This is a sort of follow up to my recent list of harrowing films. All of the below could also called harrowing, but they also possess another factor - they are intensely hard to watch - thus they are gruelling to sit through. Many of the films listed below may have traumatised you to a certain extent if you have watched them, I know they have scarred me to a degree. However, it is my civic duty to watch such films and write about them, because cinematic sickos like me are small in number (Thank Heavens says you) and we are highly passionate about our deranged movies. Therefore I bring these sick delights to your attention. You probably wouldn't go out and buy them, but in this article you can vicariously 'enjoy' them. Warning: Disturbing content ahead.
10. Seul Contre Tous (1998)
We learn the story of the Butcher. He was orphaned at a young age and sexually abused by a priest. Training as a horse butcher, he fathered an autistic daughter with a woman who left home because the daughter was not a son. The Butcher fights incestuous feelings for his daughter. When she got her first period, he thought she had been raped and stabbed an innocent man. He lost everything when he went to jail for this crime. Now out of jail, he is shacked up with a pub landlady who is pregnant and they live with her mother in a cramped apartment in Northern France. She sells the pub and promises to buy him a butchers, which she never does, forcing him to take a low paid job in an old people's home. The Butcher freaks out at his nagging wife and punches her and kicks her brutally in the belly so that it is most certain that the foetus dies. He flees the scene in a hurry, but not before grabbing a pistol. The Butcher arrives in Paris and tries to call in old favours to get a job in a horse meat butchers (that his is specialty) but he is met with slammed doors everywhere he goes. His funds dwindle and in desperation he asks for a job in an abattoir. He wants to kill the manager for the rebuttal, and he sees that the pistol has three shots only - he has to go and find out which three people to slay. He gets ahold of his daughter and incestuous and murderous thoughts culminate in his head at the film's climax as he has to decide whether to kill his daughter and himself. The ending is pervy. Not good pervy. Bad pervy. (PS - find out the Butcher's fate in director Gaspar Noé's subsequent film Irreversible) Most people will not find the Butcher's bile filled rants easily accessible. They stink of bitterness and misanthropy, but they do, in a way, make sense - however bitter that pill is for us to swallow. The violence in the film is shocking, in particular the part in which The Butcher knocks seven shades of pooh out of his pregnant fiancée. Most people will find sitting through that scene a gruelling experience. There are perverted themes being enacted in the film. One of these is incest and Noé portrays it so realistically, it is bound to put off viewers. A roller-coaster of Gallic nastiness from beginning to end.