10 Most Polarising Horror Movies Of All Time

If Hostel carried the torch of outrage against excessively violent horror movies, Ruggero Deodato's 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust is the one which set the torch ablaze, ushering in the "video nasty" era while simultaneously kickstarting the "found footage" sub-genre which would become en vogue in the 2000s.

Cannibal Holocaust centers around a missing documentary film crew, who disappeared while investigating remote tribes in the Amazon jungle, with much of the film comprising of lost footage from the crew. Deodato was accused of making a snuff film, and had to prove to a court that the actors he used were still alive (several decades later and another low budget filmmaker, Fred Vogel, would spend time in police custody while convincing authorities his film August Underground Mordum wasn't the snuff film it pretended to be).

It wasn't a question of whether or not the director harmed real people which led to the intensive polarization fans have for Cannibal Holocaust. Instead, it was a scene in which a real live sea turtle is ripped to pieces on camera which split audiences down the middle.

Deodato's justification for such a scene (other animals were killed for the film, too) was to try to blur the line between fake and real. Many people shared the feelings of the cast and crew, who had vomited off camera following the killing of a squirrel monkey.