7 Movies That Are Truly Evil
What makes a movie truly evil?
A 2021 tweet by film critic Adam Nayman is making the rounds once more as Twitter again contends with examples of “truly evil movies.” Inspired by preparing a lecture on Spoorlos, the Dutch thriller about a man on an obsessive hunt for his missing girlfriend that would go on to become a poorly-received American remake starring Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock, Nayman made it clear that he wasn’t theorizing in terms of depiction or themes. While movies like Django Unchained and Schindler’s List navigate some of history’s most deplorable moments, they do so with a certain sense of humanity and introspection. Nayman’s intended focus was on what movies did nothing but channel “something awful into the world.”
Don't Miss
People responded with more films that basically hold next to no integrity and have nothing but bad vibes from top to bottom. Films such as…
Music
With a single digit Tomatometer score of 7 percent, critics savaged Sia’s 2021 film as “offensive in its depiction of autism — and painfully misguided in essentially every respect.” Not only that, but Music also suffers from being incredibly boring.
Blonde
The 2022 film that somehow managed to earn Ana DeArmas an Oscar nomination was the subject of contentious debate following its debut at the Venice Film Festival for its depiction of the embattled Norma Jean. Everyone had something to say about the Joyce Carol Oates adaptation, including Suzie Kennedy, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator and historian, who described the movie as “an assassination of an icon” that “capitalized on and exploited the deep sadness of Marilyn’s life.”
Promising Young Woman
Where audiences expected a fun, feminist revenge tale where women flipped the script on creepy men, Promising Young Woman delivered anything but. Instead, Emerald Fennell’s film featured sisterly victim-blaming, a two-and-a-half minute anatomically correct suffocation scene (which she learned from her ex-cop father-in-law) and allowed the very men it set out to take down win in the end.
Human Centipede 2
For better or for worse, Saw was a revolutionary film when it was released in 2005, paving the way for more horror movies to push the limits of unease and discomfort, even if its own franchise hit a bit of a slippery slope as it started to favor insane gore over tense storytelling. But the worst thing it did was allow for the existence of The Human Centipede 2, a needless sequel to an already needless film. Roger Ebert named it the worst movie of 2011, calling it “reprehensible, dismaying, ugly, artless and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency.”
Megan Is Missing
Twitter user @gh0ulzrule certainly didn’t mince words when it came to the 2011 found-footage film: “The director should be ashamed of creating this miserable excuse of a movie.” They’re not alone in their disdain for the film either; New Zealand banned its release due to the use of “sexual violence and conduct” that would be considered “injurious to the public good.”
Mulan
Evil is in the eye of the beholder, and sometimes the beholder is a multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate. The 2020 remake of Mulan is certainly a purveyor of bad vibes as the attempted cash grab stripped everything that made the original film exciting in favor of a soulless, bland live-action remake.
The Flash
Ezra Miller’s insane personal life and the immoral use of CGI to include a useless cameo from the deceased Christopher Reeve aren’t even the most evil aspects of 2023’s The Flash. The actual evil was that virtually every scene looked only slightly better than a cutscene from a PS2 game, and much like Mulan, the entire film was yet another soulless blockbuster.
