10 Horror Movies That Judge You For Watching
5. The House That Jack Built
Lars von Trier is both an excellent filmmaker and one of cinema's all-time greatest trolls, and the epitome of his clear disdain for audiences was palpably felt in his most recent film, The House That Jack Built.
A 155-minute exercise in chastising viewers, von Trier's nauseating horror film basically sticks two middle fingers up at anyone wanting to watch a serial killer movie as two hours of flippant escapism.
Instead, von Trier's blacker-than-black comedy is an almost impossibly disturbing film filled with sequences designed to leave you feeling ill and deeply uncomfortable.
From a scene in which Jack (a brilliant Matt Dillon) murders two children and forces their mother to have a picnic with the corpses, to another where he cuts a woman's (Riley Keough) breasts off and turns one of them into a wallet, this is a film designed to challenge the entertainment value of the serial killer movie.
And if that's not enough, it's filled with discursive discussions about seemingly tangential subjects like architecture and faith, before von Trier steers the entire thing off a cliff in the climax by sending Jack literally into the ninth circle of Hell.
It is a bewildering, brilliantly executed experience from start to finish, but also one which dispenses with the notion of it ever being entertaining.