Any filmmaker can make you groan aloud and cover your face (even Eli Roth), but there are only a handful of really good films that contain moments so intense, frightening and gross that we want to run screaming from the room.
Don't say we didn't warn you. This feature contains scenes that shouldn't be watched by anyone, anywhere.
1. Misery – Hobbling
Kathy Bates's Annie Wilkes walks a fine line between utterly reasonable matron and screaming psychopath, and the Stephen King adaptation leaves you to wonder quite how far she'll go. This far, it turns out.
2. Pink Flamingos – Dog-poop dinner
John Waters has made a career of going further (and weirder) than anyone in the Hollywood mainstream would dare. If that could be summed up in one moment, it is Divine's infamous dog-bomb eating scene. Try not to gag – we dare you.
(NB Divine followed that dog around for three hours before it decided to void its little puppy bowels.)
3. Drive – Head smash
Talk about a gross-out action flick masquerading as arthouse. Watch (if you can) as Carey Mulligan's Irene wonders where she went wrong in her life while her boyfriend reduces a man's head to a stain on the lift floor.
4. American History X – Curb stomp
A film about neo-Nazis was never going to be a teddy-bear's picnic of a movie, but Ed Norton splitting that hoodlum's skull like a piece of fruit has a visceral power that goes beyond anything else. Even thinking about it hurts.
5. Dogtooth – Baby teeth
Ever wondered what will happen if you raise your children to adulthood on a diet of crazy fictions and almost complete isolation? It involves them bashing their own teeth out with a dumbbell.
6. Oldboy – Disentongulation
Oh Dae-su has a rough time (to put it lightly) in Park Chan-wook's intense thriller. 15 years of imprisonment, accidental incest, octopus devouring – it's all very upsetting, but was that a good enough reason for him to cut his own tongue out? We don't think it's going to grow back.
7. Trainspotting – Baby death
It's just a dummy. Remind yourself it's just a dummy, as that poor neglected baby's mother screams in horror at what's happened elsewhere in the flat while she and her friends have been off their faces.
8. 127 Hours – Amputation
The thing about 127 Hours is that you know it's coming for the entire film. That doesn't help – and probably makes it even worse.
9. Team America: World Police – Vomiting
A sequence of a puppet vomiting and vomiting and vomiting shouldn't make us respond so strongly... but it does. Disgusting… and funny?
10. The Green Mile – Botched execution
Who thought they could unite The X Files' Eugene Victor Tooms and the evil Nazi scientist from American Horror Story: Asylum for an execution and it not go horribly, horribly, horribly wrong? It will make you yearn for a nice clean beheading.
11. Affliction – Dental work
We don't know why the "removing your own teeth" thing keeps coming up in movies, but it does. Here, Nick Nolte literally takes things into his own hands with his painful tooth. It's not particularly gruesome, but the sound as it comes free gets us every time.
