10 Outrageously Gory Horror Films You Need To See

Before making overlong movies about dragons, Peter Jackson made a series of low budget films where big headed aliens hunt humans for food, evil muppets sing about sodomy, and a zombie horde is slaughtered with a lawnmower. Inspired by Dawn Of The Dead, these gore-drenched epics gave him enough clout to make Heavenly Creatures, his first 'proper' movie for which he received an Oscar nomination.

Not only can splatter movies help a filmmaker’s career, they can be more fun than their later efforts. Sam Raimi concluded his Evil Dead trilogy before going on to make big budget movies with Sharon Stone and Kevin Costner, but you don’t see anyone clamouring for more of The Quick And The Dead or For The Love Of The Game, do you?

Far from depraving and corrupting audiences, gore films have changed lives and made the world a better place, which is more than you can say about Home Alone 2 or Two Weeks’ Notice or any other movie where Donald Trump makes a cameo appearance. In these troubled times, only films about flesh eating zombies and homicidal killers armed with power tools can truly bring us together.

Movies like the following, in fact….

I know, I know – everybody hates Eli Roth and 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, Hostel II 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.