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You know the formula, it's as old as Jesus. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl overcome a variety of spirit-breaking hardships and crazy circumstances to be together. Roll credits. A slight variation we bet you're not quite as familiar with? Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy dies in accident. Girl vows to bring boy back to life by getting impregnated with his clone and raising him as her son...with benefits.
No, we couldn't even make up this twisted tale of cross-generational love—the credit goes to Hungarian filmmaker Benedek Fliegauf, writer and director of Womb, a very real movie due out for limited release Friday. In the event you and your lady are fiending for some bad romance this weekend, protagonist Rebecca (Eva Green) and her literal loverboy Tommy (Matt Smith) are guaranteed to deliver big, though we have a hunch that you'll more likely be retching than swooning.
But Green and Smith aren't the only leading lovers to weird us out with their questionable coupling—plenty of other taboo (or straight up bizarre) twosomes have surfaced over the years, threatening to steal their title for Most Likely to Make You Really, Really Uncomfortable. "Who?" you ask. Allow us to make the acquaintance. Before you, The 10 Creepiest Love Stories in Movies.
Written by Lauren Otis (@LaurNado)
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10. Notes on a Scandal (2006)
Being hot for teacher, fantasizing about hooking up with the smokin', glasses-clad temptress that makes it impossible to concentrate on your algebra notes is nothing out of the ordinary. Watching it actually play out on screen, though, between a weathered educator, Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), and her 15-year-old admirer (Andrew Simpson) is enough to put a kibosh on those daydreams fast.
While watching the two get after it over and over again, Letourneau-style, in various clandestine meeting spots can be a true test of your gag reflex, nothing can quite prepare it for the revelation that Sheba Hart is in the midst of an even more nightmarish love triangle than she thought, one in which Dame Judi Dench is the ultimate predator.
9. Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)
Some gentleman woo their on-screen counterparts by presenting them with flowers or thrusting boomboxes playing Peter Gabriel above their heads. On the more rare occasion, however, they'll get a woman's attention by threatening to rape her.
Such is the case in Jersey enthusiast Todd Solondz's 1995 dark comedy Welcome to the Dollhouse, in which middle school bully Brandon McCarthy (Brendan Sexton III) not only attempts the above with protagonist Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo), but proceeds to take it one step further by sketchily calling her house and assigning her a designated time and place to get defiled. Even creepier? She shows up. That's when their love really begins to bloom.
8. My Father the Hero (1994)
We might've ragged on Katherine Heigl in the past for playing the same part over and over, but we'll be the first to admit that her breakout role in My Father the Hero is like nothing we've ever seen. Just when you think you've witnessed every trick in the book when it comes to making love interests jealous in movies, that's when you happen to catch a chance viewing of Heigl's character Nicole, who pulls the unthinkable: trying to appear sophisticated to a guy by pretending that her dad is her lover. Like that wouldn't work on you.
7. American Beauty (1999)
What would you do if you rolled up your shades one day to discover a neighbor standing in their window filming you? We've tried flipping the scenario in our minds, imagining a cute chick in place of Wes Bentley, but even then, it remains pretty terrifying.
Our guess is that, at the very least, you wouldn't turn right around and start dating them. Not the case in Sam Mendes' 1999 Oscar-winner, featuring a similar display in which an insecure daughter (Thora Birch) becomes intrigued by a guy (Bentley) whose infatuation with her, which includes recording her going about her daily routine, would make any normal woman request a restraining order. In the world of Alan Ball, it's a jumping-off point for love.
6. Happiness (1998)
Picking the creepiest love story in Happiness (yet another dark Todd Solondz classic) is almost like being asked to pick James Spader's creepiest role. They're all very, very different, but equally worthy in their own way. In this case, however, in a story about a family in which a happily married pedophile roams free, his sister-in-law fantasizes about being sexually assaulted, and the other is dating Jon Lovitz (or, was—he commits suicide), we're going to run with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who overcomes a lot of competition to be dubbed the movie's most overtly creepy character.
As Allen, the town's resident obscene phone-caller, he gets his kicks on dialing up the film's leading ladies and describing in detail the things he'd like to do to them while engaging in a bit of self-servicing. Little does he know that his call to his sexy neighbor-crush Joy (Lara Flynn Boyle), the aforementioned sister, will result in a challenge to follow through on those bold claims. From there, we witness one of the most awkward relationships in the history of film take flight.
5. Womb (2012)
At least in Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg's "Motherlover" sketch, SNL's esteemed R&B crooners were singing about knocking boots with other people's moms. Not-so-much the case in this German romance flick, which dares to ask, "What are the consequences of giving birth to your dead boyfriend?" As one might guess, there are quite a few, and the majority of them are disturbing.
When geologist Rebecca decides to take advantage of recent advancements in science and resurrect her man by bringing him into the world all over again—as her child—the mother-and-son relationship gets progressively complicated as he ages. Imagine your mom getting unnaturally jealous of your girlfriends, or holding those caresses out for a few extra seconds too long. Yeah, we'd rather not, either.
4. Audition (1999)
You can tell that a character's future is looking bleak when his story kicks off with his friends organizing mock auditions to help him scout a wife. When he-widow and producer Shigehiko Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) meets the gorgeous, girlish Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), he's relieved to call off the dogs because he's found the woman of his dreams.
Unfortunately for him, he knows nothing of her shady past, which includes dismembered former acquaintances, dead-end references, and mysterious sacks making moves around her apartment. Before long, she's much closer to a girl that'd make cameos in our nightmares.
The circumstances under which they meet make the twosome uncomfortable to watch long before Yamazaki's true colors are revealed, but once the torture porn gets going, the flick breaks new ground in gross.
3. Crash (1996)
No, we aren't talking about the tear-jerking flick about racial tension between Angelenos (though Matt Dillon succeeds in being pretty creepy in that movie). In this case, the honors go to David Cronenberg's homage to car crash-inspired sex and the people that love it.
Among them is James Ballard (played by James Spader, who you should know by now is a rock star when it comes to portraying weirdos), a man who discovers he has an unshakable new fetish after getting into a head-on collision with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) and her husband, who is killed in the crash.
While the movie revolves primarily around the affair between the two and their discovery of other like-minded fetishists that get off on bumper-to-bumper action, Ballard's strange new turn-on ends up being, against expectation, just the thing to breathe life back into his marriage.
2. Boxing Helena (1993)
Kidnapping Helena, Amputating Helena, Forcing Helena to Watch Me Have Sex—there are plenty of titles that would've given audiences a more accurate warning as to what Jennifer Chambers Lynch (David Lynch's daughter, no surprises there) had in store with her highly criticized 1993 rom-dram. Which would be a dude amputating the limbs of his love interest to hold her captive in his pad. His mission? Make her return his affections. Because, you know, that always works.
1. The Night Porter (1974)
If watching the BDSM-fest that was Secretary made you flinch, try factoring in a concentration camp and you roughly have an idea of Italian director Liliana Cavani's hugely divisive The Night Porter. In place of your typical star-crossed lovers, the film introduces us to Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) and Maximilian (Dirk Bogarde), a survivor and an S.S. officer who cross paths at a hotel a little over a decade after WWII, bringing back memories of Maximilian's torment of Lucia at the camp, and her evolution into his sex slave.
But instead of bolting out the door, what does Lucia do? Homegirl decides to stick around, encouraging her husband to keep it movin', and picks right back up where she left off with her Nazi boo. And you thought your ex was freaky.
