The Disturbing Movies Iceberg Explained (It Gets Darker)

[00:00:00]Most people think they've seen a disturbing movie. A jump scare, a little gore, something they had to look away from once. They haven't been anywhere near the bottom. This is a ranking of the most disturbing films ever made.

[00:00:12]From the ones [music] critics call masterpieces down through the banned, the prosecuted, and the [music] films people genuinely mistook for evidence of a crime. And near the bottom, we reach [music] a line, a point where it stops being cinema. I'm not going to show you the worst of it. [music] I don't need to. Knowing it exists is worse. Let's start at the top. If you're new, an iceberg [music] ranks a topic from what everyone knows at the top to what almost nobody dares at the bottom. The higher tiers are films you can watch. The lower ones are films you probably shouldn't.

[00:00:41][music] Tier one. We start with what many call the most honest war film ever made. Come and See follows a boy through Nazi-occupied [music] Belarus and it ages him and you in real time. No thrill, >> [music] >> just the truth of what war does to a face. You don't forget it.

[00:01:10]Requiem [music] for a Dream. Addiction with the fantasy removed. Four people, four spirals. One of the most relentless final acts in cinema.

[00:01:19]>> [music] >> I'm going to be on television.

[00:01:27]Fantasy.

[00:01:30]If we get enough cash together, we can make a fortune.

[00:01:33]>> [music] [music] >> People recommend it once and never watch it again. Threads, a 1984 British film about nuclear war so bleak it reportedly traumatized [music] a generation.

[00:02:03]>> [screaming] >> The L.

[00:02:09]>> [screaming] >> No heroes, no survival montage, just the slow, gray end of everything.

[00:02:20]And then a cartoon, Grave of the Fireflies, an animated film about two children in wartime Japan that quietly destroys everyone who presses play.

[00:02:33]>> [music] >> If [music] you think animation can't be disturbing, the new wave, Hereditary and Midsommar, horror that trades jump scares for dread that follows you home.

[00:02:55]>> Come on, Peter.

[00:02:57]There's your sewing.

[00:03:11]>> What is it?

[00:03:12]>> It has special properties.

[00:03:17]>> Grief, cults, and daylight that somehow feels worse than the dark.

[00:03:23]And the cruelest mainstream ending ever put on screen, The Mist. So brutal even the author wished he thought of it.

[00:03:31]I won't spoil it, [music] but it's the moment the surface starts to crack because now we go with the critics stop following.

[00:03:45]Two pillars of Asian extreme cinema, Oldboy, a revenge [music] story with a twist so cruel it's studied in film schools. Audition [music] starts as a gentle romance and becomes something you can't unsee.

[00:04:04]>> [music] >> Then the provocateurs. Funny Games attacks the audience for wanting violence. Antichrist and Irreversible are built to make festivals walk [music] out. These aren't accidents. The pain is the point and the argument over whether that's art never ends. For a lot of horror fans, this is the ceiling.

[00:04:23]Martyrs, a film so committed to its own bleak philosophy [music] that people describe finishing it like surviving something.

[00:04:32]>> [music] [panting] [screaming] [screaming] >> And unlike what's [music] below, it's still technically a film with something to say. The Human Centipede, more infamous as a concept [music] than a movie. Proof that sometimes the idea does more damage than the footage.

[00:05:07]Then history gets [music] dark. Salo, Pier Paolo Pasolini's savage allegory about fascism and power, still one of the most banned films [music] on Earth.

[00:05:16]And in a detail worthy of this iceberg, Pasolini was murdered just [music] weeks before it premiered. The film outlived its director by days. And the one people only whisper about, A Serbian Film.

[00:05:27][music] I'll name it because it belongs here and I'll do what most won't, not describe [music] it. Its director insists it's a political allegory.

[00:05:35]Critics call it indefensible. It's banned in dozens of countries. Knowing why it's banned is the entry. The details aren't going on this channel.

[00:05:46]1980, Cannibal Holocaust was shot to look [music] so real that after its premiere, the director was arrested, accused of actually killing his cast on camera. To avoid prison, he had to bring the dead [music] actors into court alive to prove it was fiction. The film was so convincing it created its own crime scene. It's also condemned to [music] this day for real animal cruelty on set.

[00:06:08]And accidentally, it invented the found footage [music] genre that gave us Blair Witch and every haunted tape movie since. Next, a Japanese series from the 1980s made to look like real footage.

[00:06:19]One entry was so convincing that actor Charlie Sheen watched it, became certain he'd seen an actual murder, and reported it to the FBI. They investigated. It took the filmmakers releasing behind-the-scenes footage to prove the victim was fine. A special effects reel that triggered a federal investigation.

[00:06:35]Then, Faces of Death, marketed as a real compilation of death, banned in over 40 countries, [music] whispered about on every playground of its era. The twist? Most of the real deaths were staged, built by a Hollywood special effects artist with fake blood and butcher scraps. [music] You don't need something to be real, you just need people to believe it is. And Men Behind the Sun, a film built on a real wartime atrocity. It exists not for entertainment, but is one of cinema's ugliest attempts to [music] force an audience to look at history it would rather forget. I'll name it and leave it there.

[00:07:13]At the very bottom, people [music] expect the ultimate film, a real commercially made snuff movie. Here's the truth almost nobody says out loud.

[00:07:22]There is no verified evidence that a commercial [music] snuff film has ever actually existed. The word itself came from rumors around the Manson murders.

[00:07:29]In the 1976 film literally called Snuff, its real ending was a marketing [music] hoax, staged to sell tickets. The most feared film at the bottom of the iceberg was an advertising [music] stunt. Below the myth are the real shock compilations, films that stitch together genuinely upsetting footage [music] and got themselves banned worldwide. I'm not naming a viewing order and [music] I'm not describing them because this is where the movie stops being the reason they exist [music] and that's where the iceberg ends. Not because there's nothing deeper, there is, but past this point it isn't cinema [music] anymore.

[00:08:06]There's no director, no message, no actors walking into a courtroom to prove they're alive. Past this line a recording isn't a [music] film, it's evidence and the only people who go looking for it tell you everything you need to know about them. The disturbing [music] movie iceberg has a bottom for a reason. Some things aren't hidden because they're rare, they're hidden because that's where they belong.

[00:08:28]>> [music] >> That's the descent, I'll see you at the surface. If you made it to the bottom without looking away, good.

[00:08:35]>> [music] >> Most don't. Tell me in the comments which entry you'd have cut and which film I left off.

[00:08:41]The best suggestions [music] become the next chart.

[00:08:44]Subscribe, the next iceberg is already forming. Until then, [music] try to sleep.