Cannibal Holocaust

The one everybody has heard of, and the one that most resists a clean verdict.

Structurally it is decades ahead of itself: a rescue party recovers the footage shot by a missing documentary crew, and the film's second half is that footage, in which the crew turn out to have staged, burned and murdered their way through the material they claimed to be documenting. As a critique of the mondo tradition it came out of, it is sharp, and it invented found-footage horror on the way. Deodato was arrested on suspicion of having actually killed his actors and had to produce them alive in court to clear it.

And it kills six animals on camera, for real, in service of that argument. A coati, a turtle, a snake, a monkey, a tarantula, a pig. That is not a content warning, it is a description of what is on the tape. Deodato later said he regretted it. The scenes are still in the film, and the standard release cannot be watched around them.

Watch it if you're serious about the form's history. Don't watch it casually, and don't watch it to be impressed.