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If you’re looking to ramp up for Halloween by watching some horror flicks, you could go the typical route of Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street marathons, but if you’re really looking for a spooky movie fest, why not go the extra mile. The films on this list are all so violent and so offensive that they have been subject to protests, boycotts or censorship and many have even been banned in a few countries. While many of these are lesser known and hard to find, some of the big name controversial movies may surprise you. Because offensiveness and scariness are so subjective, these are presented in order of release date.
Warning: this post contains video clips that may be disturbing to some viewers, as they are from intentionally disturbing films.
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This movie was the directorial debut of Wes Craven and depicted two teenage girls who are kidnapped by escaped convicts on their way to a rock concert. They are then sadistically tortured, raped and eventually murdered. By using a grainy, hand-held 16 mm camera, Craven’s picture seemed all too real to many movie viewers. He tried to defend the violence by saying it was “a reaction on my part to the violence around us, specifically to the Vietnam War.”
Craven’s excuses didn’t do much to quell the controversy and the movie was censored in many countries, particularly the U.K., where it was banned for seventeen years and remained subject to censorship until 2008.
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You probably already know this is a darn creepy movie, but you may not know that it was so shocking to movie goers that many viewers were subject to nausea, convulsions, fainting and shocking displays of anger –one viewer in San Francisco attacked the movie screen, attempting to kill the demon. Paramedics began to be called to the screenings and it wasn’t long before picketers started showing up at the theaters. The film was even banned on video for 14 years in the U.K.
After the film was released, there was a major increase in requests for priests to perform exorcisms and a drastic rise in alleged spiritual possessions and psychoses by people claiming to be possessed. Taking advantage of the hysteria, Reverend Billy Graham claimed he “felt the power of evil buried within the celluloid of the film itself.”
As an 80′s kid myself I can certainly relate to Natania’s list of scary movie scenes over at Geeks Are Sexy:
During that decadent decade of Reaganomics, shoulder pads, and scrunchies, it never really occurred to movie makers just how terrifying some of the scenes in their movies were. To this day, typical horror doesn’t scare me to the level of the scenes in some in these examples. I think there’s something to be said about fear when it’s in relatively small measure compared to the rest of the film. Sure, the Halloween movies are scary. But you expect it. These are a different breed and, in my mind, far more effective.
So in light of the Halloween season, I thought I’d share my top ten scary scenes from 80s movies I encountered in my childhood. Sure, not all of them are kids movies: but they were all movies I saw as a kid. And they probably explain a heck of a lot about why am I am the way I am these days. Other 80s kids know what I mean.
For this year’s Halloween, Need Coffee blog is featuring daily clips of classic/weird/obscure (but all fantastic) video clips of scary movies. It’s called 32 Days of Halloween (why 32? Because 31 just wasn’t enough).
The series started with Mickey’s Haunted House. This one to the left is Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (Day 12 of the blog’s series)
Not to be missed! Link
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