These aren't the most graphically disturbing films, but the ones that stayed with me the most...
Brazil, by Terry Gilliam:
This film staggered me. It's full of surreal and grotesque images, like a morphine-tinged nightmare. But the two things that stood out were the profoundly depressing ending, and the shock of seeing Michael Palin play a government torturer.
Vanilla Sky, by Cameron Crowe
Poor Tom Cruise. For the past 10 years or so he's been so closely associated with Scientology that - even though he continues to make high quality movies every year - people seem to have forgotten what a great actor he is.
And he's great here, alongside a smoking hot Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz, in a breathtaking, bizarre, brain-bursting science fiction film where you're never sure what's real and what isn't.
The most disturbing scene is when Diaz goes insane at Cruise pumping and dumping her. What she does next is sudden and violent and comes out of nowhere. That scared the shit out of me.
Dawn of the Dead, by George Romero
Since "28 Days Later" kicked off a huge trend for zombie movies, video games, books and television shows, the living dead has become passe. We've reached Peak Cannibal Corpse. Zombies have lost their bite.
It wasn't always like this. The original Dawn of the Dead - to my mind - is the scariest zombie film ever made. It has an atmosphere of dread and suspense punctuated by moments of horror and violence and grisly comedy that most other, bigger budget zombie movies lack.
It has cheap makeup, schlocky special effects, and the story moves at a slower pace than modern films. But it's more effective for all that. Hordes of shambling, grey-skinned ravening ghouls in bellbottoms and sideburns are more terrifying than any amount of CGI. You soon feel the claustrophobia of the characters, trapped in an island of uncertain temporary safety in a world gone insane.
I still feel nervous when I'm in a lift and the doors start to open...
IT, adapted from the Stephen King novel
IT isn't a good film. It's a made-for-TV miniseries that clocks in at about over 9,000 hours running time. The ending is both "WTF" and inadvertently comical. The acting is mostly wooden.
The only thing this film has going for it is Tim Curry as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and he's only in it for about 10 minutes of screen time.
Turns out, 10 minutes is all Tim Curry needs to sear himself on your consciousness as an indelible memory of fear. The popularity of circuses has never recovered.