10 Intense Horror Movie Scenes You Couldn’t Watch

Danish writer and director Lars von Trier is many things. He’s a multi award-winning filmmaker, a provocateur, a visionary genius, and a madman with a vicious imagination. In 2009’s Antichrist, von Trier is all these things and more as he chronicles a grieving couple’s descent into madness in this surreal and grotesque fairy tale.

Starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as an unnamed couple torn apart by the death of their infant son, the film follows them retreat to the woods where the psychiatrist husband hopes to help his wife process her loss. However, with his wife’s behaviour growing increasingly erratic and disturbing occurrences happening around the isolated cabin, the man begins to suspect that something satanic is at play.

And here’s when von Trier took this film’s intensity to the extreme.

Believing that her husband will leave her, the wife ambushes him, knocking him out by smashing a large block of wood against his groin. She then proceeds to sexually assault him until he bleeds before drilling a hole in his leg and attaching a grindstone to it.

This description is enough to make anyone nauseous, but it’s Trier’s matter-of-fact way of presenting the violence which makes this sequence especially horrific.