status as a Video Nasty. There’s a surprising depth beyond the shock value, though; Deodato didn’t consider this to be a horror film because his underlying, timeless message of media sensationalism is rooted deep in reality. The wave of found footage films that emerged in the late ‘90s also owes a tremendous debt to Deodato’s film.

Inspired by the sensationalized news coverage of terrorist organization the Red Brigades in the ‘70s, Deodato crafted a narrative that stemmed from a team of documentary filmmakers willing to do anything possible to get their story on the cannibal tribes of the rainforest.  That story was told in the framework of found footage; a professor stumbles across the documentary team’s footage while on a mission in the Amazon, and that footage shows what happened to the missing crew. Playing back the footage, the professor (and viewer) discovers the blatant disregard of the indigenous people by the filmmakers as they resort to harsh measures, even extreme sexual violence, to get the story they want until eventually the tribes are pushed to their breaking point.

As the crew winds through the rainforest to the cannibal tribes, they encounter many animals along the way. A number of which were slaughtered on screen. A turtle is decapitated and disemboweled in preparation for eating, various animals are slaughtered with a machete, a pig is shot at close range with a shotgun, and a coatimundi is killed by knife. None of it is easy to watch, especially knowing it’s real, and it affected the cast and crew during production as well. Actor Gabriel Yorke flat out refused to shoot the pig, and the job had to be handed off to actor Luca Barbareschi.

The cringe-worthy animal deaths are a precursor to one of horror’s most harrowing final acts that sees the documentary crew unleash a torrent of violence toward the cannibal people, taking extreme action in manipulating the tribes in ways to shape their documentary narrative. They somehow didn’t account for their violence to be met with equal, disturbing violence. Gang rape, impalement, genital mutilation, corpse defilement, decapitations, and more ensured that the censors would be triggered in a way they likely hadn’t before.

Outside of its ban in the UK as a Video Nasty, Cannibal Holocaust faced bans and censorship issues around the world for its graphic gore, sexual violence, and brutal animal slayings. More than that, the film caused Deodato to be arrested 10 days after the film’s release in Italy. He was charged with obscenity, and murder charges were later added when Cannibal Holocaust came under suspicion for being a snuff film. Because the actors had signed an agreement to go into hiding for a year after the film’s release to promote the idea that the footage was actually real, it’s no surprise that the gimmick worked a bit too well. Deodato had to not only prove that the actors were alive and unharmed, but also to recount how he achieved the special effects on some of the most grisly kills in the film to prove his innocence.

Deodato wanted to make a statement on media sensationalism, and he succeeded. Cannibal Holocaust is a rare film to earn every bit of its infamy, both on screen and behind the scenes. The sexual violence and animal slaughter means that most who watch it never revisit it again. Considered the apex of cannibal exploitation films, Cannibal Holocaust remains high in the ranking of most extreme cinema.

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When it comes to difficult, hard to watch films that elicit uncomfortable reactions to the extreme violence depicted on screen, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible ranks high on the list. There’s a 10-minute sequence in it so harrowing and bleak that it’s become infamous. So when he had repeatedly named a little seen, banned 1983 Austrian film, Angst, as a major influence on his filmmaking (he’s stated that he’s watched it at least 40 times), you know it’s going to be dark. A film so extreme that it was banned all over the world, even earning an X-rating in France, and the controversy surrounding it contributed to an overwhelming debt that ensured it would be writer/director Gerald Kargl’s first and last film.

It’s likely in large part to Noe’s praises of the film that eventually unearthed Angst from obscurity, and thanks to the great curation of horror streaming service Shudder, horror fans are finally able to see the film that makes even Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer look somewhat tame. There’s an opening card on Shudder that warns of the ultra-violence that lies ahead, but it becomes quickly forgotten as it introduces the viewer to K. As K. is in the process of being released from prison, his inner monologue narrates his sordid childhood that gives detailed illustration as to how this psychopath was formed. The unconventional camera work and the framework of this narrative makes it easy to see why it’s so ahead of its time, and further makes the viewer forget that K. has depraved violence in store, even when he tells us he’s eager to kill again.

After a botched attempt to make his taxi driver his first victim post-prison release, he flees into the woods and winds up at a seemingly empty, large isolated home. He finds a disabled man inside, whose mother and sister arrive home shortly after. It’s here that this psycho-killer film gets from mildly unsettling to full-blown discomfort, as K. goes after each member with frenzied ferocity.

That Kargl makes K.’s attacks so visceral despite being mostly bloodless is effective. It’s a real-time, intimate look as K. tortures, defiles, and kills his victims. Even still, none of it prepares the viewer for K.’s final kill, so vile, bloody, and steeped in realism that even when the preceding scenes would be enough to earn the film its reputation, this scene alone would do it on its own merit. So much blood spilled, and Kargl used pig’s blood instead of fake blood to perpetuate that since of authenticity. The murder alone feels uncomfortably real, but then K. decides to take it a step further by drinking blood, vomiting, and even necrophilia.

The events of the film are based on true life Austrian serial killer Werner Kniesek. Kargl’s film feels so authentic because it is. Kniesek’s triple homicide ranks among the most ruthless in criminal history, and Angst feels like an intimate portrayal that seeks to understand what drives psycho-killers to kill. Kargl and cinematographer Zbigniew Rybcynski’s camerawork is a marvel on a technical level, but it’s pure, unrelenting anxiety. It’s a perfect example that horror doesn’t always have to spill gallons of blood from opening credits to end to earn its extreme warning. In 1983, Angst was way ahead of its time, and even today there’s still no other home invasion horror quite like it.

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Herschell Gordon Lewis, also known as the Godfather of Gore (a mantle he shares with Lucio Fulci), was responsible for inventing the splatter film, beginning with 1963 gore-soaked shocker Blood Feast. The film pioneer would churn out splatter films with quick succession, and by the latter half of the ‘60s, would focus more on exploitation films than horror. By the early ‘70s, Lewis departed from film entirely and focused on a career in advertising and book publishing instead, with numerous other shady business dealings that would land him in prison for 3 years in the late ‘70s. Lewis wouldn’t return to film until 2002, for a long-delayed follow up to his first splatter film. Before his first retirement from film, though, came one of the last of his splatter films, and one that’s among his most recognized; The Wizard of Gore.

For fans of Lewis’ work, the Wizard of Gore tends to be one of the more polarizing entries in splatter, but it’s one of the more accessible films in the director’s catalog. It’s also one of his goriest. The simple narrative follows Montag the Magnificent as he mutilates women on stage during his performances before horrified audiences, who appear unharmed after the performance ends. Hours later, though, the women collapse and succumb to the same injuries sustained on stage. A TV talk show host, Sherry, and her boyfriend Jack, suspect Montag of the grisly murders after attending on of his shows.

As Montag waxes poetic about the philosophy of reality as he butchers his female victims on stage, reveling in the gore during protracted sequences of mutilation. The women are hypnotized, laying across the magician’s table or sometimes tied upright, as he uses large spikes to ram into their skulls and pull out their brains, or saw them in half with a chainsaw, and various other weapons to dismantle them with glee. Each time Lewis zooms in on the viscera, lingering as Montag plays with the entrails like a child in a sandbox.

While most of the gore and makeup effects can look as low budget as you’d expect from a Lewis film, the guts look extremely real. That’s because they are. Revealed in Daniel Krogh’s book, The Amazing Herschell Gordon Lewis, much of the gore used in the film came from two sheep carcasses. The female victims were really two different actresses (one as the top half, and the other as the bottom) with a fake midsection filled with guts, stage blood, and makeup between them. The most disturbing element about this is that these carcasses had to be used for two weeks of shooting, and they tried to delay the decomposition with a Clorox based cleaner.

As graphically gory as this film is, budgetary limitations prevented Lewis from taking it even further. The ending isn’t one of huge climatic gore or action, but one that completely encapsulates Lewis’ sense of humor and desire to elicit a reaction that causes its viewer to question just what exactly they watched. That Ray Sager clearly enjoyed portraying the eccentric Montag only further hammers home the satire Lewis was aiming for. The Wizard of Gore is pure camp, and among the very last of Lewis’ splatter films, but it also was influential in the horror that would follow decades later.

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