10 Insanely Intense Films Any Horror Fan MUST See
1. Martyrs
You’ve got to give it to French director Pascal Laugier: his 2008 sophomore outing Martyrs is relentlessly, inventively gruesome from beginning to end.
As a child, Lucie escapes from a dilapidated slaughterhouse where she has been tortured and abused. Many years later, she and her friend Anna go to the house of a pleasant wealthy family, and Anna looks on horrified as Lucie mercilessly slaughters them in the middle of their breakfast, convinced that they are her childhood torturers. Oh yeah: all this time, Lucie is also hallucinating a terrifying deformed creature that won’t stop attacking her with razor blades, which doesn’t make anything any nicer for anybody.
Can it get any worse than this? Spoilers: oh yes, it can. It can get much worse for Anna, who discovers, after Lucie’s shocking suicide, that the house is actually the base of a sinister cult, who proceed to capture her and mercilessly torture her in the service of some obscure philosophical experiment about the nature of suffering.
Uncompromisingly bleak throughout, Martyrs is a must-see for anyone interested in extremity.