Five times arthouse cinema was more shockingly disgusting than the mainstream
“Art films aren’t necessarily photography. It’s feeling. If we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we made a good picture”. – John Cassavetes
It was inevitable that as mainstream audiences become increasingly desensitised to violence, cinema would continue pushing the boundaries of what’s considered an acceptable level of depravity to display on-screen.
Movies that were banned, outlawed, or heavily edited decades ago would barely raise an eyebrow in the modern climate, but at the end of the day, Hollywood’s most gruesome productions have a limit. After all, studios don’t want the dreaded NC-17 when there’s money to be made, but the arthouse has no such concerns.
Admittedly, it’s a fairly broad term, but any independently financed or distributed feature that’s clearly not geared towards a mass audience fits the bill, with experimentation and aesthetics placed at the forefront of the filmmaker’s thinking rather than the desire to turn a healthy profit.
That means the shackles are loosened by default, then, but certain films have taken things way too far and discarded them completely in favour of realising some truly disgusting sequences that remain burned into the brain long after the credits come up and quite possibly forever.
Five disgusting moments from arthouse cinema:
Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Takashi Miike has always made his movies for an audience of one, whether he’d dabbling in samurai stories, family-friendly frolics, or stomach-churning horror. Needless to say, Audition ticks the last box and then some with its arse-clenching and excruciating final act.
For the first half, the film finds Miike playing in the realm of the light-hearted romantic comedy, only to pivot on a dime and dive headlong into one of the most debauched, depraved, and difficult-to-watch sequences of torture ever committed to film.
Everyone to have seen Audition knows exactly what scene is being referred to, and even those who haven’t may have a pretty a good idea. Suffice to say, needles getting plunged into the skin right beneath the eyes and a foot being dutifully removed by piano wire turned the arthouse into a madhouse in an instant.
Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
Julia Ducournau‘s cannibalistic debut feature Raw indicated that she wasn’t a filmmaker concerned with pulling any punches, and Titane saw her push the envelope even further in a nightmarish psychological sci-fi horror that nonetheless scooped the Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival.
In the broadest strokes – which is underselling it to a haunting degree – Titane is a journey of self-discovery that finds a woman setting out on a quest to find both herself and love, which it should be pointed out is a description that should never be used to convince any prospective viewer to watch it without letting them know what they’re getting themselves into.
Titane is basically a nonstop procession of gnarly scenes, but for better or worse, Agathe Rousselle’s Alexia starring in a sex scene opposite a car that makes her pregnant before she gives birth to a mangled mess of blood, organs, entrails, and machinery has got to be right up there as the most galling.
Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)
The one and only English-language film of Andrzej Żuławski’s career, Possession proved to be a nightmare for not only ratings and censorship boards the world over, but also the people who helped make it such an unforgettable moment in arthouse horror.
A member of the infamous ‘Video Nasty’ list, Sam Neill called it “the most extreme film I’ve ever made in every possible respect,” with the director insisting he slap co-star Isabelle Adjani for real. The actor revealed that the filmmaker “asked of us things I wouldn’t and couldn’t go to now” to execute his vision, with the end result as subversive as it is traumatic.
The notorious subway sequence that helped it get banned in the first place stands out as Possession‘s most off-putting moment, with a convulsive bodily spasm, rolling eyes, and piercing shrieks as Adjani’s Anna suffers a miscarriage far from the most graphic scene in horror history, but undeniably one of the most traumatizingly evocative.
We Are the Flesh (Emiliano Rocha Minter, 2016)
Post-apocalyptic stories are everywhere in film and television and have been for a long time, but there’s no way any of them can be anywhere near as rampantly fucked up as We Are the Flesh, an aggressively unseemly exercise in shattering taboos in the most graphic fashion imaginable.
A brother and sister seek refuge and shelter in a harsh and unforgiving environment, where they end up being welcomed in by an unsettling hermit on the condition they help him turn an abandoned building into a cocoon-like structure to ensure their long-term survival.
Not the most outlandish of demands given the circumstances, until he demands the siblings have sex with each other while he watches and masturbates, with his ejaculatory moment being un-simulated and shot for real. If that’s not repulsive enough, there’s also murder, cannibalism, rape, and necrophilia, with director Emiliano Rocha Minter deciding that there’s not a single thing off-limits in an orgy of bad taste.
Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, 2009)
No reflection on arthouse cinema’s most disgusting moments would feel complete without the inclusion of Lars Von Trier, with Antichrist comfortably his magnum opus in that regard.
For those not innately tuned into the exact same wavelength as the maverick filmmaker, it’s about the most punishing 108 minutes the moving image has cobbled together in its entire history. There’s something to be said for Von Trier’s refusal to consider anything as unpalatable, but there’s only so much grotesque imagery a single person can take in one sitting.
Multiple counts of genital self-mutilation, blood-spurting penises, wanton sadomasochism, and violent sexual outbursts are par for the course, with Antichrist revelling in creating sequences that mainstream cinema wouldn’t even be able to conjure, never mind shoot.
