10 Disturbing Movies You'll Struggle To Finish

Movies about serial killers are dime a dozen and wildly varying in quality - for every classic film like The Silence Of The Lambs or Psycho there's something like The Snowman to remind us just how easy it is to mess up what should be a sure-fire winner.

Basing a serial killer movie on real events always lends the story more potency, and few films based on real killers are as challenging and authentic-feeling than Snowtown (also known as The Snowtown Murders). Based on the killing spree initiated by John Bunting in the Australian city of Adelaide, it's a film shot in near monochrome with insistent handheld camerawork which lends it an almost documentary feel.

Director Justin Kurzel builds up the tension as the killings slowly escalate, with one particular scene in which a victim is slowly strangled to death in a bath standing out as a real endurance test for the audience. Snowtown exists in a macabre limbo between horror and social-realism which few serial killer movies before have managed to achieve.