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[The Black Cauldron]

An anime-geek friend of mine could probably come up with a whole bunch of Japanese horror stuff, and there are western adult animated films like Felidae, Heavy metal and basically all movies ever created by Ralph Bakshi,
but to me personally, that kind of stuff doesn't really count as particularly messed up since those works were always intended to be dark and weird and aimed at adults (and edgelord teens) who knew what they were watching and presumably old enough to handle it. To me, the most messed up cartoons will always be the ones aimed at children, and some of the worst were made by none other than Disney.

I'm not kidding, The Black Cauldron was their first attempt at a PG movie and it was full of undead creatures and horrific imagery, and and one of the deleted scenes, whilst having unfinished animation,
is easily the goriest thing ever animated. I'm not kidding, you really shouldn't open the link at work, unless your workplace is an abattoir. 

And then there's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which I've already posted on before, but it's just that dark and strange of a movie that I can't resist posting this again;

This is a scene from Schindler's List, a holocaust movie that was rated from age 15 and upwards;

Now compare it against the beginning of this scene from the hunchback, a movie rated G, deemed fun for the whole family:

Seriously, that story based on a Victor Hugo novel centered on religious persecution, racism and attempted rape was turned into a Disney Musical, with one song featuring murder and attempted infanticide, a jaunty song where the comedy relief almost have the heroes lynched, complete with having them placed in gallows with nooses around their necks, and a villain song number literally about the villain's desire to murder the heroine if he can't force himself on her, all of it complete with tie-in toys!

But if I may post runner's up, whilst not that scary, it was still weird enough that I spent years thinking this cartoon was just a fever-dream my childhood brain had cooked up:

My Little Pony used to be HEAVY METAL AF.

Also, if you want some vintage lunacy, I can recommend the short film Swing You Sinner's by Max Fleicher (of Betty Boop fame):

So, how do any of these stand against INHUMANOIDS?

It does look good. I wonder if I can keep up my record of not having seen any DC film since Dark Knight Rises.

The Snyder films are pretty bad, but Wonder Woman was great and Aquaman is proabably one of the best superhero movies I've ever seen. Seriously, Aquaman is definitively something you should watch.

The Joker certainly looks interesting, though the moment I saw him have a love interest I got worried they'll have her death be what triggers the Joker's final transformation.
It plays into the whole Women in Refrigerators trope, and I just feel that even if you personally don't have a problem with female side characters only existing in order to get hurt in order to give male protagonists something to revenge/angst over, I still wish people would call this out just for the sake of how overused it is. Like, I've seen this so often in action movies that whenever I see the hero have a happy relationship at the start of the movie, I'm able to tell exact when his girlfriend is going to die, who is going to kill her and how the hero is going to react to it, because this trope is just that overused and it simply kills all suspense for me.

I just hope that this movie will take a different direction, because I'd much rather see a man's gradual decent into madness and embracing chaos on philosophical grounds rather than yet another comic book character who's pushed into action because of a dead love interest or similar trauma, and there are so many different things you could do with a character like the Joker, and in my opinion at least, the Joker is the most interesting when the writers give him a certain degree of ambiguity to his actions and morality.

Daylight saving time grinds my gears.
I suppose adjusting the clock one hour back/forth once each autumn and spring made sense in the olden days when the only light source available were fireplaces and expensive candles,
but in today's industrial society with electric light available for everyone, all it does is throw everyone off-schedule twice a year and cause pointless stress and confusion.

[a Disney musical aimed at small children]

No that's fair, Blondbraid. I guess I wasn't reading into Frollo's words as much as I suppose some might. There's obviously good reason it was upsetting to you as a kid.

Lol that second scene you posted! I've never actually seen the movie, so yeah I can see how that scene would be scary/upsetting (plus the dramatic music and clear terror on the woman's face is no help). Maybe The Hunchback has a place in this list of most F'ed up movies? 

Yeah, it's pretty obvious what Frollo's intentions are once you see the whole movie in full and he even gets a song number where he explicitly states that he will have her, or he will kill her if she refuses him,
and that's just a minor part of all the horrible things happening in the movie, because the entire story is based on a Victor Hugo novel that revolves around religious persecution, sexual abuse and bigotry.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame might not be all that gruesome or explicit in it's imagery compared to most of the other movies people here have mentioned, but it should definitively be counted as a seriously F'ed up movie in the context of being a Disney musical aimed at small children, complete with tie-in toys. Like, I legitimately had a Barbie doll looking like Esmeralda I played with as a kid that I dug up of my old toybox just now:

Like, I can't imagine anyone making tie-in toys for Schindler's list or Apocalypse Now other than as ironic collector's items for film nerds, yet Disney somehow thought that The Hunchback of Notre Dame was suitable for toddlers.

I think it's F'ed up that a movie featuring this scene was rated from age 15 and upwards;

And a movie featuring this scene was rated G, deemed fun for the whole family:

I'm not the only one seeing the dark similarity between them? 

That's great to hear, I look forward to your next update!

Spoiler

Was it meant to be an allegory for dementia? It felt a lot like that with the old man's memories shifting and taking a life of their own.

[close]

Spoiler

Yes. My biggest fear is dementia, so any horror story about people losing their grasp on reality has a bigger impact on me than something with ghosts/monsters/etc.

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Thanks! I'll be expanding on the short quite a bit, so while it will share a lot of key elements and characters, it's going to be a much bumpier road for poor Jeremy. 

Interesting to know, I think you did a great work of getting the theme across thorough the descriptions and dialogues, and I can definitively see how that could be used to great effect in a game where you get to walk around and interact with the environment!

Though I would advice that if you plan to go into more detail on the dark topics hinted at in your story, like bullying and abusive family homes, it could be nice to have a detailed content warning,
because I know people who can handle gruesome death scenes but have a hard time with more realistic psychological traumas and prefer a heads up beforehand.

Anyway, it'd be really cool to see more of the backstory for the characters and how they ended up where they were at the start of the story,

Spoiler

plus it'd be exciting to explore more about what the different mementos meant to the main characters and where they came from.

[close]

I had to read the short story, and I must say it was an intriguing idea with a great and terrifying twist at the end!

Spoiler

Was it meant to be an allegory for dementia? It felt a lot like that with the old man's memories shifting and taking a life of their own.

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It will be interesting to see what you make of it in the game, the screenshots look fantastic!

Epic! Well thought Blondbraid and Cassie, that's an awesome theme.

Thanks! I look forward to see what games you come up with this month! 

[isn't]

But the fact that Esmeralda defended herself and pushed the creep off is good, right? I mean, the scene doesn't present anything about his behaviour as appropriate. It would be totally different if it were Quasimodo acting this way and then they end up together at the end. In fact, many of Disney's recent princesses are presented as capable of taking care of themselves without the help of a man (right? Am I out to lunch on this observation?)

I could probably write an whole essay on why this trope is problematic, but I don't want to derail the thread so I'll try to be brief. The fact that she was able to fight him off or that the character doing the groping was a villain doesn't necessarily make that scene less scary or intense, because unlike stuff like zombies or aliens, sexual abusers exist in real life and I think I speak for a lot of women when I say that they get taught from very early on that this is a real risk they face in their everyday life, and so Frollo groping Esmeralda feels a lot scarier and hits a lot closer to home than say, Maleficent turning into a dragon to fight the prince, because even young kids knows dragons aren't real and they'll never risk being eaten by one in real life. It's really frustrating how often I've had to explain this, but sexual abuse isn't really comparable to any fictional horrors, and it's a sensitive topic that writers should approach with great care and not thoughtlessly include just for the sake of it, because even if it's a villain who does it in the story it's still traumatic to watch for a lot of people.

Now, I actually think that the Hunchback of Notre Dame handles sexual assault a lot better than a great deal of "adult" movies, but that's exactly because Esmeralda isn't able to just kick Frollo in the groin and be done with him, instead her fending him off in the church only leads to him escalating his violence and it takes the help of all her friends and community to finally stop Frollo for good, because that's how abusers work in real life. But while I as an adult can understand and appreciate the darker topics of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, it practically traumatized me as a kid, and I don't think I even fully understood the themes of sexual abuse, but I was terrified of Frollo and this scene where he hunts down and kills a woman only to try and drown her baby gave me nightmares for weeks as a kid, and I don't think this movie should ever be counted as a kid's film, I'd even go as far as saying it should have been rated PG-13 at least.

Blondbraid, thanks for mentioning Destino. I'm an artist and have been a fan of Dali since my school days. Somehow I'd never seen it or even heard of it. Very well done! 

Thanks, I'm glad to be of help!
I'm pretty sure the eyeball in the pink elephants sequence in Dumbo was Disney's homage to The Andalusian Dog, and Dali did a lot of other weird and unexpected stuff too.
For example, did you know he designed the Chupa Chups lollipop logo? He also did a chocolate commercial, which was also really weird and funny:

Lovecraft isn't a hack, but he has various issues with his writing.

Yeah, I was wondering about this. Lovecraft has an exceptional horror imagination, but he's not really a particularly good writer. (Or at least, he wasn't to begin with.) Translating his over-wrought prose and phrases like, "nighted, penguin-fringed abyss," must be quite frustrating.

I actually don't remember having any difficulties with Lovecraft's works when reading them in English, but then again, I had no problem following the plot of Final Fantasy XIII, so I suppose I'm not the best to judge on weather something is convoluted.

Anyway, I'm actually grateful for Lovecraft using a lot of purple prose, because his descriptions of the titular mountains in At the Mountains of Madness
and comparing them to the paintings of Nicholas Roerich is what introduced me to one of my absolute favorite artists.

And straight rape is a totally normal and not f***ing mental thing to put in movies! 

Would never dream of suggesting that were the case.

Don't worry, I never thought you did, but that wording made it hard not to crack that line. 

Sadly, far too many filmmakers seem to think it's the case, because while I can perfectly understand why horror movies and the kind of movies that naturally end up on lists like this one could feature it, I think it's insane that movies that aren't meant to be intentionally shocking horror movies include it. I've seen way too many otherwise lighthearted adventure movies casually include it as a peril to rescue the heroine from, default backstory for "strong female characters", or silly comedies like Get him to the Greek and Wedding Crashers have men fall victims to it as a joke, and to me that's f****ed up in a way that horror movies meant to be horror like Salo or Cannibal Holocaust can never be.

I don't know the background of it, and if you do please correct me, but having lived outside of the western world for half of my life I imagine Disney's business decisions regarding what scripts to pursue are partially waiting for the non-western world to catch up to the breakneck speed that Californian societal norms are rocketing ahead at. I mean Disney wants its brand in the Middle East, Russia, China, etc - I doubt Putin or Xijinping would be too tolerant of cartoon Adam and Steve smooching on screen?

Yeah, I get why some cultures deem homosexuality unsuitable for kids, but what I don't get is why stuff like the villain trying to force himself on the heroine similar messed up things isn't. Besides, Chinese/Russian box office isn't an explanation as to why they couldn't just include one scene where a character refers to themselves as gay without anything too explicit, in fact, another non-Disney movie, ParaNorman, did exactly that in one scene, and in the Russian dub they simply changed the word "boyfriend" to "girlfriend" to get past the censors.

Whilst not having anything NSFW, I do think ParaNorman had a pretty intense scene where the hero, after being chased by hideous zombies raised by an evil witch that's been terrorizing the town, has a vision of said witch's trial, and we get to see what the witch actually looks like for the first time. (sorry for the bad video, it was the best I could find, also, spoiler warning):

The words "I was only playing" are easily the scariest words in the entire movie and the scene chilled me more than many adult horror movies! 

Nice little ambience if you need to get a few hours of work in:

Nice!

Second, I always work better with something to listen to in the background!

[G-rated]

A Japanese film with incest, necrophilia, gay rape, f***ing mental.

And straight rape is a totally normal and not f***ing mental thing to put in movies! 
Seriously though, Disney still refuses to feature an openly gay character in their films because they deem it too sexual and controversial, but this scene made it into a G-rated kids movie!

Speaking of Disney, while "Andalousian Dog" that Kumpel linked to is his most famous movie, Salvador Dali also cooperated with Walt Disney
to create Destino, a short film that basically looks like one of his surrealist paintings came to life, I highly recommend it;

So, I tried drawing something funny again:

Indeed, it's a great use of corals! 

True, I am pretty sure it's just a director that loosely stitched together scenes that looked good to him.

It reminds me of the rumor that when Zardos (the movie famous for having Sean Connery running around in nothing but tigh-high boots and a red diaper) was filmed the director was so high on cocaine that not even he could remember what it was about.

While I've never liked movies with lots of gore, torture and shocking/disturbing content for the sake of it, if short movies count I'd say Don't hug me. I'm scared is a good example
of using lots of surreal imagery with some gruesome horror elements to good effect and manages to be equal parts scary, thought-provoking and fun. (there are six videos in total, here's the first.)

[Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.]

I'd strongly recommend looking up a game called Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. It's not a point and click adventure game (more of a hack and slash game with some platforming and puzzles on the side), but the developers have openly stated that the entire game was developed around creating an immersive and accurate depiction of schizophrenia, using methods like having the player hear disembodied voices commenting on their actions, puzzles centered around seeing patterns in nature and even having in-game text tutorials actively lie to the player to reflect the feeling of fear and paranoia many schizophrenics feel.

Best day of my life.

Awesome!

Anyone else willing to try the game and share your screenshots? 

Have you seen this adventure game?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/581360/FoxTail/

I remember seeing screenshots of it a while ago, the great use of color in the pixel art really stood out to me.

Congrats!