Directed by Michael Haneke • 1997 • Austria
Starring Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch
Michael Haneke’s most notorious provocation, FUNNY GAMES spares no detail in its depiction of the agony of a bourgeois family held captive at their vacation home by a pair of white-gloved young men. In a series of escalating “games,” the sadistic duo subject their victims to unspeakable physical and psychological torture over the course of a night. A home-invasion thriller in which the genre’s threat of bloodshed is made stomach-churningly real, the film ratchets up shocks even as its executioners interrupt the action to address the audience, drawing queasy attention to the way that cinema milks pleasure from pain and stokes our appetite for atrocity. With this controversial treatise on violence and entertainment, Haneke issued a summation of his cinematic philosophy, implicating his audience in a spectacle of unbearable cruelty.
Up Next in Horror
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Strip Nude for Your Killer
Directed by Andrea Bianchi • 1975 • Italy
Starring Edwige Fenech, Nino Castelnuovo, Femi BenussiA spate of highly sexualized murders is rocking a prestigious Milanese fashion house. Ambitious photographer Magda (Edwige Fenech) and her on-off boyfriend, love rat Carlo (Nino Castelnuovo), team u...
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Diabolique
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1955 • France
Starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul MeurisseBefore PSYCHO, PEEPING TOM, and REPULSION, there was DIABOLIQUE. This thriller from Henri-Georges Clouzot, which shocked audiences in Europe and the U.S., is the story of two women, the fragil...
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The Cremator
Directed by Juraj Herz • 1969 • Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovak New Wave iconoclast Juraj Herz’s terrifying, darkly comic vision of the horrors of totalitarian ideologies stars a supremely chilling Rudolf Hrušínský as the pathologically morbid Karel Kopfrkingl, a crematorium manager in 1930s Prague ...
