15 Most Disturbing Horror Movies Ever

Wes Craven’s debut is the oldest film to make this list and is easily the most famous, with its iconic horror helmer going on to have one of the genre’s most illustrious careers. However long before the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream series, not to mention this film’s own sanitized Hollywood remake, Craven shot a horror so viscerally upsetting it’s still hard to watch decades later.

The gritty atmosphere of the film, aided by its low budget and no-name cast, make its extended sequences of torture and rape almost impossible to sit through, and the surreally misjudged comic relief cops do nothing to blunt this upsetting atmosphere.

The film’s opening half is brutally bleak enough to sap the film’s closing scenes—wherein the murdered heroine’s parents slaughter her captors—of any potential catharsis, leaving Last House On The Left an almost unwatchable vision of pointless, inhuman cruelty.