10 Horror Movies So Disturbing You’ll Only Watch Once

A handful of horror films are so deeply disturbing that no one who watches them ever wants to rewatch them. Some horror movies have great rewatch value. Scream and The Sixth Sense both require a couple of watches to pick up on all the clues and foreshadowing before their twist reveals. The unbridled genre-bending fun of horror comedies like Evil Dead II and Shaun of the Dead never gets old. Stanley Kubrick’s mesmerizing cinematography makes The Shining a timeless gem. But that’s not the case for all horror movies.

Some horror films are so unsettling that viewers only ever want to watch them once. No one wants to relive the genuine animal cruelty depicted in Cannibal Holocaust, or the months of psychosexual torture depicted in Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Watching these movies once is more than enough. Some truly unnerving horror films are tough to sit through just once, let alone on a rewatch with the knowledge of all the terrible things to come.

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10 The Human Centipede

The Human Centipede isn’t particularly scary, but it is a tough watch. It revolves around a psychotic surgeon who abducts three people and sews them together via their gastric systems. This is one of the most disgusting, stomach-churning movies ever made. Dieter Laser gives a terrific performance as the mad scientist, but it’s hard to find the time to enjoy that performance in between scenes of buttock mutilation and defecation into people’s open mouths. After sitting through this grueling piece of body horror once, no one is eager to watch it again.

9 A Serbian Film

With A Serbian Film, director Srđan Spasojević set out to critique the Serbian government with graphic visual metaphors. But he just ended up creating a deeply horrifying, exploitative, borderline snuff film that generated controversy across the globe. A Serbian Film’s main claim to fame (or infamy) is that it features a truly shocking scene of a grown man sexually assaulting a newborn baby. A Serbian Film wants to be a smart satire, but it just spends 104 minutes realizing the most repugnant thoughts ever to cross a human mind.

8 Audition

There are no signs of horror for the first half of Audition. It starts out as a melodrama about a widower organizing auditions to find a new wife. Before long, he meets the perfect woman and quickly falls for her. His manipulative methods to meet women ironically come back to bite him when he finds that his new girlfriend is much more sinister than she seems. The elongated climactic sequence, which has more than enough bloodshed to make up for a bloodless first half, usually leaves viewers too shaken to rewatch the film.

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7 Irréversible

Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible is more of a thriller than a straightforward horror movie, but it certainly leaves viewers feeling horrified by the time the end credits roll. It follows two men’s dark quest to avenge the survivor of a brutal sexual assault, told in reverse chronological order to keep the audience guessing. The long-take nature of the cinematography adds a layer of realism to the startling events on-screen. Irréversible is a powerful story about the futility of revenge, but its uncompromising portrayal of violence makes it almost unwatchable.

6 Hereditary

Ari Aster’s haunting family tragedy Hereditary is an excruciating watch (especially on a rewatch with the ending in sight), because Aster creates an unbearable sense of dread from the beginning. From the moment the pagan cult has targeted the Graham family, their fate is sealed. It’s a question of “when” they’ll meet that dark fate, not “if.” One of the earliest scenes in the film is the accidental decapitation of a 13-year-old girl, and after that jaw-dropping inciting incident, there are even more gruesome moments still yet to come.

5 Tusk

In the early 2010s, Kevin Smith branched out from his usual raunchy comedies and tried his hand at the horror genre. Red State is a delightfully dark satire of religious cults, but his true horror masterpiece is Tusk, inspired by the true story (which turned out to be a prank) of a man who offered free room and board in exchange for his roommate dressing up as a walrus. Smith took this absurd premise to its most unsettling extremes in Tusk. Cop Out and Yoga Hosers are unwatchable because they’re bad movies, but Tusk is unwatchable because it sustains its gonzo premise and creepy atmosphere so effectively.

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4 Antichrist

Lars von Trier’s arthouse horror film Antichrist opens with the accidental death of a toddler, and it only gets worse from there. The grieving parents retreat to a cabin in the woods, where the man experiences unsettling visions and the woman becomes sexually violent and sadomasochistic. Antichrist has beautiful cinematography, but the images in those shots are so deeply disturbing that they distract from the beauty of the artistic execution. Any movie featuring a child’s death is difficult to watch more than once, but especially when that death scene is actually one of the tamer moments in the film.

3 Ichi The Killer

In Takashi Miike’s relentless horror actioner Ichi the Killer, a sadistic yakuza enforcer who derives pleasure from bloodshed encounters an anxious, repressed psychopath with a superhuman ability to inflict pain and remorseful feelings about it. Ichi the Killer satirically deconstructs the media’s glorification of violence while pushing the boundaries of gruesomeness to a questionable degree. From bloodbaths to impromptu amputations, the manga-inspired violence of Ichi the Killer is not for the faint-hearted, and has even gotten the film banned in some countries. Those who can sit through its gory spectacle usually don’t opt to return.

2 Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom

The final film of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, managed to generate even more controversy than his other movies. Salò revolves around a group of wealthy Italian libertines who, during the time of the fascist Republic of Salò, abduct 18 teenagers and subject them to months of sadism, violence, and various forms of torture. There’s been a lot of discussion about the film’s deeper themes, but its untethered depravity and unflinching depiction of crimes against humanity might scare some viewers away from trying to identify any underlying themes.

1 Cannibal Holocaust

Director Ruggero Deodato was arrested on obscenity charges over his wildly controversial horror film Cannibal Holocaust. The movie is an early “found footage” effort in which the footage shot by a documentary crew observing cannibal tribes in the jungle is recovered and broadcast by an American TV station. Cannibal Holocaust is more unnerving than the average horror film, because a lot of its gore is real. The film’s portrayal of cannibalism, sexual violence, and genuine animal cruelty is too much for some viewers. The viewers who can stomach the movie once tend not to rewatch it.