Oldboy
2003 · South Korea/Japan · 116m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyThe corridor fight alone would earn its place. The last twenty minutes are why nobody forgets it.
Transgressive & midnight
1970–1990 · 37 films catalogued
Films made to offend, that found their audience at midnight. Waters, Jodorowsky, Lynch.
Not a genre so much as a scene: films made deliberately to disgust, provoke or bewilder, which the studios would not touch and which found their audience through late-night repertory screenings. The midnight movie circuit was their distribution system, and word of mouth was their marketing.
John Waters
The presiding genius of American bad taste. Pink Flamingos (1972), in which Divine competes to be the filthiest person alive and eats dog excrement on camera to settle it, is the purest act of cinematic provocation ever committed to film. Female Trouble and Desperate Living followed. Waters made offence into an art form and did it with genuine wit.
The others
Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo and The Holy Mountain built the midnight circuit. David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) ran at midnight for years and made him. George Romero, John Waters, and the Rocky Horror phenomenon all lived here. Later, Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik and the shot-on-video underground extended the tradition.
Why it belongs on this site
Transgressive cinema is exploitation's most self-aware wing: it exists to cross lines, and it knows exactly which lines it is crossing. Where the rest of the site's films offend by accident or for profit, these offend on purpose, as the entire point.
Where to start
Pink Flamingos if your stomach is strong, Eraserhead if it is not.
Transgressive & midnight films on file
All 37 Transgressive & midnight films →
Eraserhead
1977 · USA · 89m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyLynch's industrial nightmare about fatherhood. It played midnight for years and made him.
Battle Royale
2000 · Japan · 113m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyA class of ninth-graders handed weapons and told to kill each other. Fukasaku at seventy, swinging hard.
Irreversible
2002 · France · 97m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyNoe runs the night backwards so the horror lands before the love does, and half the cinema left before either.
In the Realm of the Senses
1976 · France/Japan · 105m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyThe art film that shipped its own negatives abroad to beat Japan's censors. Unsimulated, and deadly serious about it.
Audition
1999 · Japan · 115m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyThe slowest, sweetest bait-and-switch in horror. Miike lets you fall for her first.
The Holy Mountain
1973 · Mexico · 114m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyJodorowsky's spiritual epic. Every frame is a blasphemous tableau, and it is dead serious.
Martyrs
2008 · Canada/France · 95m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyThe New French Extremity's defining title, and the one that empties the room.
Pink Flamingos
1972 · USA · 93m
Obscurity: canon. banned somewhereDivine competes to be the filthiest person alive. The most notorious act in film history closes it.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
2002 · South Korea · 121m
Obscurity: canon. watchable legallyThe coldest panel of Park's revenge trilogy, with no jokes and no mercy in it.
I Saw the Devil
2010 · South Korea · 141m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyRevenge as a chew toy. Nobody in Korean cinema has been crueller for longer.
High Tension
2003 · France · 87m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyAja before Hollywood, at maximum brutality, with a twist that still starts fights.
Inside
2007 · France · 83m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyThe French extremity wave stripped to one room, one night, and a pair of scissors.
Suicide Club
2001 · Japan · 99m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyOpens with fifty-four schoolgirls and an oncoming train. Then it gets stranger.
Santa Sangre
1989 · Mexico · 119m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyJodorowsky's late masterpiece. A circus, a cult, an armless mother, and her son's hands.
The Beast
1975 · France · 104m
Obscurity: known. watchable legally. banned somewhereAn acclaimed animator's fairytale about a noblewoman and a well-equipped forest beast, banned on sight.
Female Trouble
1974 · USA · 97m
Obscurity: known. watchable legallyDivine's crime spree as performance art. Waters at his most focused and vicious.
The Untold Story
1993 · Hong Kong · 96m
Obscurity: cult. watchable legallyAnthony Wong won Best Actor for this. Then you find out what goes in the pork buns.
Trouble Every Day
2001 · France/Germany · 101m
Obscurity: cult. watchable legallyCannibal desire filmed like an art installation, and it will not hurry for you.
Der Todesking
1990 · West Germany · 74m
Obscurity: cult. watchable legallyButtgereit's bleakest: seven suicides, one rotting corpse holding it together.
Nekromantik 2
1991 · Germany · 104m
Obscurity: cult. watchable legallyButtgereit's necrophilia sequel, prosecuted on arrival, and stranger than the first.
Calvaire
2004 · France/Belgium · 88m
Obscurity: cult. watchable legallyDeliverance relocated to the Belgian mud, and just as unwilling to let anyone leave.
Successive Slidings of Pleasure
1974 · France · 105m
Obscurity: cult. watchable legallyA nouveau-roman novelist makes a nunsploitation film and refuses to let it mean anything.
Tromeo and Juliet
1996 · USA · 107m
Obscurity: cult. watchable legallyBody piercings, a penis monster, and Lemmy on narration. Troma's actual masterpiece.