10 Banned Movies Now Considered Masterpieces

With a name as grisly as Cannibal Holocaust, you'd expect it to belong to a group of greasy teenagers with long hair making death metal music in their garage. Fortunately for us, the world has enough of those, and instead we have a seminal piece of found footage cinema in its place. Presented as a mockumentary about indigenous cannibal tribes, the 80s film was shockingly realistic - prompting a backlash that resulted in filmmaker Ruggero Deodato getting arrested for obscenity.

Believing Deodato to have created a snuff film, the director went through an elongated court battle to prove he hadn't murdered his actors on set, who'd simply agreed not to appear in media for a year after the film's release so as not to discredit the 'reality' of the movie. Whilst he was acquitted of murdering people however, Deodato did kill real animals, and as such has been criticised and heavily censored in response.

Cannibal Holocaust has numerous versions available with varying degrees of violence, sexual assault, nudity, and animal abuse - which makes it sound pretty horrible really - but it remains the influential birthing ground of found footage cinema.