The Most Disturbing Movie Moments Seen at SXSW So Far

When film buffs think of "Sundance movies," they picture talky, slow-paced dramas about emo people doing emo things. Thoughts about the SXSW Film Festival, however, aren't so vanilla.

Reflecting the unpretentious party atmosphere of its location, the great city of Austin, TX, SXSW's yearly lineup of new independent cinema tends to the bizarre. The fest's programmers pride themselves on discovering filmmakers who take more risks and follow fewer beaten paths. Which is why, this year, there's one movie about a German girl who's into rubbing her genitals on dirty public restroom toilet seats (Wetlands) and another about an Australian guy who stashes drugs in his rectum (The Mule). (OK, that second one is pretty true to drug-mule life, but still.)

And those are two of the best-received films here at SXSW so far, proving its standing as a place where movie critics and viewers alike are down to get a little weird. A whole lot weird, in some cases.

Now that the film festival is almost over, it's a good time to bring you up to speed with just how sick and twisted the 2014 edition has been. Brace yourselves, folks—these are the most disturbing movie moments seen at SXSW so far.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

For more of Complex Pop Culture's SXSW coverage, click here.

Seen in: Honeymoon

Being part of SXSW's Midnighters lineup, Honeymoon, writer-director Leigh Janiak's debut feature, has been perceived as a horror movie, which it is, kind of. Really though, it's a psychologically disturbing and nuanced piece of surprising science fiction. A newlywed couple heads to a backwoods cottage for their honeymoon; the wife disappears one night, turns up naked in the woods, and gradually turns into something else. Without giving away everything about the movie, let's just say the culprits responsible for her brief disappearance aren't exactly earthbound.

We never see what they did to her, either, but the film's most mind-scarring scene hints at something darkly sexual. Paul (Harry Treadaway) can't handle Bea's (Rose Leslie) changing demeanor anymore; he snaps, frantically trying to bring her back to normality, partially through trying to arouse her. His hand goes down south and comes out covered in some kind of web-like gook. And then it goes back in and comes out holding what looks like the world's biggest slug. And then the hideous thing moves.

Too late for an annulment?

Seen in: Starry Eyes

Starry Eyes is one of the more impressive horror movies here at SXSW. As a satire of Hollywood starlet ambition, it's intelligent and often funny; as a horror show, it evolves from moments of psychedelia into an exhibition of grisly carnage. Yet it's one of the film's blood-free moments that leaves the deepest mark.

Sara Walker (Alexandra Essoe) is an aspiring actress who can't catch a break in Los Angeles. She's also mentally unstable, the byproduct of self-deprecation and depression over watching other land movie roles as she repeatedly bombs auditions. After one especially traumatic audition, Sara retreats into a grungy bathroom stall and copes with the defeat the only way she knows how: by yanking clumps of hair out of her head. Essoe sells the pain and desperation like a pro. It's disturbing on an emotional level, unlike everything that happens in Starry Eyes' third act, like...

Seen in: Starry Eyes

…the all-out homicide ride Sara embarks on once she's completely succumbed to a Hollywood cult's career-making dark arts. Murdering through her close circle of friends, she gives one of her gal-pals the film's supreme moment of gore. After grabbing a dumbbell off the girl's bedroom floor, Sara straddles the sleeping friend on her bed and, use as the unlucky lady wakes up, bashes her skull in with the free weight. As in, smashes it into the girl's cranium a good seven or eight times, and you see every bit of extreme contact.

Seen in: Among the Living

French filmmakers Julien Maury and Alexandra Bustillo clearly have something against pregnancy. How else can you explain this shit?

In their exceptional 2007 film Inside, 80 minutes' worth of a psycho woman trying to take the baby out of a pregnant woman's belly culminates in the crazy lady cutting the other woman's stomach open with scissors. And in the visceral, no-holds-barred opening scene of their new movie, Among the Living, Maury and Bustillo return to that un-motherly territory. There's a pregnant middle-aged woman who's just treated her husband's head like a batting tee with a bat, and she's ready to hurt her unborn child. With a big-ass knife, she stabs herself directly in the belly, and to make sure the little fetus is a wrap, she then slices her own throat.

Seen in: Among the Living

The villain in Maury and Bustillo's Among the Living is Klarence, a deformed, tall albino whose father was exposed to hazardous radiation of some kind while serving in the military before Klarence's conception (At least that's what Among the Living's murky opening sequence alludes to). Not ones to skimp out on the ghastly visuals, the filmmakers eventually show Klarence in the buff, and it isn't pretty.

Like his bald head (which makes his pointy ears all the more prominent), he's completely hairless, right down to his groin, where… Well, picture a stuffed mushroom, but instead of crab meat or something agreeable, there's a tiny penis tucked into the pouch. And then picture that stuffed mushroom running around and trying to murder little kids.

Seen in: Among the Living

While in his birthday suit, Klarence abducts a family's baby from its crib. Knowing that you're watching a movie by the sick bastards responsible for Inside, it's reasonable to assume that you'll eventually see said baby hacked up somewhere, but, thankfully, the filmmakers aren't that fucked up. OK, they're a little bit fucked up—the baby turns up in a running washing machine, crying as the mother and brother try to pry open the sealed-shut door. Maybe the French don't wash their infants in kitchen sinks like we Americans do?

Seen in: Wetlands

If you're ever given the chance to see the German film Wetlands, please do so, but be warned: It's unlike anything you've ever seen before, and it will also make you nauseous.

Frankly, the entire movie could've made it onto this list, but we'll single out a couple of moments here. The first one, truthfully, is gratuitous and adds nothing to the otherwise intriguing narrative, that of a unhygienic young woman, Helen (an amazing Carla Juri), who's trying to cope with her parents' divorce by doing one disgusting thing after another. That being the film's plot, it's tough to understand why director David Wnendt felt the need to spend five minutes having Helen tell her friend a story about four vulgar pizzeria employees.

The gist of the story: Two girls order a pizza and keep calling back asking why the food's late, so the four guys place their pizza on a table, stand around it in a kind of square formation, and whack off onto it. Yup, ejaculate toppings with no extra charge. Let that, pun intended, sink in.

Seen in: Wetlands

And now for a Wetlands moment that actually does have some bearing on the plot. In fact, it's pivotal.

Giving the whole context here would spoil the film, so let's color in broad strokes. Early into the film, Helen seriously injures herself while shaving her pubic region. For most of Wetlands, she's hospitalized, and she wants to keep it that way. How far is she willing to go to stay in the hospital room? When it's time for her to go home, she desperately re-injures her vagina, but not with a razor like before. This time, Helen sits down on a spoke poking out of the leg of her bed…slowly. And, yes, the camera remains positioned directly in front of the impact zone.

i nearly upchucked my Shiner Bock beer.

Seen in: 13 Sins

The weakest of this year's SXSW Midnighters is 13 Sins, an ineffective remake of the Thai film 13: Game of Death that jacks one of its foreign predecessor's best sight gags.

Mark Webber plays a financially strapped guy who randomly finds himself playing a sadistic game. The rules: If he does each of the 13 challenges presented to him by the mysterious man who keeps calling his cell phone, cash will immediately be deposited into his bank account. The wildest challenge of all takes place on an open highway—he's supposed to run a thin, nearly invisible visible wire across the road for a group of motorcyclists to drive through. Which they do, causing numerous decapitations and other bodily dismemberments at high speeds.

Seen in: Oculus

If there's one SXSW Midnighter that deserves to be seen blindly, without any pre-screening spoilers of any kind, it's Oculus, a head-spinning horror film that we saw and loved in Toronto last September. But since the recently released trailer shows this scene, the damage is already done. And it needs to be any list documenting the most disturbing movie moments from this year's SXSW.

In a nutshell, Oculus centers around the Lasser Glass, a haunted mirror that alters the reality of whomever looks into it. One such unfortunate character is played by Dr. Who veteran Karen Gillan, whose legacy as a Who Girl could get some competition from the title "That Actress Who Ate the Lightbulb in That Horror Movie." Because, well, that's what she does, thinking she's biting into a apple and looking in horror as glass crunches in her mouth and blood oozes out of it.