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 it's very creepy and terrifying nature. There isn't actually any plot for this film with weird title cards in it. A lot of disturbing imagery are in this film, but the most remembered is the opening sequence. A man fiddles with a razor, and then goes to a women sitting in a chair, with the man slicing open her eyeball (offscreen) where we can hear the insides spill out.
Created by Tod Browning, the creator of the iconic film Dracula, the following year he made the movie, he would release Freaks, that came out in 1932. The story is about a Trapeze artist and a strongmen who tries to kill one of their helpers for inheritance, but the helpers where all a bunch of "freaks" with visually creepy deformities no one has ever seen. Also, there was a deleted scene of the original where the freaks kill the owners. The film also 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 is having 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 of the film being very freaking disturbing. The film is based on Dante's Inferno and has scenes of depictions of *H-Word*, 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. And even the Joker was inspired by this freak in this movie.
The 1922 Danish Film Haxan, for it's time, was a visual masterpiece. Being presented as a documentary, it suggests that the Salem Witches were suffering from mental illness. But then it segues into something scary. The director plays as a terrifying Satan, which lures women from their sleep in 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 it's way to theaters until three years later, because the distributors were a little nervous about it's content in it, with some people calling it the 1st gore film. A transplant scientist accidently decapitates his wife's head off, but is able to keep her head, or in this case brain, alive. The movie had some controversies due to having scenes in the movie that audiences weren't used to seeing, such as a victim having it's arm ripped right 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 pass through Europe censors. The story involves around 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 women's face. And the daughter has to wear a mask to hide her unfaced, 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 Chamon, who people called the most significant Spanish film maker of the Silent Era. It's about a man preparing to shave when he decides to take a taste of his shaving cream. This would lead to sometimes odd to downright disturbing and creepy hallucinations in his mirror. Finally after 2 minutes, our character snaps out of it and destroys the mirror.
Maniac was directed by Dwain Esper, who was not famous for being a film director, but for being a smart business man. The plot of this weird trip of a film is a actor (And I can't say the other thing because, kid friendly) who murders his doctor and assumes his identity. It features small amounts of actual nudity. And there is one very gruesome scene of a live cat's eyeball popping out of his head.
