10 More Perfect Horror Movies You've Never Heard Of

Horrific, majestic and dark, stop-motion acid dream Mad God submerges us in layer after layer of visuals that would make David Cronenberg blow chunks, descending into a subterranean hellscape that never shies away from an opportunity to one-up its own depravity.

The Assassin, a lone soldier in a gas mask and trench coat, journeys into the underworld, carried by a diving bell, and with a disintegrating map guiding his mysterious mission -- to destroy the underworld. He ploughs on through eons of misery, passing wretched creatures of all shapes and sizes being torn and tortured and made to suffer all manner of unspeakable indignities for unknown and almost certainly unnecessary purposes, until he becomes one himself.

With no dialogue, Mad God relies on its grim visuals and a rich and foreboding soundscape to carry tension from beginning to end. And, while almost unbearable at times, this combination also ends up being curiously transcendent -- something like the state of euphoria Martyrs tells us people enter when they've endured more pain than their system can handle.

A labour of love, constructed over some 30-odd years using spare weekends, crews of volunteers and Kickstarter money, Phil Tippett's animated odyssey is perhaps the best stop-motion ever to have hit our screens, and certainly the best horror. And it comes with a disturbing message: there is no purpose but creation and destruction themselves.