GrotesqueMovies like Grotesque
- Key Features:
- Torture, Captivity, Psychological manipulation, Sadism, Despair, Survival, Nudity-moderate, Violence-high, Extreme violence, Psychological horror
- Tone:
- serious, gritty
- Target Audience:
- Horror fans, Exploitation cinema enthusiasts, Cult film aficionados
- Emotional Arc:
- Anxiety → Dread
Grotesque

An unnamed doctor has always had everything he's ever wanted, but that has only made him develop more extreme and depraved needs. He kidnaps a young couple in the prime of their life together and forces them into a game of torment that slowly extinguishes their hopes for survival.
Grotesque
A detective starts spiraling out of control when a wave of gruesome murders with seemingly similar bizarre circumstances is sweeping Tokyo.

A doctor conducts experiments on patients which end up in anguish!

A psychotic executive triggers a journalist's dark side, and they begin to form a strange bond through the internet.

A woman kidnapped in the dead of night awakens in a grisly dungeon, where her deranged assailant prepares her body for a morbid ritual.

After escaping from an insane asylum, a medical student assumes the identity of a mysterious dead man, who appears to be his doppelganger, and gets lured to a sinister island ruled by a mad scientist and his malformed men.

As sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer Kakihara searches for his missing boss he comes across Ichi, a repressed and psychotic killer who may be able to inflict levels of pain that Kakihara has only dreamed of.

An upper-middle-class couple's life is destroyed when their only child is kidnapped and killed. Obsessed with revenge, the couple seizes an opportunity to kidnap the killer.

A scientist taints his mother's scientific experiment with his own drug that transforms pain into a pleasurable experience. Unfortunately for the three women involved in the experiment, the drug works a little bit too well.

A ferocious, misogynistic, and morally deprived serial killer is active in Las Vegas. Obsessed with the collapse of the Twin Towers, and with Nazi tendencies, he even targets underage girls.

Neurosurgeon Koichi uses an experimental technique to enter the brain of his beloved Atsumi, who is in a coma after attempting suicide. In his quest, Koichi drifts steadily further into the sweltering marshes of the spirit. It is soon no longer clear what is real and what is not.

David, an orderly at a hospital, tells his horrific story of being kidnapped and forced to play a vile game of survival.

Six friends are captured and tortured by a murderous family after giving a ride home to a desperate stranger.

A young pathologist seeks answers to the mysterious death of a friend and soon comes into contact with the same cursed videotape that caused the death of the friend's wife and son, which is haunted by the curse of Sadako, a relentless spirit.

The inhabitants of a small Japanese town become increasingly obsessed with and tormented by spirals.

Rose, a desperate mother takes her adopted daughter, Sharon, to the town of Silent Hill in an attempt to cure her of her ailment. After a violent car crash, Sharon disappears and Rose begins a desperate search to get her back. She descends into the center of the twisted reality of a town's terrible secret. Pursued by grotesquely deformed creatures and townspeople stuck in permanent purgatory, Rose begins to uncover the truth behind the apocalyptic disaster that burned the town 30 years earlier.

A young woman abducts a doctor whom she holds responsible for the death of her boyfriend and subjects him to various sexual torture acts.

After having narrowly escaped an attempt on his life at the hands of a psychopath, detective inspector Takakura quits active service in the police force and takes up a position as a university lecturer in criminal psychology. But his desire to get to the bottom of criminals’ motives remains, and he does not hesitate long when former colleague Nogami asks him to reopen an old case.

A hapless country doctor describes with breathless urgency a night-time summons to attend a young patient. Events soon take on a surreal aspect as "unearthly horses" transport him instantaneously to the bedside. The doctor, preoccupied with personal distractions and grievances against those he is employed to care for, fails to find what is revealed to be a vile, fatal wound. He is humiliated by the villagers, who are "always expecting the impossible from the doctor," and doomed to an endless return trip, losing everything.

A Japanese salaryman finds his body transforming into a weapon through sheer rage after his son is kidnapped by a gang of violent thugs.

In the Olden Tymes, Count Regula is drawn and quartered for killing twelve virgins in his dungeon torture chamber. Thirty-five years later, he comes back to seek revenge on the daughter of his intended thirteenth victim and the son of his prosecutor in order to attain immortal life.

In Tokyo, Japan, several grotesque murders take place on rainy days. Detective Sawamura, who is in charge of the case, soon discovers that his own family is connected to the crimes.

Laura is a successful plastic surgeon who feels her life is somewhat empty. She meets a young nurse and falls in love and experiences sexuality to a extent not known to her. However, this spiral of desire and seduction is a dangerous game where no one is who they appear to be.

A group of people awaken to find themselves prisoners in a mysterious house with no means of escape. They are each outfitted with electronic devices attached to the base of their skulls. The chemicals that the brain produces when in pain are collected by the devices, and when it collects a predetermined amount, the doors will be opened. In order to escape, they must hurt themselves and each other.

Retired porn star Milos leads a normal family life trying to make ends meet. Presented with the opportunity of a lifetime to financially support his family for the rest of their lives, Milos must participate in one last mysterious film. From then on, Milos is drawn into a maelstrom of unbelievable cruelty and mayhem.

A plastic surgeon and his nurse join a bizarre circus to escape from the police. Here he befriends deformed women and transforms them for his "Temple of Beauty". However, when they threaten to leave, they meet with mysterious accidents.

A criminal psychologist loses his arm in a car crash, and becomes one of three patients to have their missing limbs replaced by those belonging to an executed serial killer. One of them dies violently, and disturbing occurrences start happening to the surviving two.

A detective breaks all rules of ethical conduct while investigating a colleague’s involvement in drug pushing and Yakuza activities.

The wealthy president of a company has built up an unpayable debt to a local crime lord, and to escape punishment he sells his famous dancer wife to the lecherous old man figuring a 90 year old can’t do too much bad with her. Perhaps not, but others can while he watches. She’s put on stage in an underground BDSM sex show and begins a spiraling decent from strongly independent woman to submissive sex slave

A surrealistic anthology of horror films; four segments structured as an intense fever dream...

During a stopover in Germany in the middle of a carefree road trip through Europe, two American girls find themselves alone at night when their car breaks down in the woods. Searching for help at a nearby villa, they are wooed into the clutches of a deranged retired surgeon, who has a very disturbed vision.

Mitsuko, a young student, encounters a series of horrifying incidents set in alternate realities where people wind up dead in the most horrendous fashion.

A severely injured man and woman awake in an abandoned sanitarium only to discover that a sadistic caretaker holds the keys to their freedom and the horrific answers as to their true identity.

While doing a thesis about violence, Ángela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured to death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student at her college...

An outwardly normal schoolteacher preys on suicidal women to slake his overwhelming thirst for human blood.

A corrupt magistrate subjects a innocent young bride to inconceivable physical punishments after convicting her of killing her husband.

Forensic pathologist Kang is assigned to examine the dismembered corpse of a female murder victim. Detective Min points to a fanatic environmentalist, Lee Sung-ho, as the primary suspect. But when Kang’s daughter is kidnapped, a manipulative game begins between Kang and Lee, who holds secrets about the homicide case.

After a dreadful incident coupled with an ungovernable paroxysm of violence, a butcher will fall into a downward spiral that will burn to the ground whatever dignity still remained in him.

Tenshu is imprisoned and sentenced to death for murdering the men who raped his girlfriend. However, he manages to survive his execution and is presented with an option: face another execution attempt or subject himself to their bizarre and dangerous experiments.

A psychotic killer is on the prowl, who continues to slaughter young women while an innocent man is wrongly accused and sentenced for crimes he could never have committed. A determined detective arrives on the scene and soon becomes obsessed with the case while under pressure from the prosecutor to see a man hang.

Koji Shiraishi interviews the survivors of an indiscriminate attack at a sightseeing resort and starts investigating the strange events that have been happening to them.

When a woman is harassed and threatened by one of the men who gang-raped her five years previously, she is pushed to take icy revenge against her attackers.

A psychotic small-time criminal realizes that the everyday robberies, rapes and murders he commits aren't profitable enough, so he figures to hit the big time by kidnapping the daughter of a rich man.

A detective investigating a missing model in Paris uncovers a plastic surgeon’s horrifying secret involving kidnapped women, blood, and organs.

When Susan was a little girl, she rejected the Valentine of a lovestruck classmate. Decades later, she’s come to the hospital for a routine medical examination, and finds herself trapped in a bizarre nightmare, made all the worse as her vengeful childhood valentine, disguised among the hospital staff, begins murdering everyone in his path as a means of proving his undying ‘romantic’ obsession…

Seven years after the death of his wife, widower Shigeharu seeks advice on how to find a new wife from a colleague. Taking advantage of their position as a film company, they stage an audition. Interviewing a series of women, Shigeharu is enchanted by the quiet Asami. But soon things take a twisted turn as Asami isn’t what she seems to be.

A doctor works to cure patients suffering from crippling phobias by placing them inside his invention which induces and controls hallucinations.

A priest-doctor chasing a man with supernatural regenerative abilities, who has recently escaped from a medical lab, reaches a small town where the mutant goes on a killing spree.

When a machine that allows therapists to enter their patient's dreams is stolen, all hell breaks loose. Only a young female therapist can stop it and recover it before damage is done: Paprika.

A young man awakens in the hospital after an accident wipes his memory. Fascinated by a textbook full of drawings of dissections, Hiroshi is drawn to medical school. There he catches the eye of a fellow student, but it's another who becomes his obsession: the dead woman on the cadaver table.

A psychiatrist tries to put her life back together after a violent attack by seeking to repair the life of a new patient, but he has his own terrifying history.

Two people, a man and a woman, wake up naked and with their abdomens attached to each other.

Three female idols appear on a television show to investigate an exorcism. An exorcist with psychic powers named Unsui claims that the show’s subjects, the Kaneda family, are cursed by a demon that’s too powerful for him to banish on his own, so he calls in a fellow exorcist to help. Soon, a reckless ghost hunter enters the fray as the three idols witness a series of terrifying events.

Masked thugs torture an innocent woman in increasingly brutal ways.

A blind sculptor kidnaps an artists' model and imprisons her in his warehouse studio – a shadowland of perverse monuments to the female form. Here a deranged passion play of sensual and sexual obsession is acted out in world where sight is replaced by touch.

Dr. Alan Feinstone has everything: a beautiful wife and a successful career in dentistry. However, when he discovers his wife's affair, he realizes that behind every clean, white surface lies the stench of decay.

A young couple is pushed to the limits of sanity as they attempt to be reunited amid the chaos of a pandemic outbreak. The streets erupt into violence and depravity, as those infected are driven to enact the most cruel and ghastly things imaginable.

Infection takes place in a dark, isolated hospital, where one doctors mistake has led to dire consequences for a patient. In a hospital death is just a breath away.

A submissive hooker goes about her trade, suffering abuse at the hands of Japanese salarymen and Yakuza types. She's unhappy about her work, and is apparently trying to find some sort of appeasement for the fact that her lover has married.

A killer is released from prison and breaks into a remote home to kill a woman, her handicapped son and her pretty daughter.

A seemingly innocent man is abducted by a notorious L.A. serial killer, who forces his victims to switch roles with him so that he can enact his own capture, torture and murder.

A detective investigates a series of murders. A possible serial killer might be on a rampage, since they all are in the same vicinity and by the same method, but as the evidence points toward the detective as the prime suspect, a ghost in red follows him, and he begins to question his identity. His realization of what seems to have really happened results in something much more sinister and larger in scope, and it leaves his psyche scarred.

Five dangerous patients, suffering from extreme phobias at a government testing facility, are put to the ultimate test under the supervision of a crazed doctor and his quest to weaponize fear.

Shamoto runs a small tropical fish shop. When his daughter Mitsuko is caught shoplifting at a grocery store a man named Murata steps in to settle things between the girl and the store manager. Murata also runs a tropical fish shop and he and Shamoto soon become friendly. However Murata hides many dark secrets behind his friendly face.

A homeless man meets a medical school student who pays him to volunteer for a surgical procedure known as trepanation, drilling a hole in his skull, which ends up giving him the ability to communicate with the dark side of people’s subconscious minds.

Mrs. Van Houten has shown signs of losing touch with reality, and her husband discusses possible treatment with Dr. Caligari, who says Mrs. Van Houten has a disease of the libido.

The erotic novelist Taeko is writing a morbid story of a family destroyed by incest, murder and abuse. Her assistant, Yuji, sets on a mission to uncover the reality of this story, but the reality might be too much to bear.

A wife, overwhelmed with hatred for her husband, inflicts an unspeakable wound on their son, as the family heads towards horrific destruction.

Newlyweds Cory and Sarah Morgan take Cory's 7-year-old son Liam up to the country for some much needed family time. When it appears as if Liam has run away, psychological suspense becomes straight-out horror, as Sarah and Cory must now confront a sadistic cult-like family who have been hiding in the house all along and have taken Liam for themselves.

A top surgeon is besotted with a beautiful woman who once rebuffed him. Unable to come to terms with life without her, he tries to convince her that they need each other. She has other ideas, but a horrific accident leaves her at his mercy.

A man who runs an apartment house for women is the demented son of a Nazi surgeon who has the house equipped with secret passageways, hidden rooms and torture and murder devices.

A young policewoman slowly goes insane while tracking down an elusive serial rapist/killer through Italy when she herself becomes a victim of the brutal man's obsession.

Ichiko works as a private nurse for a family she almost became a part of. While Ichiko cares for the grandmother, she is also a confidant to Motoko, the eldest sister. But one day, Motoko’s younger sister disappears. And the media soon reveal the kidnapper to be Ichiko’s own nephew.

After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, Dr. Rose Cotter starts experiencing frightening occurrences that she can't explain.

A poverty stricken woman starts a restaurant where she slaughters people and serves up human flesh, cut from her victims.

In future Tokyo, a young woman in the privatized police force tracks down her father's killer while battling against mutant rebels known as engineers.

Capable of making bio-mechanical weapons out of human flesh, alien parasites grotesquely invade the Earth, turning their hosts into maniacal killers who seek and destroy each other to the bloody death! And yes, it s also a human love story, even though the budding romantics are infested with slimy, tumor-like globules.

Dr. Feinstone escapes from the mental hospital where he has been held ever since his wife's adultery sent him on a deranged killing spree. Hoping to resume a normal life, he makes his way to a quiet Midwestern town and establishes himself in a new practice under an assumed name. Things are starting to look up for Dr. 'Caine' – that is, until the day he catches his new love in the arms of someone else. As before, the impact of romantic betrayal sends him over the edge into madness and murder, with his unfortunate patients once again bearing the brunt of his hostility.

A young woman with a severely troubled past signs up for an extreme haunt called Perdition. She believes that putting herself through Perdition's nightmarish trials will help her exorcise her internal traumas, but has no way of knowing just how shocking her ordeal will be-or what dark secrets buried in her psyche will emerge.

A man bumps into an old crush and becomes obsessed. After several failed attempts at winning her over, he kidnaps her and holds her captive underneath the animal shelter where he works.

A harsh young man seduces a freeloading young woman and eventually takes advantage of her knack for hitchhiking to rob middle-class men.

Horror anthology consisting of three episodes directed by Jörg Buttgereit, Andreas Marschall and Michal Kosakowski.

After losing her parents, young flower selling Midori is put up by a fairground group. She is abused and forced to slavery, until the arrival of an enigmatic magician of short stature, who gives her hope for a better future.

Two teenage couples traveling across the backwoods of Texas searching for urban legends of serial killers end up as prisoners of a bizarre and sadistic backwater family of serial killers.

A mild-mannered psychopath plays mind-games with a woman he has tied to a chair in his basement.

Forced to work extremely hard to keep things afloat, Paul begins hearing voices in his head questioning his past choices. Convinced that his wife has been unfaithful, he begins to see every male guest as a potential threat. What follows is Paul's downward spiral into the madness of deranged jealousy where he finally discovers that hell is not a state of mind – hell is himself.

An American journalist travels through 19th-century Japan to find the prostitute he fell in love with but instead learns of the physical and existential horror that befell her after he left.

Japan's number one extreme reality show is having it's first all-American special! Six lucky contestants, chosen from thousands of applicants, will have the chance to win millions of dollars, and all they have to do is stay alive!

A young Los Angeles couple Tara and Sam fall head over heels into a new romance, entwining their lives—until their intimacy transforms into something terrifying.

A psychologist connects her missing brother to the strange case of a mysterious little girl believed to be Sadako reincarnated.

After years of being browbeaten and walked on, a man wakes one day wearing an expressionless mask, fitted with a personality that enables him to take revenge.

When a number of suicide victims slash themselves in their sleep, detective Keiko Kirishima is called to investigate.

A group of residents begins to suspect that their strange neighbor might be hiding something dark.

An ophthalmologist's assistant with an unhealthy interest in human eyeballs goes on a killing spree to collect eyeballs for his overbearing mother's collection. Reality soon takes a bizarre turn, both for the characters and the audience.

While driving, an estranged couple's car is hit twice. A sheriff takes them to a motel where they hear disturbing noises from a room, realizing they're part of a deadly game.

A young Romanian woman and a recovering drug addict launch an unlikely investigation after her parents are murdered by a vicious serial killer known as The Headhunter.

When his mother's untimely death quickly follows his father's, a doctor begins to believe a killer may be targeting him and his amnesiac wife.

Somewhere in Eastern Europe. Carole is a young nurse with a humanitarian aid group that has reached the end of its mission. But just then, the young woman and her two colleagues are kidnapped by strangers for mysterious reasons. Held captive, cared for and kept alive in an oppressive and sinister setting, the three prisoners soon discover with horror what their kidnappers truly have in store for them.

Following some trauma in her past that has since been repressed, a young woman is trying to recover her memories with the help of a psychiatrist. During her hypnosis sessions, she repeats the name "Tomie" but is unable to recall where she knows it from. Meanwhile, a police detective is investigating a string of brutal murders, where he also runs across the name "Tomie." How are the two connected?

