10 Harrowing Movies You Can’t Watch Twice

The story of a man who wants nothing more than to be treated like a human being, The Elephant Man's premise alone is enough to break even the stoniest of hearts.

David Lynch handles the tragic story of Joseph Merrick with the kind of emotional complexity nobody would have guessed he possessed based on his brain-scrambling debut Eraserhead, which came out only a couple of years earlier.

Merrick was born with severe deformities due to a rare congenital disorder and was shunned and persecuted because of his physical appearance. The kindness of a good-hearted surgeon (played in the movie by Anthony Hopkins) offered only brief respite from a life of torment, circuses and freak shows.

That gut-wrenching scene in which John Hurt's Merrick pleads with his tormentors and insists he's "not an animal" but a "human being" before breaking down sums up his sad plight and is enough to move anyone with an ounce of compassion to tears.