Extreme cinema

Extreme cinema is a film genre that features excessive amounts of sex, violence, or torture to shock audiences. The genre developed in the late twentieth century, but its roots can be traced to a Parisian theater near the start of the century. Extreme cinema is a wide-ranging genre that encompasses films with graphic, often unsimulated, sexual content and hyper-violent films colloquially dubbed “torture porn.” Extreme cinema had its origins in small, art house films but became more high profile in the twenty-first century. The films have attracted large numbers of fans and critics, with the latter arguing that the extreme elements overshadow the films’ artistic merits. Examples of extreme cinema include 1972’s Pink Flamingos; the Asian horror films Audition (1999) and Oldboy (2003); and 2010’s A Serbian Film, widely considered one of the most disturbing movies of all time.

Background

Violence and sexual themes have been common plot points in plays from the days of the Ancient Greeks to the works of modern playwrights. Violence as entertainment has also been around for thousands of years, with a prime example being the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome. The idea of extreme sex and violence as entertainment is a relatively new concept, developing only in the twentieth century.

One of the first venues to provide such entertainment was the Grand Guignol, a theater that opened in Paris in 1897. The theater originally presented short plays highlighting the day-to-day lives of average French citizens. However, when a play featuring a French prostitute killing a Prussian solider became extremely popular, the theater’s owner decided to shift focus to plays that included overt and extreme violence.

Using theatrical effects of the era, Grand Guignol’s plays showed characters having their eyes gouged out, having their faces melted with acid, and being skinned alive. The theater proved so popular that an attempt was made to open a similar venue in London in the 1920s. However, British censorship laws made it impossible to do the same shows as in Paris, and the theater closed after two years. After World War II (1939–1945) audiences seemed to lose their appetite for hyper-violence, and the Paris theater closed in 1962.

Overview

The term extreme cinema emerged in the early twenty-first century to describe a series of Asian-made films that explored taboo themes and featured excessive graphic violence. However, films fitting the definition of extreme cinema existed long before that. One example is the 1929 silent film Un Chien Andalou, which was written by surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. The film features numerous strange and disturbing images, none more so than a shot of a straight razor slicing a woman’s eyeball. (The eyeball belonged to a dead calf).

In 1972, counterculture filmmaker John Waters released the movie Pink Flamingos, a film in which he purposely pushed boundaries to shock audiences. The film features drag queen Divine as “the filthiest person alive” who gets into a battle of “poor taste” with a couple that wants her title. The film includes depictions of rape, incest, nudity, and murder, and famously ends with Divine eating real dog feces.

Film critics have both praised and condemned Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. On one hand, they note the art house quality of the filmmaking and its relevance as a metaphor for the rise of fascism in Italy; however, many cannot get over the extreme scenes of rape, violence, sexual torture, and human degradation.

The violence in Italian filmmaker Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is so graphic that the director was later accused of actually murdering his actors. The movie, which includes “found-footage” of a film crew’s encounter with cannibal tribes in the Amazon Rainforest, features graphic mutilation, rape, and murder. What many find more disturbing is that the director used footage of real animals being killed in the film.

During the late 1990s and the early 2000s, Asian filmmakers released a series of hyper-violent horror films. Among the most notorious is the 1999 Japanese film Audition by director Takashi Miike. The film is about a widower who stages a phony film audition to meet a new wife. He meets a woman named Asami who turns out to be a deranged killer. The film is notable for its gruesome torture and dismemberment scenes.

The 2003 South Korean film Oldboy tells the story of a man suddenly released after being mysteriously imprisoned for fifteen years. In his quest for answers, he falls in love with a young woman who turns out to be his own daughter. Oldboy features themes of incest and scenes of graphic torture and self-mutilation.

Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has made several controversial extreme films in his career, including 1998’s The Idiots, in which several adults pretend to have an intellectual disability in public. The film features a controversial group sex scene in which the characters actually have intercourse on screen. In von Trier’s 2009 film, Antichrist, a grieving couple retreats to a secluded cabin and descends into a world of violent sex and madness. The film includes scenes of mutilation, torture, and murder. His horror miniseries The Kingdom premiered in three partsRiget (1994), Riget II (1997), and Riget: Exodus (2022). Riget: Exodus was adapted into a film, but it failed to reach the competition stage of the Venice Film Festival.

Many critics find the 2010 horror-thriller A Serbian Film to be the most disturbing movie ever made. The film, directed by Serbian Srđan Spasojević, is about a fading porn star who is hired to take part in a mysterious “art film.” When the actor discovers the film director’s true perverse nature, he leaves the set, but is later captured and drugged. The drug causes him to be aggressively sexual and leaves him with no memory of his actions. He later finds evidence that he did unspeakable acts of sex and violence under the drug. The film contains numerous instances of sexual violence, rape, and child endangerment. Upon its release, A Serbian Film was banned in more than forty countries, although it was allowed to be shown in some places after editing. Other horror films that fit into the extreme cinema genre according to some critics include The Empty Man (2020), Speak No Evil (2022), The Substance (2024), Late Night with the Devil (2023), Talk to Me (2022), and Barbarian (2022).

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