Exploitation films

The Burning Moon

Shot-on-video German splatter so homemade you can smell the garage. Ittenbach's Herschell Gordon Lewis tribute act.

Assault! Jack the Ripper

A couple who find that killing is the only thing that works, followed all the way down.

Dr. Lamb

Simon Yam as the Rainy Night Butcher, fully off the leash. Cat III at its ugliest.

The Eternal Evil of Asia

Black magic, exploding wizards, and a curse that turns a man's head into a penis. Cat III lost its mind.

Ecstasy of the Angels

Wakamatsu wires the pink film to a detonator and steps back.

House of Whipcord

Pete Walker builds a secret prison to punish the censors who wanted one. Sheila Keith is the nightmare.

Run and Kill

A drunk man accidentally orders a hit on his own wife, and it is all downhill from there.

Island of Death

Mykonos has never looked prettier or hosted anything uglier. Mastorakis dared himself to be banned and won.

Violated Angels

The Richard Speck murders restaged as avant-garde pink film. Wakamatsu's coldest hour.

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul

The first Brazilian horror film, and the birth of Coffin Joe, a national icon with terrible fingernails.

Ebola Syndrome

Anthony Wong versus the world, armed with a virus and no impulse control.

Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood

The fake snuff film that got Charlie Sheen on the phone to the FBI.

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse

Coffin Joe returns, still hunting the perfect woman, and the film turns Technicolor to show you Hell.

Calvaire

Deliverance relocated to the Belgian mud, and just as unwilling to let anyone leave.

Successive Slidings of Pleasure

A nouveau-roman novelist makes a nunsploitation film and refuses to let it mean anything.

Tromeo and Juliet

Body piercings, a penis monster, and Lemmy on narration. Troma's actual masterpiece.

Der Todesking

Buttgereit's bleakest: seven suicides, one rotting corpse holding it together.

Nekromantik 2

Buttgereit's necrophilia sequel, prosecuted on arrival, and stranger than the first.

The Untold Story

Anthony Wong won Best Actor for this. Then you find out what goes in the pork buns.

Trouble Every Day

Cannibal desire filmed like an art installation, and it will not hurry for you.

Female Trouble

Divine's crime spree as performance art. Waters at his most focused and vicious.

The Beast

An acclaimed animator's fairytale about a noblewoman and a well-equipped forest beast, banned on sight.

Santa Sangre

Jodorowsky's late masterpiece. A circus, a cult, an armless mother, and her son's hands.

Suicide Club

Opens with fifty-four schoolgirls and an oncoming train. Then it gets stranger.

Inside

The French extremity wave stripped to one room, one night, and a pair of scissors.

High Tension

Aja before Hollywood, at maximum brutality, with a twist that still starts fights.

I Saw the Devil

Revenge as a chew toy. Nobody in Korean cinema has been crueller for longer.

Martyrs

The New French Extremity's defining title, and the one that empties the room.

Pink Flamingos

Divine competes to be the filthiest person alive. The most notorious act in film history closes it.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

The coldest panel of Park's revenge trilogy, with no jokes and no mercy in it.

Audition

The slowest, sweetest bait-and-switch in horror. Miike lets you fall for her first.

The Holy Mountain

Jodorowsky's spiritual epic. Every frame is a blasphemous tableau, and it is dead serious.

In the Realm of the Senses

The art film that shipped its own negatives abroad to beat Japan's censors. Unsimulated, and deadly serious about it.

Irreversible

Noe runs the night backwards so the horror lands before the love does, and half the cinema left before either.

Battle Royale

A class of ninth-graders handed weapons and told to kill each other. Fukasaku at seventy, swinging hard.

Eraserhead

Lynch's industrial nightmare about fatherhood. It played midnight for years and made him.