World, meet the harshest horror critic known to mankind — me! Horror films are the worst thing in the entertainment industry besides pop icons. Rarely has there been a truly exceptional horror film since The Shining... although there have been some respectable scares that have crept out here and there.
The Ring gave me a ten-second nightmare where I was sleeping on a couch and that scary long-haired chick was standing beside me being her usual absurdly terrifying self. The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a well-done film with a gripping performance by Jennifer Carpenter that disturbed me several times over throughout its run time.
Yes, I’ve seen garbage passing itself off as art in the likes of I Spit on Your Grave. Yes, I’ve seen the most demented and vile that Japan has to offer from director Takashi Miike and many others. Yes, I’ve seen Faces of Death. My grandmother, thinking it was a harmless horror film, let me rent one of them once. I was in the first grade.
Yes, I've seen it all, folks. But not until this day has the limit of my every terrible emotion been tested as it was watching Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs. I kid you not, at the close of the film my gut was still trembling in nervous shudders, and I had a lump in my throat so swollen that it felt like I was swallowing slime.
Hey, um, Lucie? I think you're sitting on the remote.
Martyrs follows a young woman named Lucie who, after escaping brutal depraved torture at only 12 years old, runs away to an orphanage where she befriends only one other girl who tries to help her escape her mental devastation. Their friendship leads them to an act of vengeance that disembowels the plot and lays it out, organ by organ, for you to see every visceral and psychological part of the human mind and body in its deepest, most tormented psychosis.
If you haven’t put it together by now, do not see this film if you are easily disturbed, and I mean this with the sincerest and most dire warning. For my entire life, I had waited for this film. An entire life of wondering when someone is gonna grow the balls to make a horror film that genuinely delivers on truly astounding levels of stomach-flattening dread. It is here. It has finally been done.
Article comments
1 - Diane
what kind of grandmother is that? who lets her grandson watch faces of death??
2 - Jesse G. Barnes
Hahaha, she had no idea what it was and neither did I. The cover intrigued me. I brought it home, popped it in, and I'm like, "Uh, what the hell is this?" Morbid curiosity pushed me through a few segments before shutting it off.
Afterward, I immediately took it to my grandmother and said something like, "This isn't what I thought it would be." We took it back and I got something else.
Thanks for the read! Although, I'm not sure if I'd go around recommending Martyrs to everybody. It's made for a very particular audience (incredibly jaded critics like me).