It’s difficult to single out one decade in cinema history as being the grossest. It’s easy to disqualify earlier decades, back when sensibilities seemed to be a little different and censorship was more widespread. But by the 1980s, at least, movies seemed unafraid to push boundaries, get gooey, and gross audiences out; you can even see it with relatively mainstream movies by this point, like and .

But people get used to seeing sickening things on screen, and what counts as gross keeps shifting. So, while certain movies from the 1980s can be appreciated as gross and shocking for their time, equivalent releases from more recent times go even further in their quests to elicit similar responses. in question.

If you want to be genuinely scared by a movie, might let you down to some extent, even if it can be psychologically tense and persistent in its depiction of a disturbing atmosphere. The characters are in a nightmarish situation, sure, given they're lighthouse keepers stuck on a tiny island with only each other for company, but watching their miserable situation is darkly funny and genuinely quite entertaining.

Still, it’s in the details where The Lighthouse gets gross. The violence might be infrequent, but when it’s there, it’s in-your-face and squirm-inducing. Also, The Lighthouse is once it’s over.

Famed provocateur showed no signs of slowing down his provocative ways in 2018, when he made . Like with The Lighthouse, there is a dark sense of humor at play here that can mitigate some of the more alarming elements… but never entirely, because this bizarre serial killer film is still frequently alarming and consistently uneasy.

The serial killer here is the titular Jack, , not to mention surreal (at least eventually). The House That Jack Built really is quite all over the place and not always horrifying if you have a dark sense of humor, but the fact that it doesn’t shy away from scenes of grisly murder – all from a very disturbed point of view – does mean it’s pretty confronting at times.

The series reaches new heights of grossness and depravity with each release, with the original doing a good job of setting such a demented precedent. It’s less successful as an actual movie, admittedly, given Terrifier lacks much by way of story or memorable characters, aside from Art the Clown, who is instantly memorable here. But that story? It’s just kind of him killing people for a while and then the movie ends.

and both gave you more of a reason to care about Art's victims, and had some more interesting narrative elements to boot. So they're better as “films,” and they're arguably even better when judged for their shock value. But Terrifier (2016) is , still deservedly.

It’s hard to watch , as it forces you into a world that’s miserable, dirty, and violent, and then makes you stay there for close to three hours all up. That world is also quite literally a different planet; one some scientists from Earth travel to seemingly to “help” the people who live on it get out of their equivalent of the Medieval era.

But then the scientists play God, . Hard to Be a God is an admirable endurance test of a movie, and could well also stand as one of the most intense and gritty science fiction films ever made. It’s not to be entered into lightly, or watched as breezy late afternoon entertainment, that’s for sure.

’s older movies still hold up and prove somewhat shocking when watched today; take the intensely real and psychological horror of , or the white-knuckle thrills and action scenes found in . But shows the filmmaker was still willing to push boundaries and go further than before even when he was in his 70s, as this 2011 film is arguably his most harrowing.

To go into and its story, but Killer Joe is undoubtedly disturbing and doesn’t care about your sensibilities. It’s bold, big, and stripped back, somehow all at once, and boasts a performance that might well be ’s best to date (or at least his most distinctive/out-there).

Honestly, if you watched a horror movie about cannibalism and it didn’t gross you out in some way, you'd probably feel some degree of disappointment. Thankfully (or regrettably, depending on your stomach), is a particularly full-on horror movie about cannibalism, courtesy of , who’s one of the boldest filmmakers to rise to prominence in the last couple of decades.

Narratively, Raw is about a young woman who’s training to be a vet, but finds herself part of a strange group of students who force her to eat raw meat, and then she begins getting an appetite for human flesh. , and proves more than able to get under one’s skin in more ways than one.

Like Raw, also deals with cannibalism, though this time, it’s a Western on top of being a horror movie. It’s unnerving from the start, but takes its time building to the most infamous scenes it has to offer, following a group of men who go on a desperate mission to rescue several people who've been kidnapped by a brutal cannibal tribe.

Anyone who’s seen Bone Tomahawk will know full well while it’s here, and anyone who isn't aware… well, it might be the kind of thing where the less you know, the better. , and though it is extremely effective for what it is (i.e., a good movie; make no mistake), it’s certainly not for everyone.

Combining the action, thriller, and horror genres to striking effect, is dead-set on being uncompromising, extreme, and straightforward. One young woman is abused, attacked, and left for dead in the desert by several men, yet she doesn’t succumb to her injuries and sets out to get vengeance on those who wronged her by any means necessary.

It’s not so much the story that makes Revenge special; more the lengths it goes to with some of its scenes of violence, and how nerve-wracking it is as a sheer viewing experience. Words don’t really do it justice, but the images do. The question is, of course, whether one wants to see some of the images in this film, .

Unlike some of the aforementioned movies, is not particularly good. Instead, it ranks high for present purposes because of how effectively gross it is; one of the most sickening of the 2010s, really. Cannibalism is front and center here, too, and emphasized even more frequently than in the likes of the more tasteful (by comparison) earlier-mentioned films like Raw and Bone Tomahawk.

Once the adventure story here takes a turn into horror, The Green Inferno never slows down, and shows one confronting/prolonged death after another. Anything gruesome that could happen in a movie about young people getting killed and eaten by cannibals probably does happen at some point in The Green Inferno, and it unfortunately feels like shock value for the sake of shock value (unlike the arguably satirical/subversive Cannibal Holocaust). , for what it’s worth.

And, to end on a bit of a downer, as well as highlight another movie that’s shocking without being particularly good in the traditional sense, here’s . It’s included here without enthusiasm, and because of obligation, really. Because if you talk about shocking or gross movies from the 2010s, and you don’t mention A Serbian Film, someone’s probably going to say, “Hey, where’s A Serbian Film?”

So here. Here’s A Serbian Film. People probably know why it’s here, and if you don’t – if you're blissfully unaware of what this film’s about and what it depicts – then don’t read about it; remain free from the idea of A Serbian Film. . Nothing more needs to be said.

Buy on Amazon

NEXT: The Most Important Episodes of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'