Racism, sexual assault and torture: The 10 most offensive movies ever made
There’s barely an emotion that cinema can’t wring out of an audience in one way or another, but offence is comfortably among the least palatable on the part of the viewer.
Nobody minds being brought to tears by moving drama, splitting at the sides from raucous comedy, being stunned into silence by a major twist, or glaring open-mouthed at the screen at a showstopping action sequence, not that anyone intentionally heads into a movie expecting to be offended.
It inevitably happens, though, but some titles have proven to be so offensive they’ve secured their own notoriety as a result. In certain respects, it’s clear the filmmakers have gone in with a shock-and-awe mindset to generate that exact response, but in other cases, the greatest intentions in the world have backfired.
The following ten films span over a century, but the commonality is that each one of them – for a variety of different and often opposing reasons – has managed to offend more moviegoers than any other.
The 10 most offensive movies ever:
10. Postal (Uwe Boll, 2007)
Uwe Boll deservedly holds a reputation as one of the worst directors in the history of cinema, with his loose adaptation of the video game Postal setting out its stall in the very first scene as a brazen exercise in treating serious events as the subject for gags made in the worst possible taste.
The story begins with two hijackers calling Osama bin Laden to find out the exact number of virgins they’ll be rewarded with for carrying out the 9/11 attacks, but after discovering it won’t be enough, they decide to head off to the Bahamas instead, only for the passengers of Flight 93 to intervene and cause the plane to crash into the World Trade Center anyway. Again, this is the opening scene of the film.
From there, it transpires that George W. Bush and bin Laden are best friends – Postal literally ends with them skipping hand-in-hand through a field together – and have cooked up a new plot to inject toys with bird flu and hand them out to American children. Boll was intentionally seeking to cause offence, but even at that, a filmmaker who lives at the bottom of the barrel still conspired to plumb new depths.
9. Freaks (Tod Browning, 1923)
Freaks proved so offensive at the time that it basically obliterated Tod Browning’s entire career, and while it has undergone reappraisal in the decades since as an early example of exploitation cinema, that doesn’t make it any more tasteful.
Branded as being unnecessarily cruel and mocking of its subjects, many of whom were living with restrictive and life-altering disabilities, Freaks came under fire for turning them into the focus of a horror movie intended to shock, disorient, and make its audience feel queasy.
Heavily censored and widely lambasted, the changing attitudes in society in the ensuing years have made Freaks an uncomfortable watch even for modern viewers, with the tragedy comfortably outstripping the terror when watched through a current lens.
8. Cuties (Maïmouna Doucouré, 2020)
A tricky one to quantify given that it won the ‘Directing Award – Dramatic’ for international films at Sundance and received widespread critical acclaim, Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties nonetheless caused such widespread outrage and offence that the United States government sought legal action against Netflix.
A coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old girl from a conservative Muslim household joining a dance troupe, all it took was the release of a poster for Cuties to incite pearl-clutching around the world. There were petitions to have it pulled from Netflix, subscribers cancelled their subscriptions in numbers, and Doucouré was even subjected to death threats.
Netflix was called to explain itself before Congress by multiple political figures, and the company was even indicted in Texas on the charge of “the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age.” Nothing came of it, but Cuties‘ reputation was assured forevermore, although it stands to reason a large percentage of those left so offended hadn’t even bothered to watch it.
7. Hounddog (Deborah Kampmeier, 2007)
After premiering at Sundance, Deborah Kampmeier’s harrowing drama was colloquially dubbed ‘The Dakota Fanning Rape Movie’, which says more than enough about how it was greeted by those in attendance at its first screening.
As the moniker would suggest, the star’s character Lewellen is subjected to sexual assault on-screen, even though Fanning was only 12 years old when it premiered. Vicious attacks were launched at the filmmakers, producers, and even the actor’s family for allowing her to be part of such a troubling scene, but Hounddog wasn’t even good enough to overcome the stigma of its most offensive moment.
The film was burned at the stake by critics for reasons well beyond the queasy sequence that saw it land a spot in cinema’s halls of infamy, with the outrage overshadowing every single aspect of the movie, and tarring it with a brush that saw cinephiles everywhere refuse to entertain the idea of watching it based on the inbuilt offence it had already caused.
6. Song of the South (Harve Foster and Wilfred Jackson, 1946)
So offensive that Disney tries its hardest to pretend it doesn’t exist, Song of the South has never been made available for purchase on home video, and even with the streaming service’s addition of disclaimers to various movies and TV shows, it doesn’t have a hope in hell of being added to the Disney+ library.
While the film doesn’t actively celebrate the slavery era or those who were freed from its tyranny, it doesn’t exactly decry it, either. It’s steeped in a fantasy world blatantly at odds with both reality and history, with the Mouse House deciding the best way to combat the problem was to shutter it away in the vault, never to be seen again.
That didn’t prevent Song of the South from being incorporated into several theme park attractions, though, which still ended up gaining renewed controversy and spurring the company to obliterate it from existence and update the Splash Mountain ride to The Princess and the Frog instead.
5. Soul Man (Steve Miner, 1986)
Incredibly, Soul Man was a box office hit that recouped its budget more than seven times over from cinemas despite being every bit as offensive at the time as it continues to be to this day.
C. Thomas Howell uses blackface in order to qualify for a scholarship that’s only available to Black students, with the movie deciding that the best way to approach the concept of systemic racism was for a white guy to headline a light-hearted comedy that shines a light on such a serious issue.
Of course, lessons are learned, and worldviews are changed along the way, but that doesn’t make Soul Man any less grotesque. Hitting the nail on the head, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People decried it for “the unhumorous and quite seriously made plot point of Soul Man is that no Black student could be found in all of Los Angeles who was academically qualified for a scholarship geared to Blacks,” which was just one of its many glaring issues.
4. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)
Disgusting and offensive movies aren’t necessarily irredeemably terrible from a cinematic standpoint, something that applies to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which has been defended by Martin Scorsese, Alec Baldwin, and John Waters at various points.
However, it was banned outright in multiple countries, and with good reason. Absolutely horrific in its deployment of sex, violence, sexual assault, scatology, torture, murder, and sadism, it’s undoubtedly the work of an auteur, but that’s nowhere near enough to give it a pass.
Salò is squirm-inducing stuff, with several scenes so depraved they make the skin crawl, but for every person who holds it up as a masterpiece, there are two more who’ll decry it for being stomach-turningly offensive, and there’s no middle ground between the two.
3. 9/11 (Martin Guigui, 2017)
Charlie Sheen once publicly lent his support to the idea that 9/11 was an inside job that brought down the Twin Towers through a controlled demolition, which was then covered up by the government, which, of course, made him the perfect candidate to lead what was supposed to be a hard-hitting drama set inside the building on that fateful day.
Casting a noted conspiracy theorist as the lead in a movie about the very thing they’d gone on record to voice suspicion over wasn’t even the most offensive thing about writer and director Martin Guigui’s film, either, which made the repellent move of refitting a tragedy into the basis for a low-budget schlocker that played with the tropes of the disaster flick.
Gina Gershon, Luis Guzmán, and Academy Award winner Whoopi Goldberg are all part of the ensemble, too, which makes the manipulative, exploitative, and altogether disrespectful attempt to tug at the heartstrings even more galling. These are talented actors, but 9/11 is an abject, unconscionable dreck.
2. A Serbian Film (Srđan Spasojević, 2010)
There’s a certain ballsiness to A Serbian Film, which was seemingly created for the sole purpose of making the most debauched, degenerate, and offensive movie the human mind could possibly comprehend, so in that respect, it does a sterling job.
Disturbing from start to finish, it was designed with the intention of firing a shot across the bows of the local film industry and how it was stifling creativity in the name of playing it safe, but a gruesome story involving rape, necrophilia, paedophilia and incest was not the way to go about making that point.
It takes a strong stomach to even contemplate watching A Serbian Film, which drummed up such a cacophony of offence during the build-up to its release that it also doubles as one of the most notorious, infamous, and controversial features to have ever existed as well.
1. The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915)
A genuine landmark in cinema and a watershed moment, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation nonetheless failed to reconcile its trailblazing technical merits with the blatant and overpowering racism that seeps out of every frame.
The first 12-reel motion picture in American history, the first feature from the United States with an orchestral score, a pioneer in the use of closeups and fadeouts, and a game-changer for how large-scale battle scenes were committed to celluloid, it can’t be argued that it’s a historically important movie.
However, the fact it was controversial over 100 years ago says everything about its content, and suffice to say it has not aged well over time. Harmful stereotyping, white actors in blackface, and the borderline deification of the Ku Klux Klan are just three of its offensive aspects, of which there are many, many, many more. There are few films in isolation to have made the same impact on the medium as The Birth of a Nation, but on the other hand, there are none more offensive.
