But for all that he’s a creep, he’s usually held up as one of the greatest and most “artistic” directors in horror. And I’d tend to agree with this consensus. Argento movies never bother me that much: they’re graphic, sure, but everything is so hyper-aestheticized that it’s impossible for me to think of it as real. Even a purely symbolic assault on the female form can be a little upsetting when it’s this extreme… but not to the degree that I find myself taking extra-long showers for the next three days, which is really the kind of film I was trying to capture in this list.

Not that girls fare well in most horror movies, but Suspiria contrives elaborate grotesqueries to make them suffer before slaughtering them. And without the implied Puritanism of the 70s/80s slasher flick (“oh, she took her top off; she’s going to get knifed”). No, the first victim’s crime is looking out a window on a dark night. For this, the killer:

* Stabs her repeatedly in the chest …
* To the point that her still-beating heart is exposed (?!), which he then stabs;
* Chokes her to death with a rope;
* Drops her body on the glass skylight over the lobby of her apartment building …
* Which shatters, killing a friend of hers who’d been running for help by impaling her through the head.

All of this is depicted fairly graphically, with nightmarish color schemes and unreal synthesizers.

I’ve never actually seen the movie. You can find the above sequence on YouTube, though I strongly and sincerely recommend against watching it ever. Profoundly discomfiting.

Mads – I think that the fact that it really took place might justify ACTUAL footage of it. No one would, or should, try to censor the stuff the US Army recorded when they were going around liberating people from the concentration camps. But a restaging doesn’t get off the hook. It isn’t documentary footage: it’s an attempt to entertain or manipulate the audience. As such, it should observe certain limits of taste, regardless of the nobility of its intentions… and nothing in your description makes me think that the men behind “Men Behind the Sun” had very good intentions.

And yeah, that thing with the cat couldn’t be more apalling.

Odd, though… I was just thinking of that scene at the beginning of The Wild Bunch where they kill the scorpion by dropping it on an anthill. I couldn’t care less about that one. My sympathy and moral outrage are reserved for vertebrates, I guess?

You asked for “disgusting movie,” not “disgusting HORROR movie,” so the first movie that came into my head was “Trainspotting.” The combination of my morals, experiences with poverty and addiction and self-medication (personal and closely observed, respectively), astute ability to empathize, desire to have children someday, and with an already hypersensitive/histrionic nature made me *actually vomit* during one particular scene after a painful-to-watch-but-unable-to-stop buildup, at which point I did, I stopped watching. Anyone that has seen this movie would hopefully know what I’m talking about. I knew it was coming, for it was sadly and masterfully quite predictable, given how the movie had been thus far; but still, I reacted physically, and violently so. Before seeing this (and I was a sophomore in college at the time), I had never felt the need to look away for a whole scene during a movie, let alone shut one off- even the scariest ones I had seen, like “The Exorcist” or the “Saw” movies may have caused me to squint or turn my head a little, but I never completely closed my eyes for more than a second or two. But when that particular image came onscreen, I threw up and then cried for over an hour, and I still have nightmares about it. And yes, I understand what the point was- I’m not st00pid, in spite of how I ramble- but goddamnit, that just… Ah, I’m watering up thinking about it.

*Is the phrase “what with” used properly there, Wrather?