10 Most Dark And Twisted Movie Scenes Of 2016

First things first: Nicolas Pesce’s directorial debut is about as arthouse horror as it gets. So if lingering arty shots, black and white cinematography and not knowing what the hell is going on half the time doesn’t float your boat you might want to give The Eyes of My Mother a miss. Otherwise, you’re in for a treat.

There’s good reason for its oh-so-pretentious black and white aesthetic, however, and for the fact much of its violence takes place off-screen. With a typical horror movie in which the gore takes place before our very eyes and is illustrated by splashes of crimson red blood flying everywhere, we don’t have to engage much imagination.

Sometimes it’s far more unnerving when horror is implied rather than overt and we have to conjure up the brutality in our own dark and twisted little minds. The Eyes of My Mother offers this in bucket loads. Does this make it an anti-horror, in a way? Probably, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

One scene exemplifies this crafty approach. We see the peaceful, rural home of the movie’s protagonist, young Francisca, brutally disrupted by the arrival of a seemingly nice door-to-door salesman played by a wonderfully creepy and disturbing Will Brill.

After convincing Francisca’s mother to let him use their bathroom, the proverbial hits the fan. Turns out he has something far more nefarious than urinating in mind when he proceeds to brutally murder the mother. Off-screen, of course, but the frenzied noises and a brief flash of Brill in action are more than enough clues as to the mother’s fate.

There’s plenty more disturbing scenes in The Eyes of My Mother, too. After witnessing the murder of her mother, the film follows Francisca as she grows up into quite a f*cked up young woman – the kind of lass who preserves her dead dad’s body, kidnaps women from bars and abducts children.

But in terms of creeping tension and unseen but unsettling horror, this scene wins hands down.