Horror Movies People Famously Walked Out Of

The 2006 remake of the Wes Craven original, The Hills Have Eyes gave its audience something truly horrific to contemplate. Not only do the mutant cannibals attack the family of travelers in the middle of the desert, but the baby and dogs along for the ride are never safe from harm either. With rape, grotesque mutations, and a whole lot of blood and gore, it just couldn’t sit well with some people. For some, just the sight of one of the film’s characters, Big Brain, a grotesque man confined to a chair with an almost gelatinous head a bulbous throat, was a bit much.

This one is easy to understand once you know the plot: four men agree to marry each other’s daughters and recruit 8 boys, some of whom solely for their large penises, and then they kidnap 18 other young people and take them to a palace. Things do not go pleasantly.  Commonly listed as one of the most controversial films ever made, and making the depraved and “best worst” lists, Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, is a film adaption of the novel by Marquis de Sade (You know, the man we named Sadism after). It takes place in the last days of Benito Mussolini’s reign over Italy and will really convince you of how wrong fascism is.

For some people, cannibalism is their sexual limit, and we respect that, so some audience members were not pleased when they watched 2001’s Trouble Every Day just to see an actress have sex with a man and then devolve into eating him and savagely tearing out his tongue with her teeth. A man also starts eating people and by then it’s hard to imagine that this film started with a nice honeymoon between a perfectly normal couple. The director, Claire Denis, has said she didn’t mean for it to be an audience-walk-out kind of movie saying “I don’t think it’s explicit. And the cannibalism? It is how a kiss becomes a bite.”

Speaking of bites: 2015’s Bite, about a young bachelorette on vacation in Costa Rico who is bitten by a strange bug and promptly begins to turn into a grotesque creature herself. The makers of the film knew the effect it might have on audiences, so during its debut, the Fantasia Film Festival opted to hand out specialty branded Bite barf bags. I guess that just wasn’t enough for some viewers who left the theatre instead.

Famed movie reviewer Roger Ebert couldn’t sit through this one. 1970’s Caligula, though not strictly a horror film, stunned audiences with its unstimulated sex, brutal violence, and cruelty. Caligula was known for his brutality and sex appetite, but seeing them on screen from Penthouse was just too much for most people. Despite this, it became somewhat of a cult classic for those who could watch the entire 2.5 hours run time.

Another cult classic film, despite generally unfavorable critic reviews, is the 2008 New French Extremity film Martyrs . As a revenge film of sorts, violence is expected, but as the genre goes, the usual violence is just the beginning. It’s merciless in its violence and doesn’t hold back as two young women are on the hunt for blood after one of them survived a year of torture at the hands of strangers. What follows was way more than some viewers could take. It was remade for Americans in 2015 to even worse reviews, so if you want to take this trip, go for the French.

Baskin is a surreal Turkish film from 2015 that really dug its heels into a horrific fantasy setting. Following five police officers as they essentially descend into hell. There is plenty of violence and lurid gore, not to mention its surreal and back-and-forth plot which made the story difficult to follow, and therefore the redeeming qualities, hard to find for some. The film ends with a Black Mass of demons and other horrific creatures torturing the men in absolute disgusting ways while a strange little man espouses philosophical nonsense. It’s amazing and a must see for any true gore hound out there.