23 Disturbing, Brutal Movies Based on Real-Life Atrocities
List Rules Vote based on which true stories are the most terrifying
Wait, what? Yes, indeed. Believe it or not, Hostel began life as a documentary about an underground extreme thrill-seeking practice director Eli Roth discovered online whereby participants pay $10,000 to kill someone. The practice was supposedly not illegal because people volunteered to be murdered—extremely poor people from rural southeast Asia sacrificed themselves so their families could have money to change their lives.
Roth set aside the idea of making a doc when he realized that people who make a business of killing might, you know, kill him if he ruined their business. And so was born Hostel, the popular zenith of torture porn, which, according to some, also serves as an allegory for relations between America and the rest of the world immediately following 9/11.
The word Auschwitz in and of itself evokes enough tragedy and dread for a film with that title to land itself on this list. But that's not all. Auschwitz was directed by Uwe Boll, one of the least subtle—and by many accounts, least talented—filmmakers of all time. Before seeing the film, critic Sophie Albers wrote "The words Auschwitz and Uwe Boll in one breath rightly leads one to fear the worst.” She wasn't wrong.
The film depicts Jews having their teeth pulled out while being shoved into ovens, the massacre of children, and a cameo from Boll himself as an SS officer standing nonchalantly outside a gas chamber as the people within pound on the door trying to escape. A metaphor, perhaps?
The Strangers, a sleeper hit in 2008, provides enough squeamish, disturbing home invasion material to please genre fans but make others think twice about sitting through the film. The movie adds an interesting twist to the “based on true events” label—it seems to be an amalgamation of three true stories: (A) the Keddie Cabin murders; (B) the Manson family murders; and, (C) something that happened to the director as a kid. Watching the film with this in mind makes it all the more difficult to sit through.
