With this second edition of Depths of Obscurity I wanted to get festive.  Now, I’m not a horror guy.  Most horror flicks just don’t do anything for me.  I have a hard time getting scared or disturbed by movies, and in the rare cases where I am, its not a fun movie experience.  I’ve never understood the thrill in trying to scare yourself for recreation. I prefer to sleep soundly at night.  That being said, every October there are countless horror films on seemingly all the time and I feel obligated to catch at least a few of them.  Like a food which I don’t like, I feel if I expose myself to enough of it, my palate may change and someday I might finally start to appreciate the fine art of gore.

In this blog I use the rank filters to scour Flickchart searching for the most obscure lists possible. Lists that are so niche that there exist only a few movies which fall into the specific category.  There are many horror related filters available.  I could have gone with ‘Costume Horror from the 1950s‘ or ‘Haunted House Films of the 1990s‘, but I decided to go all out and really try to shake myself.  Why not go to the origins and see what was the worst of the worst in in the golden age of exploitation.  In this post I delve into the twisted world of ‘Sadistic Horror Films from the 1970s‘.  This was the birth of the genre that is currently at its peak of popularity with franchises like ‘Saw‘ and ‘Hostel‘ achieving mainstream consumption.  Looking at the top Sadistic Horror films of all time, the top twenty are nearly exclusively dominated by movies released in the last decade.  In the 1970′s these films were fringe, playing primarily in grindhouses and facing heavy censorship.  Today’s audiences are inundated with blood and violence with each successive slasher film trying to outdo the last.  As I ventured into this mini-marathon of mutilation, I asked myself: Could forty year old films possibly disturb the mind of a person tempered in modern gore?

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