10 Movies Like A Serbian Film for Hardcore Horror Fans

We enjoy seeing violent things happen on TV. A lot of people enjoy movies like A Serbian Film where other people are having fun, from the antics in Looney Tunes to the Avengers beating Thanos up in a four-quadrant film. Maybe it’s a way to deal with our own problems through someone else’s pain; maybe the fact that we know it’s all fake gives us “permission” to enjoy it; maybe it’s because the stakes are so low, both in and out of the text. I’m not here to fault people who like this kind of material; I’m one of them. What I’m here to look at instead is what happens when directors push this dial too far.

A certain type of film is interested in exploring the extreme, the vulgar, the illegal, and the upsetting. A type of movie that sticks with you by showing powerful images and exploring the basest and most evil parts of human nature. These are the kinds of emotions that might be connected to the “sanitized” violence we tolerate on TV and movies (oops, I guess I’m admitting I’m guilty here!). There are movies here that are just meant to shock you for no reason, and there are movies that have real messages at their core. All of them will bother you.

That being said, here is a list of the scariest movies ever made, ones that will leave you speechless and scared. Be careful when you watch.

10 Movies Like A Serbian Film:

1. Antichrist (2009):

Is it a deep, thought-provoking art house movie or a sick, evil “torture porn” horror movie? The movie Antichrist by Lars von Trier could be the most controversial on this list because it has strong reasons for both sides. After the tragic death of their young son, “He” (Willem Dafoe) and “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg) hide out in their cabin in the woods, called “Eden,” to deal with their loss. On the one hand, Antichrist is a stark and emotional look at loss, a highly symbolic understanding of Original Sin, and a fight between reason and the unknown. On the other side, there’s a doe with a stillborn fawn halfway out of her, a red fox that talks and slits its own throat, a violent act at the base of a dead tree with bodies in its roots, a piece of wood smashed into a groin, a handjob with a bloody “happy ending,” and, in the movie’s most famous scene, an anus that gets cut off. Be scared by the violent and sexy scenes, and stay for the smart stuff. — Lloyd Fought

2. August Underground’s Mordum (2003):

Toetag Pictures, run by Fred Vogel, is an independent studio and company that makes horror movies. They are known for making low-budget, experimental movies. The trio of violent, aggressively nihilistic found footage films called August Underground is what they want to say about themselves. In all three movies, a group of serial killers are found to be traveling together and filming each other torturing and killing helpless people. It looks like all three movies were shot in a rough, low-fidelity way, making them look as much like snuff pictures as anyone has made in a narrative feature film. All three movies have realistic effects that make your stomach turn and actors who are ready to do crazy, crazy things to each other. That being said, August Underground’s Mordum, the second part, might be the most horrifying of the whole bunch. Body parts are just anonymous chances for gross and disgusting acts of corruption and dissection, and the Toetag team is happy to put it all in our faces. Each scene is more horrifyingly cruel than the last. If you look past the chaos of the content at face value, is there a point? It seems like Toetag doesn’t want to ask that question.

3. Eraserhead (1977):

It’s the first movie by David Lynch, who is known for making people have bad dreams and studying the weather. For me, it’s the most like living in a real-life nightmare in a movie. Lynch tells the story of Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a weak and sensitive man who lives in a strange, post-industrialized, post-apocalyptic society. He does this with stark black and white photos and sound design that is incredibly scary. His life is turned upside down by the appearance (or threat) of marriage, raising children, sexual activity, and even death. Lynch deals with these problems in two ways: with a style that makes your skin crawl and with no style at all. The mood of this movie is unmatched, but many of the haunting images happen without any comment on how sad or strange they are. All of this leads to the reveal of a child’s face, which is still debatable because of how Lynch may have made it. Eraserhead somehow makes the things in our minds that we can’t say talkable by barely talking at all. Join me in singing, “Everything is fine in heaven…”

4. The Human Centipede 2 (2011):

When Tom Six’s 2009 movie The Human Centipede came out, it had a loud plot that became famous right away, not just among serious movie fans but also with regular people. What would happen if you put people’s mouths on other people’s butts to make a “human centipede”? If that idea makes you laugh, I wouldn’t blame you. The first movie’s strangely bright color scheme and Dieter Laser’s likeable performance play on the easygoing, darkly funny nature of it all. But The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), the movie’s follow-up, hit any sense of ease with a car and crushed it. Oh, and yes, that is a hint at something that happens in the movie.

Drawing from Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Human Centipede 2 is centered on Laurence R. Harvey’s incredibly dedicated performance as a man who is suffering and is obsessed with — get ready — the Tom Six movie The Human Centipede. Harvey makes the most audacious meta-choice when he chooses to make his own human centipede out of his own very, very amateurish “medical supplies.” He’s developed a taste for gory blood after killing his abusive mother in a very graphic way. Being on top of this centipede?

Get ready for Ashlynn Yennie as “Ashlynn Yennie, star of The Human Centipede.” Even though Six’s way of wrapping his mythology on top of itself is interesting and self-critical in a way that you wouldn’t expect, he mostly uses this to show unspeakable cruelty in sickeningly greasy black-and-white. The “skull-crushing” scene involves someone you don’t want to see it happen to, barbed wire is used in a sexually violent way, and the human centipede is, um, “eating” in a scene that is disgusting. For “better” or “worse,” The Human Centipede 2 feels like the movie that everyone thought Part 1 would be.

5. Inside (2007):

During the New French Extremity movement in the 2000s, many disturbing films were made, such as Martyrs, Trouble Every Day, High Tension, and others. Of all the films I’ve seen that brutally show what is wrong, Inside (known in France as À l’intérieur) is the one that sticks with me the most. The story is way too simple: Sarah (Alysson Paradis), who just lost her husband, is pregnant and lives by herself. Then, a woman named “La Femme” (Béatrice Dalle), who is crazy about the idea that Sarah’s baby is hers, breaks into her house. She’s going to get it any way she can. As a result, a very pregnant woman goes through a very bad, physical, and visceral experience of extreme violence and self-defense, mixed with aggressive psychological triggers of trauma, entitlement, and parenting. Even now, the last few seconds of this tight, scary movie make me shiver.

6. Man Bites Dog (1992):

Out of all the scary movies I’ve seen, only one has ever made me skip over a scene because it made me feel bad. “It could happen to you” is what the Belgians call the movie “Man Bites Dog.” The black-and-white mockumentary, which is another classic found-footage horror movie, is all about how we consume and worship violent acts and their “fun” sense of fear, especially in the news media. A group of reporters follows a man named Ben, played by the bright but unsettling Benoît Poelvoorde. He’s cute and funny, and he’s also a cruel serial killer who kills a lot of people. With an air of objectivity, the reporters want to film him and his increasingly aggressive crimes. But quietly, sneakily, and uncomfortably, the journalists can’t help but take part in his crimes. They are guilty of indicting not only news outlets around the world, but also us for wanting to watch and laugh (yes, laugh; the movie is often darkly funny). All of this builds up to a scene in the middle that shows killing and the damage it causes in such a casual, graphic, and without guilt way that I wish I could skip it in my mind.

7. Men Behind the Sun (1988):

The horrible things that happen in war, shown in terrible detail. Men Behind the Sun, a movie by Chinese director T. F. Mou, shows how Japanese military leaders used sickeningly grotesque special effects to do horrible trials on Chinese and Siberian prisoners during World War II. Besides the clear physical problems caused by the movie, it also hits hard on mental issues, both inside and outside of the text. That’s what Men Behind the Sun wants to do: it wants to show the limits of patriotism and the shifting scale of nationalism; it wants to send the important lesson that war is and always will be hell. But it also wants to be a horror movie that takes advantage of people and has gory effects that push the limits. Is it possible to have it both ways? Does it deserve to? Is it still worth our time if it works? Are there other, more pleasant ways to think about and digest the horrible things that people do to each other during war? Or is this really the only way for blunt words to stick in our minds?

8. The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007):

You might not want to watch The Poughkeepsie Tapes if you think of mockumentaries as funny movies like This is Spinal Tap or What We Do in the Shadows. Again, though, I’m not judging you because you’re reading this article. You’re probably okay with the highly disturbing serial killer twist in the genre. At the start of the movie, cops raid a house in Poughkeepsie, New York, and find 800 videotapes that serial killer Edward Carver (Ben Messmer) had made. The collection is like a library of pictures of the murders he did, starting with Carver kidnapping his target and ending with the cruel death and cutting up the body. The problem is that Carver is not a fool, and he never appears in his movies without being masked. This means that police have no clue where to find him.

These “snuff film” scenes work well because they make people wonder if they are real, which makes them even scarier. One shows Carver raped and killed an eight-year-old girl that he took from her home. Carver picks up a couple, uses chloroform to knock out the woman, performs a Caesarean section on her, puts her husband’s severed head inside her womb, and then wakes her up to film her response. This video is much more disturbing. It makes you wonder who is more sick: the serial killer in the movie or the people who came up with ideas like the one you just read for the movie. Hey, Poughkeepsie police, remember to be nice and play it back. — Lloyd Fought

9. The Snowtown Murders (2011):

The Snowtown Murders is based on a real series of killings that happened in Adelaide, Australia. It’s a painfully slow burn that looks at broken small-town communities through the lens of decay. It’s a cross between Harmony Korine and Michael Haneke, and it’s director Justin Kurzel’s fierce first movie. To get rid of the clear threat of pedophiles and homosexuals, which he is happy to mix up in a toxic way, John Bunting (a terrifying Daniel Henshall) hires a group of poor people, including Jamie Vlassakis (a heartbreaking Lucas Pittaway), a victim of sexual violence, to find, torture, and kill those who deserve it. Kurzel’s frame is both graphically violent and disturbingly stylish. It constantly drives a screwdriver into the viewer’s guts through both overt and covert fear. From a psychological point of view, Snowtown never lets anyone off the hook. Not the pedophiles who are being killed, not the watchers who might find that action satisfying in some way, not Jamie giving in to this new attractive person, and most definitely not John Bunting himself. It’s horrific. The movie shows the worst parts of people in a way that will make you feel sorry for them and then make you want to take a shower.

10. Terrifier 2 (2022):

It has the mood of the horror movies you loved in the 1980s and has all the bloody violence and gore you need. There is a plot in Terrifier 2, but does it really matter? Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), who was thought to be dead after the events of the first movie, comes back to life just as a doctor (Cory DuVal) starts to look into his body, just like Jason and Freddy did before him. The coroner’s head is smashed in, one eye is gouged out, and then the rest of his head is hit over and over with a heavy object. The Terrifier movies are known for their creative and deeply funny deaths. Terrifier 2 is one of only a few movies that can say it made people throw up. In one extremely dark scene, Art mutilates Allie (Casey Hartnett) in horrible detail. He starts by stabbing her in the eye, then cuts into her back, breaks off an arm and then a hand, pours bleach and salt into her wounds, and finally pulls off her face. She’s still living through it all. If that doesn’t bother you, you’ll be glad to know that Hollywood studios turned down Terrifier 3 because it has a very violent opening scene where a young kid comes down the stairs to see “Santa,” but it’s not Santa. The movie will still be released on its own, though. — Lloyd Fought

Conclusion:

This is probably not the kind of scary movie you’re looking for, since the last girl gets away through a broken window. This is the place for scary movies that stay with you long after the screen goes dark—the kind that whispers in your ear while you’re trying to sleep.

Movies like A Serbian Film make us think about how we feel about violence, morals, and even stories themselves. There are some provocations that are beautiful and some that are gross. Some people don’t see the line. But they all need to be talked about.

So, be careful as you go. Not only are these movies fun to watch, but they’re also psychic minefields. You’ve found your poison if you want to be scared, upset, or maybe even changed forever.Also Read: 10 Best Survival Movies Like The Revenant to Watch Now