10 Nastiest Horror Films Since 2000

There’s a good reason for why, every so often, horror has to turn nasty and address the issues that most movies don’t touch upon. Hollywood pictures either deal in accepted truths or they tell us things that we would like to believe, and if by some oversight something is not perfect, then the love of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl will make everything just wonderful.

In nasty, exploitative horror pictures, however, the family unit is either failing or dysfunctional, and not even Kirsten Dunst (or Natalie Portman or Anna Kendrick) will be able to fix it. These movies want to get under your skin, not prop up the fantasies of homemakers in Peoria.

True, some of them were made just so put rubes in seats, and Switchblade Romance didn’t say much about The Meaning Of It All, but it still had an attitude that’s absent from most multiplex fare.

If your ambition is to seek out as many nasty horror pictures as you can then the following list, which ranks them from worst to best, should serve you well.

Everybody seems to hate Eli Roth and, yes, Hostel II is just an all-girl facsimile of Hostel I, but he’s genuinely trying to make a modern day exploitation movie here, even throwing in cameos from Edwige Fenech (All The Colors Of The Dark) and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust), who gets one of the film’s best scenes as “The Italian Cannibal.”

Judged from that perspective, the film works better than Rob Zombie’s Halloween reboot (released the same year), with a real 70s feel to the unrestrained narrative. It’s also nastier and bloodier, most explicitly in a sequence where a naked woman is hung upside down while another woman cuts her and bathes in her blood.

Throw in a decapitation, genital mutilation and a character being ripped apart by dogs and you’ve got a good old Drive-in movie that was made for multiplexes. If Roth added scratches and a few fake trailers, he could’ve given audiences a cult movie instead of a gratuitous sequel.