8 Horror Movies That Broke All The Rules

If you ever felt a little frightened whilst travelling alone that something terrible could happen in a country you're unfamiliar with, then don't worry. Hostel is here to allay all your fears by proving that you don't need to travel alone, you can be kidnapped and sold off as an object for rich people to torture in a group too, so just go ahead and cancel that European holiday as there's no avoiding it either way.

Of course, both Hostel and Saw are to thank for the permeating torture porn genre in modern cinema, popularising films where the main end goal is just to see quite how messed up they can get along the way, but it's Hostel that stands as the most intensely visceral. Cutting fingers off with chainsaws, slicing tendons, and blowtorching faces, Hostel was the amalgamation of every video nasty into one horrible cinematic effort, bringing the culture to the mainstream and sparking off a trend for explicitly gut-churning gory sequences.

It wasn't the first of its kind, but it was one to popularise the sub-genre and bring it to the forefront in a way others hadn't generally done before - making a lasting impression on films being solely about mindless gore rather than a convoluted story, or with one central slasher.