Funny Games
Some people might have been fooled by the title of this movie when they sat down to watch it, but there’s not much to laugh at when two young guys arrive at a vacation home to hold a family hostage and torture them with games like “how good y’all movin’ with a broken leg?” and “guess how alive your dog is right now?”
While those games are upsetting enough, the pair’s knowing winks, glances, and questions to the camera break the fourth wall, making viewers partly complicit in watching the horrors play out. Director Michael Haneke doesn’t consider Funny Games a horror film; rather, it’s supposed to be a pointed message about violence in media. Still, people usually do feel like they’ve watched one, and for a long time after.
The Exorcist
There have been about a trillion possession movies since The Exorcist, but back in the early 1970s, depicting the demonic possession of a child was shocking. Controversy raged on for years after its debut, with the movie’s content said to have caused nausea, fainting, and even spiritual crises in those who had lapsed in their faith.
But all publicity is good publicity, as they say, and wild reactions to The Exorcist continued. In fact, video copies of the movie were withdrawn from circulation in the U.K. as late as 1988. It wasn’t until 1999 that it was once again granted a home video release, such was the furore over its “lenient” rating and its controversial story of an exorcism performed on a young girl by two priests. Don’t even get us started on whether the film itself is cursed!
Faces of Death
This mondo horror from 1978 pretends to be a documentary, but although some of the footage in Faces of Death shows actual humans dying from a distance, much of the movie is fake, with other queasy real-life footage purchased from the likes of random news stations and medical researchers and reappropriated in a mockumentary context. Despite many having this knowledge, the film sparked a moral debate over exploitative movies and their worthiness.
If you were a kid at the time, you often heard whispers in the playground about Faces of Death. Apparently, it showed real, grisly crimes, and it had scarred the kid who watched it for life. If you happened to hear those whispers in the U.K., you may have also been aware that it was a banned “video nasty,” which may have conjured gory imaginings far beyond the movie’s actual content.
