“Human beings do things in a far more terrible way than animals, but the idea that things might be otherwise is one that has occurred only to humans.” – Theodor W. Adorno

What value does humanity have? This list explores that very question. To raise the question of humanity’s value requires some discussion of humanism. Humanism is often linked to atheism or the renaissance, but it is a rich set of philosophical and cultural traditions. Yet much of humanism is understandably critiqued as dangerous and often inhumane. Humanism has been a justification for all sorts of barbarous acts toward animals.

Many ecologists therefore simply dismiss it as speciesism. The belief in progress, fundamental to many humanist schools of thought, has attempted to justify genocide and various crimes during modernity’s revolutions. The emphasis on flourishing human life¬—characteristic of much of humanism’s history—has been complicit in ableism.

The great Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno once speculated that Man, by which he meant humanism, had been complicit in dehumanization. Therefore, the critiques of humanism have become as varied as various humanisms. Depictions of dehumanization can serve a variety of ideological ends, some of which affirm humanism.

Depictions of the human being reduced either to a machine-like state or a subhuman condition can be configured as a desperate plea for human dignity. But it can also be a reflection of the emptiness of the human subject or a chilling expression of human barbarity or indifference that elides any potential to affirm a schema that celebrates human accomplishment.

Whether humanism can be salvaged is of partial relevance to this enquiry, but depictions of dehumanization can move beyond general questions of human worth to critique specific tendencies, histories and ideologies.

10. Funny Games (original version)

Funny Games is one of the more obvious films to explore dehumanization on this list. It concerns two killers murdering a family. All the while, one of the killers breaks the forth wall challenging the audience to consider why they are watching this film. Such allusions to imagined audiences draw attention to cinematic and televisual violence.

For those who ‘enjoy’ Funny Games, Benny’s Video is a much more complicated and nuanced look at modern estrangement and technology, but there are far more intimations of the human amid such alienation.

9. Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis concerns the spatialization and spacelessness of capitalism and the manner in which corporate heirs come to exhibit the power and status of capricious, cruel princes.

With a sense of endless flux and movement hypercapitalism comes to disintegrate and capitalist speed ends in a motionless, directionless existence. Such a state of emptiness and purposelessness come to predominate Eric Packer’s (Robert Pattinson) limousine-confined existence, in David Cronenberg’s meditation on capitalism’s dystopic, decaying present.

8. Goodnight Mommy

Goodnight Mommy is a twisted film about a child torturing his mother due to the belief that she is in fact an impostor.

A frightening film, Goodnight Mommy’s twist ending is as much about dealing with trauma as about how false beliefs can lead to brutality.

7. Damnation

Béla Tarr has claimed that all of his films concern human dignity. Yet while this is an almost indisputable truth, they concern humanity amid the forces of dehumanization. A sort of romantic humanism lingers, but as a crushed and defiled shred. Damnation concerns a desperate figure set against a cold decaying, industrial setting.

At the close of the film he ends up barking like a dog. Boris Groys, an important art theorist and philosopher has observed that there are two forms of dehumanization, important for art. One which relegates the human being to animal status and the other where the human becomes nothing more than a machine.

Tarr seems to feel the former is a greater expression of humanity, for the negation of the human being via a backward step dwells on what has been lost. The protagonist who has abjectly failed, covered by mud, and out of his mind, becomes a much harsher image of human desperation than present in The Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse. No wonder Damnation was Susan Sontag’s favorite film. It is one of the greatest films ever made.

6. Full Metal Jacket

Kubrick’s work is an almost absurdist exploration of military caricatures. The notion of the military as dehumanizing is well established as a subject. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that in order to kill and dehumanize, one may have to undergo a loss of humanity oneself, and the military is renowned for creating killing machines.

But what makes Full Metal Jacket stand out is the perverse humor and an almost Brechtian estrangement where we have the drill sergeant actually praise psychopathic killers, mentioning Lee Harvey Oswald’s skill and proudly stating that that is what the army will teach young men. This gesture seems ridiculous and intentionally on the nose.

The brilliance of Kubrick is precisely his realization that without a sufficiently cool gaze and a parodic approach, a certain triteness or worse, valorization usually takes place. Powerfully, the film shifts through a temporal ellipsis, breaking a sense of narrative whole, with a second half many viewers find disappointing. But this disappointment is itself the point where war as a pointless spectacle that, for all its horrid beauty and sublime spectacle remains fundamentally banal.

To begin, the heading is of course shameless clickbait. No one can definitively say what the most perverse films are. Rather these are some perverse films. For many, these films will not even seem that perverse. However, all the selected films are in some way perverse, often in distinctive ways. By perverse, this article does not mean perverted.

There is a clear difference between types of perversity. Poe’s Imp of the Perverse is propelled by a childish, manic contrariness. This sense of contrariness, of glee and joy has a juvenile quality associated with childhood and possibly a strange type of innocence.

These films are not all concerned with sadistic violence and sexual divergence. They often explore the perverse or play with cinematic conventions in perverse ways. They even show that the very act of viewing may be associated or inscribed within a voyeuristic matrix of pleasure.

The notion of perversion is itself a strange one. It has clear subversive implications, a defiance and closeness with the childish id refusing social authority. And yet perversions are kept secret and thus far from disrupting norms actually take on the contours of power and oppression. Perversions can be a type of accomplice to the pathologies of the powerful and become a form of abuse.

But there is a theological and tragic dimension to perverseness too. Humanity’s grasping at forbidden fruit is what liberates humanity and grants the human being a sense of right and wrong. The merits of the fall also are a curse as they co-exists with death and a perverse yearning to return to a state where we can be as free and innocent as animals untouched by knowledge.

The self-conscious qualities of the perverse can be liberating and all pleasure and truth come to us in a broken and perverted state, what Kant called humanity’s crooked timbers. To quote W.H. Auden’s verse at the outbreak of the Second World War, registering the perversity of the world and a need to find affirmation amid such a horrendous circumstance:

“Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”

10. L’Age d’Or tie with Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom tie with Import/Export

L’Age d’Or is a surrealist film by Luis Buñuel following the depravities of the wealthy elite. The film explores their darker urges in order to scandalize the bourgeois, but the film also delights in a sort of perverse surrealist humor, opening with a documentary on scorpions. There are some delightfully amusing moments in the film.

Salò, orthe 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini, adapted from de Sade, reveals a fear he had about the state of freedom and sexual exploitation, namely that far from setting everyone free, such revolution in fact benefits the powerful at the expense of those without power, enabling abuse. The absence of limitations and social norms are a liberation for those with power, not the powerless. A cinematic analysis of perversion,Pasoliniframes fascism as the next stage of capitalism’s libidinous eruption.

As stated in the film, fascism is the ultimate anarchism. Although one may disagree, Pasolini’s view was that communism needed to be founded on laws. Pasolini thereby turned his back on sexual revolution, seeing the commodification of the body as a type of fascism. The infamous excrement eating scene in the film is meant to recall fast-food.

Import/Export is a film that shows two people exploited in Eastern and Western Europe who never cross paths but both find their dreams of hope dashed by the cruel sobering reality of capitalism.

It should be noted that what makes this film truly perverse is its own defiance of the spectacle of cinema, with additions of naturalism and exploitation of elderly people suffering from dementia. One of the protagonists works in a hospital and we witness a ward with the actually aged who are confused, thereby challenging our sense of safe distance.

L’Age d’Or and Salo are both delirious, ludic adaptations of de Sade but Import/Export is a more chilling reflection on bourgeois exploitation and abuse.

9. Inland Empire and Eraserhead

Both films are works of frightening mindfuckery by the master of perversity, David Lynch where reality disintegrates amid distortion and disgusting caricature with a strong sense of suprapersonal forces lurking beneath the psyche.

By probing into the depths of the psyche Lynch shows us our worst fears and desires realized.

8. Breaking the Waves tie with Irreversible

Both films seem rather different but both play with the audience in a twisted and perverse manner. Von Trier’s film uses a heightened unreal, melodramatic narrative presented in a largely gritty realist manner with the surprising and jarring interruption of magic realism at the close.

The film concerns a woman, Bess, whose injured, sickly husband asks her to sleep with other men—at first so that she can find another but later to cater for his voyeurism.

Bess refuses but when his condition worsens she comes to believe it is God telling her that she must sacrifice her soul and sleep around as part of a strange fidelity. SlavojŽižek argues that goodness becomes an excess and transforms into a disturbing quality in the film.

Gaspar Noé’sIrreversible seems a Dantean fable where one goes from hell through purgatory and then arrives at heaven. But this narrative becomes devastating as the film is a backward reconstruction where we witness the conclusion first. As such, one’s life can so easily change from heaven to hell with no hope of redemption.

The strong and pessimistic theological quality evokes the sense of the fall, but is far crueler than anything Christianity has envisaged. Unlike the fantasy of hell, this film presents a reality of unending torment.

7. Palindromes

Todd Solondz’s film follows the feelings and self-image of an adolescent girl who was pressured by her liberal parents into having an abortion as she undergoes various emotional states and hooks up with an older, pedophiliac pro-lifer who murders doctors who perform abortions.

When I say the film follows her emotional states, it does so through a brilliant method. The protagonist named Aviva is sometimes played as a large woman of color and sometimes by a girl with reed hair. Eight actors play her.

In many ways, this film may not seem as perverse as other Todd Solondz films such as Happiness and Storytelling which actually at the very least tie with Palindromes. But the film was selected because its perversity exists through a tenderness to its subjects and via a nonjudgmental approach, one far less based on cringe than Storytelling. (This is to say nothing of the director’s desire to work with Paris Hilton.)

Moreover, the film makes fun of conservative and liberal pathologies and quirks in ways both satirical and gentle and thereby is all the more challenging. There is a certain perversity or uncertain perversity in the Palindromes’ treatment of these issues which constitute a sort of internal tensionwith the film’s own ludic and confrontational premise.

6. Videodrome

Situated via a debate on television sex and violence, Cronenberg’sVideodrome captures anxieties concerning technology and the posthuman.

The plot centers onvideos that induce psychotic imaginings and cause one’s body to explode with cancer and the film features the protagonist massaging a Yonic wound in his chest and stomach with a gun.

Tragedy for the purposes of this list does not mean films that are very sad. Rather the films selected explore themes associated with Greek and sometime Shakespearian Tragedy. Throughout this list, philosophers and theorists of the tragic have been cited. This use of theory to discern what is properly tragic is controversial.

Raymond Williams for instance argued that the tragic was not an elite experience but rather one that evolved to incorporate modernity itself, including ordinary experiences of sadness and alienation. Terry Eagleton, a literary theorist, argues that perhaps the only workable definition of tragedy is very sad. However, why then not do a list of very sad films? Why use the term tragic at all?

For this list, the films evoke more philosophic conceptions simply to distinguish the tragic from the sad, which is not intended to be an absolute distinction. The list does not include tragic TV series such as The Wire—which was inspired by the idea of postmodern tragedy where bureaucracy functions as the inescapable and undefeatable necessity sanctioned by the Gods—and Breaking Bad—which seems to frame the transformation of the anti-hero into a tyrant.

10. Town Without Pity

According to GWF Hegel there is nothing more tragic than a conflict between two rights, where characters come into conflict who both embody conceptions of what the right thing to do is. For Hegel, justice in tragedy comes at the price of injustice.

When a 16 year old woman, Karin Steinhof, is raped by American soldiers during the US occupation of Germany, a conflict arises for Steve Garrett played by Kirk Douglas. He must defend these men even though he knows they are guilty. Initially he tries to bargain that the men will admit their guilt and serve their time provided they are spared the death penalty. He does not wish to see them die. When that fails he tries to convince Karin’s father, Karl Steinhoff to drop the charges. Garrett discerns the greys but saves the men at the expense of Karin Steinhof, destroying her account on the witness stand.

The town horrifically condemns Karin Steinhof, insinuating that she invited the attention of the soldiers and while Garrett attempts to help her his loyalties are with the accused. The court at the end of the trial, with Karin Steinhof’s withdrawal from the process, can no longer execute the men. But the court, taking the place of the chorus dishonorably discharges the soldiers and sentences them to prison for their horrific crime. A journalist reporting the events initially despises Garrett but comes to recognize his dilemma.

Hegel framed the conflict of right largely through ancient tragedy, particularly Antigone where Antigone represents the family and Creon the law. With modern tragedy the divided self becomes paramount according to Hegel. As such characters in modern tragedy can no longer have clear convictions.

Rather their will drives them forward even when their beliefs undergo doubt. But the tragedy is of course more than Garrett’s tragedy. It is Karin Steinhof’s tragedy most of all. Caught in fate’s clutches, tragic notions of destiny are reconfigured along gendered lines. Unfortunately the film, while showing the very real consequences for Karin Steinhof who commits suicide, often switches focus to the tragedy of deciding between rights as well as the cruelty of the town.

9. The Killing of a Sacred Deer tie with A History of Violence

Both Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence explore the notion of being punished for past crimes and the notion of familial guilt. In the former case, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a sort of reinterpretation and reworking of Euripides Iphigenia in Aulis. When a surgeon kills a boy’s father on the operating table, the boy gives him the alternative of killing one of his family members: either son, daughter or wife, or otherwise watching them die from a mysterious illness brought about by his curse.

According to George Steiner, tragedy entails people being punished in excess of their guilt. We never know exactly how culpable the protagonist is. Steiner states that tragedy concerns dark and mysterious forces that torment humanity for sport. Such seems to be the implication of The Killing of a Sacred Deer as the crimes of the father affect the children and his wife. This notion of predestined suffering is a thematic common in Greek tragedy and although Shakespearian tragedy often suggests that fate may well be superstition, there is nevertheless lip-service to predestination and fate.

A History of Violence doesn’t quite go down the Steinerian path, but it does convey a sense of inescapable reckoning associated with Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. A History of Violence follows Tom Stall works in a dinner. When the diner is robbed, he kills both robbers, defending waitress’ life. Gaining media recognition, Tom who had previously been involved in gangs must defend his family from them. Indeed, he must even kills his mobster-brother to do so.

In Greek tragedy, one’s crimes as with Oedipus, inevitably catch-up with the protagonist who suffers until he or she, through a ritual act of transgressive suffering or violence, can be cleansed.

Although Aristotle’s catharsis has been hotly disputed with perhaps the most credible translation of the word being clarification rather than cleansing, purification or purgation, the possibly misinformed lexicology has generated a productive way of interpreting tragedy that is perhaps truer than the account proffered in the Poetics. Moreover, the conflict within the family and the notion of violent redemption is key to so many tragedies including the Oresteia.

8. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

According to Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet in their masterful study, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Greek tragedy problematizes the notion of the mythic hero. Greek tragedies wee reproduced in democratic Athens and as such they reflect, so the scholars argue, an ambivalence to the cult of the hero. Greek myth shows how rulers and heroes established and defended city-states and Greek Tragedy similarly honors them for their service. However, as the tragic hero is often a tyrant, the hero poses a threat to democracy.

Peter Greenaway turns ambivalence into denunciation, taking motives associated with tragic narratives such as revenge and cannibalism as well as cruel justice, to examine Thatcherite Britain. Greenaway himself has said that the film is a parable but more than just a parable of Thatcherism. The film concerns a mobster, the thief who murder’s his wife’s lover. In vengeance, the wife kills the thief but not before forcing him to eat a piece of her dead lover.

How, one may ask, is this a parable for capitalism without limits? Well, the thief is clearly an image of a businessman, indeed a criminal businessman, and mobsters have long been associated with corporate CEOs. He further acts cruelly to the poor and the unfortunate and represents the cruelty of the world and also the capitalist system. Borrowing from a Shakespearian framing of villainy, there is no ambiguity to the thief’s villainy, only a figure driven by appetite.

7. Throne of Blood

Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood is possibly the greatest cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare ever made while also reworking the story in a radically different way. The film opens with fog and dark mountains and mounds of barren earth, accompanied by the sound of people singing “Look upon the ruins of the castle of delusion. Haunted only now by the spirits of those who perished.

A scene of carnage.” Whereas Macbeth concerns time being out of joint, hurried and frenzied, there is a sense in Throne of Blood that the only thing constant is time itself, and that human beings and their desires are transient hauntings that disappear of their own hubris. Hegel in his description of tragedy claims that tragic personages perish and become ‘shadowy-picture thoughts’, almost forgotten. He argues that tragic heroes are wrong to trust divination, the utterances of Gods, the spirits and witches. Accordingly, divine knowledge lies: it is true but deceptively true—just as the Macbethian protagonist in Throne of Blood discovers.

There is a temptation to read Throne of Blood along the contours of the Shakespearian reformulation of the tragic flaw of the protagonist, namely ambition. But there is another, non-Aristotelian way of understanding Throne of Blood. According to Friedrich Nietzsche in a footnote in his work, The Case of Wagner, the tragic does not concern tragic action but is rather a type of ritual establishing a sense of place through a sacred story of suffering. Is this not the very opening of Throne of Blood?

6. Antichrist

The emphasis on place is very evident in Lars von Trier’s great exploration of sublime horror. Antichrist is about a couple, known only as He and She, who after the loss of their son retreat to a cabin in the woods, theologically named Eden.

There is a strong sense that they are returning to some sort of primal world inhabited by destructive spirits. He has taken her to the cabin to help her deal with her grief, and represents a masculinist rendition of reason. She allies herself with the destructiveness of nature and its cycles, warning that she and by extension nature are evil. When he ignores her warnings, she castrates him. He eventually believes she is a witch and burns her body.

At the end of the film, he wonders through the woods, eating berries and then witnesses faceless women walking either side of him. The ending could suggest that he is condemned but another interpretation is that by killing She, he has purged woman and by extension nature of the evil attributed to it.

From this reading, she becomes a tragic scape-goat, that like the tragic hero, accepts her destiny as a sort of purifying sacrifice. Still another reading would hold that He is purged of his tyrannical reason and now open to the scary, pagan properties of both women and nature. Certainly, according to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, the hero must be humbled and negated before he can be rid of his painful individuality and return to the earth mother, via a Dionysian ritual.

On a philosophical level, violence is rather difficult to define and violence can have connotations reflective of temperament and psychical states. Any sense of disturbance or perturbation may be said to be violent, however artfully rendered.

Slavoj Žižek argues that there are distinguishable types of violence, namely subjective and objective violence. Subjective violence which is manifestly apparent as it seems to emerge from an agent and is directed toward agents. Looting, murder and terrorist attacks are subjective forms of violence. Objective violence is the political and economic structures that generate much of what we deem to be subjective violence.

The films on this list may in some sense deal with a sort of violence, but depict very little subjective violence. Documentaries have been avoided but there are numerous disturbing documentaries that don’t feature violence, such as Mr. Death: the Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. which follows a Holocaust denier and designer of death-penalty instruments.

A possible omission was Last Tango In Paris, especially given the circumstances of how an infamous scene was shot, but its inclusion would risk trivializing sexual assault. Films in which the very making of the film is disturbing have therefore been avoided. Given these considerations, hopefully the title is not too misleading.

10. Innocence (2004)

Innocence is a beautiful film by Lucile Hadžihalilović about prepubescent girls in a strange school, where they are sheltered from the outside world. Not much happens in the film. Rather the film evokes a sense of wonder and mystery. However, the exploration of these girls as they transition to adolescence and the sensuality of the cinematography may unnerve some viewers.

As there are intimations of prepubescent sexuality, the film’s subtlety itself may add unease. Also, the fact that new girls to the school arrive in coffins injects a sense of the uncanny. For these reasons, Innocence belongs as a beautiful example of how the wondrous and mysterious can also be troubling.

9. Import/Export (2007)

Ulrich Seidl’s film follows two people living different lives who do not meet. Olga is a single mother who is underpaid for her work as a nurse and so takes up work on an online porn site, where clients of the site fascistically shout orders at her. She moves from Eastern Ukraine to Austria where she is fired as a maid and forced to work as a janitor in a hospital where we witness ageing people confront their mortality. The scenes, arguably exploitative, are in a sense genuine as Seidl has used—emphasis on the word—elderly people suffering from dementia.

The other narrative follows Pauli who after being fired from his work as a security guard agrees to travel with his stepdad to Ukraine. He witnesses his stepdad behave cruelly to a sex worker in a scene that would disturb anyone with a trace of moral sensibilities.

This film conveys a sort of structural violence, what Slavoj Žižek calls objective violence. Peter Bradshaw describes the film as “a sort of cinema of cruelty.” As such, many would find even the cruelty of a Haneke movie a little more bearable. Indeed, the fellow Austrian’s work, Amour appears a more tender exploration of aging, sickness and degradation—if one feels Import/Export is in fact too violent to appear on this list.

8. Loving Memory (1971)

An elderly woman mistakes a hit-and-run victim’s corpse as a living person and behaves with tenderness to the body. Watching her care for a corpse and behave as though it were a living being is unsettling. This film by director Tony Scott is a classic that fuses absurdity and the morbid with a certain tenderness.

7. Camille Claudel 1915 (2013)

A beautiful film by Bruno Dumont about the sculptor Camille Claudel’s inner and sometimes outer struggle against her incarceration in a mental asylum. Despite not belonging in the asylum, Camille Claudel’s conservative brother Paul Claudel refuses her the right to leave.

Despite the incredible character study that evokes Bresson’s masterpieces, the sheer injustice surely world disturb many viewers. One may end up disagreeing with W.H. Auden that history will “pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well.” Nevertheless, to appropriate Auden terms, there are “ironic points of light” that shine throughout the film.

6. Ma Mère (2004)

Christophe Honoré’s Ma Mère is a film about a woman who seduces her son. Ma Mère questions whether immorality can be a type of ethical commitment.

A must for those of transgressive cinema, the film manages to be more twisted than it sounds, but also an exploration of the idea that transgression can be a religious, even moral search for new meanings and commitments.

This list of films is necessarily inadequate. There are a large number of truly great films to have received a hundred percent critically favourable reviews. It would have been desirable to select silent classics of German Expressionism such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Hitchcock’s drama Shadow of a Doubt, Kieślowski’s Red and especially the films of Satyajit Ray, to name but a few omissions.

Nevertheless, the selected films were picked not only on the basis of their diversity but also on their commonality. Almost every film picked is aesthetically unusual and almost every selected film analyses the political or social structures that shape everyday life (although sometimes within a historical period different to our own day).

10. The Conformist

Bernardo Bertolucci’s greatest film, The Conformist is a surprisingly colourful and vibrantly photographed exploration of Italian fascism, perhaps channelling the aesthetic dynamism of modernism. The film explores the dangers of conformism and the very modern notion of the agent who lacks agency, lacking both a moral identity and integrity.

The Conformist follows Marcello, who through flashbacks is revealed to have had an isolated childhood, estranged by his wealth and further alienated from society as he believes that as a youth he killed his predatory chauffeur. His guilt is ultimately expiated but in what Bertolucci has called a ‘negative catharsis’, namely by sinning more rather than making amends. Throughout his life Marcello adapts to his situation, often in a chilling manner when he works for the fascists.

The self as a vacuum emptied of selfhood, as adaptive was memorable explored by Woody Allen’s masterpiece Zelig which also ranks at 100% critical approval on Rotten Tomatoes. Bertolucci expertly conveys the existential themes from Alberto Moravia’s novel of the same name in relation to an exploration of sexuality, alienation, illusion and totalitarianism. If one is a lover of Bertolucci’s exploration of complicity, responsibility and guilt, one may also enjoy the films of István Szabó.

9. Vagabond

Agnès Varda’s haunting film explores the death of a woman vagrant named Mona. We are introduced to Mona by her corpse and come to learn the circumstances that led up to her death. We also discover the people who crossed paths with her along the way her fated journey. By the end of the film, Mona still remains enigmatic, but her sense of defiant free-spiritedness is nevertheless apparent.

The French title of the film Sans toit nil oi means no shelter no law conveying a sense of the protagonist as exposed but also locating her story through a negativity, of being without. We learn about her through an investigation into the circumstances of her death, but we also glimpse her as a human being searching.

There is a long tradition of female existentialist figures suffering or dying, especially in French cinema, think Godard’s brilliant Vivre sa vie. But there’s something different about Vagabond, some sincere desire to know its character and not patronise her—as with Godard’s film where Nana is killed illustrating her inability to determine her life against the cold linguistic logic of the modern world. This film on the contrary is a call for justice underpinned by an approach of respect and sometimes respectful distance for and toward the protagonist. It is a film that every cinephile ought to view.

8. Tokyo Story

Ozu’s masterful Tokyo Story concerns an elderly couple, a mother and father, who travel to visit their adult children in Tokyo. It transpires that their children have no time and interest in them. The only one who wishes to meet them and seems to display feelings toward them is their daughter-in-law, who is widowed and desperately lonely.

But the film is more than a sentimental, tender narrative about loss and an analysis of family ties. It is also a film about alienation and hushed desperation amid the rhythms of modern life.

7. Un Chien Andalou

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí created one of the most recognisable sequences in film history. Opening with a graphic scene where a barber slices a woman’s eye open as a cloud divides the moon, we are violently thrust into an altered reality severed from conventional cinematic perception. Often considered the first surrealist film, it is a great work of cinematic art, capturing the sadism and cruelty embedded in the modern psyche.

The film explores violent and sexual fantasies buried within bourgeois culture. Fittingly, the film is not altogether coherent in its objectives. Buñuel was a leftist while Dalí had little interest in politics. For Dalí surrealism was a way of liberating oneself from moral, political concerns and surrendering to aesthetic realms that were at once above and below the surface of our reality.

At times, one intuits that the sequences of the film reflect not so much the deplorable fantasies of the bourgeois as celebrate their Sadean realisation. This antithetical focus meant that Dalí split with Buñuel over their next, more ambitious collaboration L’Age d’Or, which further pronounced the difference between their outlooks.

6. Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane remains one of the greatest films. With its innovative deep focus, its unusual narrative structure and the idea that a missing reference remains unknown to a key character by the end of the film. As the wealthy Kane dies he utters the word Rosebud which inspires a journalist to decipher what the word means, only for the film to end without him ever learning that Rosebud was the name of Kane’s childhood sled.

The film leaves open whether Kane mentioned Rosebud longing for a false and idealised past or whether he was merely replaying his life. The remembrance of his sled may in fact be the remembrance of his childhood fetish—in the sense Freud used the term fetish—namely a way to cope with trauma. We are transported from Kane, the wealthy recluse to Kane the child of a poor family, leaving what appears to be a happy life until we learn that his father beat him, and his mother is desperate for him to escape both his abusive father and to offer him an education.

Despite the various easy explanations we now offer for Kane’s reminiscences—most of which are pop psychology and rather twee (such as the idea of recasting the small things as really big things after all)—the film remains a testament to what we cannot know and the various deceptions of power. Given fake news, and the current US president, the framing of business and power and the idea of a news cycle descending into triviality and scandal, while capturing a sense of revolutionary times, the film is a powerful warning of the trappings both of power and powerlessness. It is reminder of the futility of the American dream.

Even the technical use of deep focus conveys an exploration of the human subject up against the world. The use of deep focus allowed Welles to use theatrical space but contrary to the view that such a device merely allowed Welles to move from theatre to cinema, deep focus combined cinematic shots, affording Welles the ability to capture the pathos of the close-up and the bathos of the wide-shot. As such, a sense of significance granted by the close-up is undercut and undermined by the insignificance of the wide shot, and the noir chiaroscuro underpins the atmosphere of despair and the Faustian bargain of fame and fortune.

Philosophy isn’t always considered the most erotic subject. While not exactly equipped with the best pick-up lines, philosophers have a long history of interest in the erotic. According to Plato, philosophy has much in common with the erotic, directing us toward an appreciation of beauty and goodness. In order to heighten an erotic philosophical relationship, Socrates in Plato’s symposium warns that sex shouldn’t take place. Philosophers have therefore had a long interest in sexual attraction but not always viewing the erotic in a wholly positive light.

Epicurus, despite the reputations of epicures and Epicureans, for instance, believed sex could be the cause of dangerous obsession and its absence generated pain—sex should be avoided. And Arthur Schopenhauer viewed our instinct toward sex as blinding and getting in the way of truth. Friedrich Nietzsche had a different view, seeing philosophy as denying any thrill to life, and instead wanted a philosophy tied to health, physicality, art and triumph. (He was a great admirer of sex, if not a practitioner.)

The films on this list explore the way sex is linked to metaphysics and the search for truth but also how it can obscure truth. Some of the films are only notionally thrillers or erotic and it is hardly surprising that art cinema has the reputation for nudity and overly portentous and some might say pretentious philosophical dialogue. However, all of these films incorporate elements of the erotic and of thrillers, however deconstructed, and some obviously belong as erotic thrillers or thrillers exploring the erotic.

10. Nymphomaniac (director’s cut, both volumes)

Lars von Trier’s controversial film used the actors’ come-faces as advertisements but the film itself (released in two parts) is about Joe’s failure to find a sense of fulfilment signified by her inability to orgasm. Her quest is more than a physical addiction: there’s something almost theological about it. Sexual yearning is framed as an expression of incompleteness, hence Joe’s tragic and desperate pleading to her past lover Jerôme, “fill all my holes.”

The idea that the self is broken and needs another to find erotic fulfilment is explored in Plato’s Symposium and it is a theme also explored in German Romantic philosophy such as Hölderlin’s and Schelling’s analyses of the yearning, incomplete subject. The theological and aesthetic dimensions of Joe’s suffering are likened in the film to Odin hanging on the tree of life and her inability to achieve orgasm is compared to an incomplete polyphony. With references such as these, there is a strong sense that the film shares a German Romantic interest in the Empedoclean themes of love and strife.

Moreover, the film is structured around a dialogue between Joe and her new, apparently asexual friend, Seligman. Together they discuss philosophical issues such as whether a human being can be innately evil, or whether abortion is right, as well as examining the nature of sex and of humanity.

Although not necessarily a thriller, the film contains many tropes associated with the genre and directly appropriates thriller conventions in the opening and closing of the film.

If you enjoyed Nymphomaniac you may also enjoy Romance X by Catherine Breillat and Ma Mère by Christophe Honoré. Decidedly more French existentialist than German Romantic, Romance X follows a woman committed to exploring and creating a new sexual self and in so doing challenging conventional sexual morality. Ma Mère is the story of an erotic relationship between mother and son based on Georges Bataille’s story of the same name.

The film expands on Bataille’s idea that an immoralist has a distinct sense of morality, a commitment to experiences beyond what society would sanction and thereby to defy social hypocrisy. This film, like Romance X and Nymphomaniac, isn’t exactly a thriller as such, but explores the ethics of sexual transgression.

9. It Follows

It Follows is not an erotic thriller in the usual sense: it isn’t Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct. Rather it has a touch of the erotic and the sensual in the beautiful cinematography inspired by Gregory Crewdson’s photography. At all times surprisingly tasteful for a film with a horror premise, the plot concerns a sort of philosophical thought experiment.

Thought experiments are used by ethical philosophers to delineate moral and ethical concerns through imagined hypothetical scenarios. If framed as a thought experiment, It Follows asks whether one can risk the life of another for one’s prolonged safety.

The plot concerns a supernatural entity that follows a young-adult after sex and who is confronted with the unpalatable possibility that the only way to get rid of it is to sleep with another person. If she doesn’t sleep with another person and condemn him to her current fate, the supernatural entity will kill her. In this way, the film raises a fascinating ethical scenario as to whether it is right to risk another’s life to save one’s own.

The film also envisions fears around sex and the idea that there is some sort of traumatic, destructive, abject quality to sex that lurks in the human psyche. This dimension of the film almost invites a psychoanalytic reading. After all, the It of It Follows literally sexes one to death in an abject, bone-breaking way.

8. Crash

Trailblazing psychoanalyst Sabine Spielrein asked a brilliant question in her paper, Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being. She pondered why if sex is so pleasurable is it such a taboo subject and so often repressed. What about our own desires challenge us to invent customs and rituals that reduce, or sacralize sex? She argued that our desire for sex was in fact a desire to cease to exist and so we repressed sex out of a sense of self-preservation.

Sex was necessary for generation, but generation and creation are linked, according to Spielrein, to destruction. Freud was influenced by Spielrein’s ideas in his own formulation of our drives toward death, but ultimately came to moderate her radical views. For Freud Eros and the death drive were still oppositional to some extent, but for Spielrein, erotic love always was connected to ceasing-to-exist.

Crash directed by David Cronenberg similarly examines the much-explored theme of the relationship between sex and death. The film concerns people who get-off on car accidents and who realise that the best way to achieve orgasm is to come closer to death. Hence Cronenberg’s film, an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name, explores themes very similar to Spielrein’s work. Indeed, the character of Vaughan who loves to get into car accidents and bring like-minded people along for the ride/crash remarks that “there’s a benevolent psychopathology that beckons toward us.

For example, the car crash is a fertilising rather than a destructive event.” Spielrein herself suggested that self-dissolution could be framed as a yearning to return to the mother, expanding on the Oedipal complex. Interestingly, Cronenberg, who may not have been directly influenced by Spielrein for Crash, would directly feature Spielrein’s daring ideas in A Dangerous Method.

With terrific performances from James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger and a chilling portrayal of the sinister Vaughan by Elias Koteas, this film manages to be rather unsettling but also interesting on a conceptual level. Those who enjoyed the exploration of sadomasochism in Crash may also find Roman Polanksi’s Bitter Moon of interest or Venus in Fur.

7. Blow-Up

Blow-Up is a film following a trendy photographer during London’s swinging 60s. The film was shocking in its day for featuring glimpses of female nudity though the film is rather tame by today’s standards. But there’s still an erotic charge in this supremely stylish film.

Observing a woman and a man together in a park, Thomas snaps a picture. The woman featured in the photograph attempts to get the roll of film off him. When he blows up the film he discovers that behind a bush there is the hand of a corpse. He finds the corpse but when he goes back to the park to photograph it, the corpse is gone and he will never know the truth of what happened.

On some level, this film examines epistemological questions as to whether we ever really know the world and its workings or whether we are taken in by illusion, which is to say nothing of the existential questions that are so apparent in all of Antonioni’s most notable films.

6. Eyes Wide Shut

According to the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Eyes Wide Shut explores the idea that female desire threatens to overwhelm male desire. Featuring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, there is gossip that Kubrick’s obsessively-made film may even have broken the couple up. The narrative of the film features Cruise’s character, Bill Harford, desperately trying to experience life on an erotic level equal to his wife’s sexual fantasy.

When after getting high, she tells him that she once imagined having an affair and describes the imagined affair with an intensity almost unimaginable to Bill, he becomes disconsolate. Such imagination challenges his understanding of fidelity and his own erotic sensibility, which is lacklustre in comparison to his wife’s. Indeed, the very fact that they had to get high to get in the mood, suggests the feebleness of his libido and a certain pretence. He searches the streets of New York looking for an experience to rival her imagination until he discovers an ornate orgy for the wealthy and powerful.

As Žižek points out, the orgy itself lacks any sense of the orgiastic. Perhaps, this lack of fun and pleasure reveals that sex is very often a staged affair, lacking the vitality and even reality of our dreams and fantasies.

The film examines what is fidelity, while exploring some of the same themes as Blow-Up, where Bill never really knows what his wife felt nor is able to find out the exact meaning of the orgy he stumbled upon.

The uncanny is associated with the strange, the weird and the mysterious. The word was used by Sigmund Freud to suggest a threatening sense to the familiar. The German word for uncanny is das Unheimlich. Heim means home but it also means secret, so the uncanny for Freud occurs when something concealed and homely threatens to be unhomely. Toys, gnomes, dolls, puppets are great examples—things that both seem quaint and menacing.

Famous examples of films making use of the uncanny include Dead of Night and Child’s Play. Indeed, Freud postulates that the reason we find dolls creepy is that as children we believed that they were living beings and as adults we repress this childlike belief.

To an adult, inanimate things having agency are threatening and indicate a malevolent world. As such the uncanny accompanies a sense of displacement, of something that should belong not belonging or vice versa and is a mainstay of horror and science fiction films, like Alien and The Thing, but also of surrealism.

Given that the uncanny entails repressed and irrational fears bubbling to the surface, the presence of horror and science fiction films are arguably over represented in this list but to do otherwise would be silence the most marked examples of the uncanny.

Nevertheless I’ve tried to keep the list relatively diverse. Perhaps the most notable omission in this list is the work of David Lynch, but since every Lynch film is uncanny and often plays on the simultaneously threatening and homely qualities of Americana, I was unable to pick just one film. Indeed, the very word Lynchian more or less conveys a cinematic uncanniness.

10. Get Out

Get Out by Jordan Peele is a great example of the uncanny, where racism literally gets a facelift. When Chris is invited by his partner Rose to meet her family, he asks Rose if her family knows he’s black. She replies that it isn’t an issue. Her father after all, voted for Obama twice and would vote for him again if he could. An uncomfortable Chris agrees to visit her family on their country estate.

The setting itself is uncanny, a plantation-style mansion juxtaposed with an Obama-voting family of liberals. Rose’s father and mother are all too eager to show just how not racist they are, thereby creating a sense of something sinister under the surface of their attempted niceties.

When a party is thrown to meet Rose’s extended family as well as family friends, they all seem to want to buy into black coolness. Chris manages to find another “brother around here” at the party, but there is something strange about him. He doesn’t seem to have the lived experiences of racism that usually accompanies the various forms of discrimination faced by people of color.

Similarly, the family’s black servants behave in an unusual manner and Chris becomes increasingly suspicious. The reason for this strange behaviour transpires to be more horrific than Chris could have imagined. In Get Out, the uncanny converges with contemporary issues of race and cultural appropriation.

9. Alice

All of the animations by Jan Švankmajer are uncanny. Indeed, there is something potentially creepy about Claymation and stopmotion more generally, as it consists of creating life from the lifeless—where what we are watching both seems alive and kind of dead.

If you ever wanted to know what Lewis Carroll’s story would look like if it consisted of dolls from Hans Bellmer’s studio arranged by Hieronymus Bosch, then you’re in luck—Švankmajer has you covered. As one can imagine, Alice begins with the eponymous heroine following a rabbit, however this rabbit is taxidermied.

Alice does some of the usual Alice things like visit a tea-drinking Mad Hatter, but something is never quite right. In this case the Mad Hatter is constructed out of wood. Rather than take a colorful Tim Burton approach, Švankmajer strips the Mad Hatter down to resemble a menacing slab of timbre with a hat and an angry looking beard. This is by far the scariest, creepiest and weirdest adaptation of Lewis Carroll ever produced.

8. Throne of Blood

This Japanese retelling of Macbeth by master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa establishes an eerie, uncanny mood. Wailing winds, haunted woods, and mist create a sense of humanity and nature being out of sync. Throne of Blood is not particularly Freudian but Freud was not the only theorist of the uncanny.

Indeed Martin Heidegger argued that the uncanny emanated from a sense that the human being is estranged from, and doesn’t belong in, the world. The human being, according to Heidegger, searches for something to give life meaning, but in so doing, discovers that his life and all human life consists of a violent disruption of the natural order.

The story of Macbeth then is a perfect fit for a story of the human being alienated from the natural world. Kurosawa captures the mood of Macbeth but also Heidegger’s understanding of the uncanny by establishing the uneasy feeling that humans are violent creatures doomed to death with no place to call home in a world that is itself violent. Another great uncanny film in a strangely similar vein is Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

7. Vertigo

Scotty, played by Jimmy Stewart, is recovering from a trauma involving heights. Working as a private investigator, he is tasked to follow a woman named Madeleine. There is an unsettling sense of voyeurism as he develops an attraction to her. However, when she appears to commit suicide Scotty is inconsolable. But later Scotty’s mood improves when he spots a woman that looks identical to Madeline, named Judy.

Scotty forms a relationship with her, but with the image of Madeleine hanging over them, they encounter problems. In a sense this situation recalls Freud who claimed that the doppelgänger is an uncanny occurrence, signifying a sense of threat to one’s identity. Scotty drives Judy to the brink of madness with his terrifying obsession to remodel her to resemble a dead woman.

But the narrative isn’t the only thing uncanny about Vertigo. Hitchcock’s innovative use of color and the “Vertigo effect” where the camera zooms in the opposite direction to the dolly movement create a sense of menace and heightened reality throughout, capturing the eerie confusion of the familiar and the unfamiliar converging.

6. Kitchen Sink

Alison Maclean’s Kitchen Sink channels Méret Oppenheim’s fur-covered tea cup, “Object,” by (dis)placing hair where hair does not belong. The fourteen minute, black and white film follows a woman who discovers a hair in her sink. She pulls at the hair and a disgusting abject hairy dead fetus surfaces—the hair seeming to serve as some sort of repulsive umbilical cord. When water is added to the fetus, it grows to be a man’s size.

The whole film is uncanny but it also evokes Kristeva’s idea of the abject, namely that that which is abject exists between person and object: blood, vomit and in this case, hair. As such, the film perfectly captures uncanny abjection in a domestic setting with incredible black and white cinematography.