Top 10 Creepy and Disturbing Black & White Films
Hollywood was a very interesting place. Film makers could use this to make dreams come to life. But going in for the fear center, is very, very effective.
The 1929 Spanish short film Un Chien Andalou can be very disturbing for mainstream audiences due to its very creepy and terrifying nature. There isn't actually any plot for this film, and it has weird title cards.
A lot of disturbing imagery is in this film, but the most remembered is the opening sequence. A man fiddles with a razor, then goes to a woman sitting in a chair, and slices open her eyeball (offscreen), where we can hear the insides spill out.
Created by Tod Browning, the creator of the iconic film Dracula, the movie Freaks came out in 1932. The story is about a trapeze artist and a strongman who try to kill one of their helpers for inheritance. However, the helpers were all a bunch of "freaks" with visually creepy deformities no one had ever seen.
There was also a deleted scene in the original where the freaks kill the owners. The film was banned in the UK for 30 years.
Maya Deren's most notable movie, Meshes of the Afternoon, was a 1943 short film that would forever be known as a masterpiece. Our main character has a weird day, with events that keep repeating, things in her house that keep moving around, and a black-coated figure with a mirror as a face.
The 1911 film L'Inferno was the first-ever Italian feature film. The film was very popular, grossing 2 million dollars in the United States alone. But maybe it's because the film is very freaking disturbing. The film is based on Dante's Inferno and has scenes depicting hell, with suicides that hang from trees and demons torturing hopeless souls.
Coming out in 1928, The Man Who Laughs was an American production with a German director. It wasn't a horror film, since it was a romance and melodrama, but there was one thing about this film that was a little creepy and disturbing.
The main character was disfigured to forever have a terrifying grin when he was a child, and he worked as a circus freak. Even the Joker was inspired by this character in the movie.
The 1922 Danish film Haxan, for its time, was a visual masterpiece. Presented as a documentary, it suggests that the Salem witches were suffering from mental illness. Then it segues into something scary.
The director plays a terrifying Satan, who lures women from their beds in the middle of the night. There are also depictions of torture, grave robbing, and nudity. Very full-on nudity.
Shot in 1959, this old film didn't make its way to theaters until three years later because the distributors were a little nervous about its content. Some people call it the first gore film. A transplant scientist accidentally decapitates his wife's head but is able to keep her head, or in this case brain, alive.
The movie had some controversies due to scenes that audiences weren't used to seeing, such as a victim having an arm ripped off and the mad scientist having a big chunk of his neck bitten.
Eyes Without a Face had to be edited in the US and barely made it past European censors. The story involves a mad scientist who tries to find his daughter a new face. This film literally shows a scene of the surgical removal of a young woman's face.
The daughter has to wear a mask to hide her faceless, um, face, and when we see it, it is disturbing to the max.
Ah! La Barbe, aka The Funny Shave, was a 1906 short film by Segundo de Chomon, who people called the most significant Spanish filmmaker of the Silent Era. It's about a man preparing to shave when he decides to taste his shaving cream.
This leads to odd, sometimes downright disturbing and creepy hallucinations in his mirror. Finally, after 2 minutes, our character snaps out of it and destroys the mirror.
The Newcomers
Maniac was directed by Dwain Esper, who was not famous for being a film director but for being a smart businessman. The plot of this weird trip of a film is an actor (and I can't say the other thing because it's kid-friendly) who murders his doctor and assumes his identity.
It features small amounts of actual nudity. There is also one very gruesome scene of a live cat's eyeball popping out of its head.
