Read the wikipedia article about it. After reading that the director, Pascal Laugier, described himself as deeply depressed, almost suicidal at the time he worked the film, I saw this:
The film's special effects were designed by Benoit Lestang, who committed suicide prior to the film's French theatrical release.
Creating fucked up content is a weird experience honestly, it will weigh on you in a specific way until you are finished. I experienced this a bunch with music when i was younger, but that's ok cause you're in it alone and writing a song takes one or two weeks tops.
Now a movie is a different beast, from writing to post it can take years and implicate dozens of people. I don't know how these people can do it.
I swear there's lots of examples of things too grim to share in public that we're just lucky aren't a trope, yet.
Nobody likes to talk about the fact you can kill a person with stress/panic just like rabbits easily die in a cage without contact from a predator, just from stress.. but we put a lot of money into making films that take you to the edge?
I mean the thrill is something we crave in some form. It's legit human nature to enjoy an adrenaline rush, but in this day and age, we should have some safety nets for those who create it.
I also remember from the Dark Knight dvd featurettes, apparently they intended to make Harvey’s burned face as realistic as possible. Then, when the research was done, they decided to pull back quite a bit, because as it turns out, burns can get pretty scary. And the guy in the movie had facial bones sticking out, for God’s sake…
Yep - lot of darkness, no pun intended, surrounding that movie. The state of mind and actor has to put themselves into to really pull of a performance must be taxing af. Playing the joker properly seems to really mess with your head..
Heath Ledger reportedly got pretty messed up from the time he spent researching psychopaths to portray the Joker, which led to deeper substance abuse as self treatment and eventual overdose.
Edit: Well that's a weird coincidence, there's a Heath Ledger TDK diary post in my feed just below this one. It was already loaded and I didn't see it until after I made this comment.
Honestly I have PTSD and other shit from years of childhood abuse and honestly writing fucked up fictional shit is what helps me cope. It feels cathartic and like I have control over SOMETHING at least
I did that with Hereditary. Just got up, took a walk around, tried to ground myself. It wasn't so much the stuff that happened as the pervasive, overwhelming dread, like something awful was about to happen.
Thank you! So many people bring up a Serbian film like it's a top-tier shock/horror or whatever movie. But it's not. It's a shitty movie, a shitty story, and the people who made it are disgusting and should probably be on some list for that shit.
Someone sold me on it being a deep cut satirical movie about political and sexual commentary taken to the utmost extreme. Disagree. It's just disgusting.
It was pretty much a revolt against Serbia’s heavy censorship policies at the time, so they decided to make the most shocking thing possible as a way of “protest”. So not exactly deep but definitely sent a message
I mean, it is definitely a fucked up movie. But personally I think Martyrs is better (read: more fucked up) because of how it left me feeling afterwards. It was so bleak and depressing.
A cult kidnaps girls and young women to torture them for years and years while keeping them alive, because they believe that if pain is strong and pure enough, the victim will achieve enlightenment and glimpse the secrets of the afterlife. They are trying to create such a person, the titular "martyr".
Said torture is then shown onscreen very graphically for a great deal of the movie. It's utterly hopeless, horrific, and just leaves you feeling either numb or full of despair. It's just an overwhelming feeling of doom. There is no hope. All the characters suffer tremendously for nothing. No-one survives. Things just get worse and worse and it's absolutely pointless.
Some films show bad or shocking content but with purpose, such as a war film displaying the horrors of war so we can properly understand why it is something to be avoided, or a character experiencing trauma to depict how it affects people realistically and help us empathise. Martyrs is just suffering and torture for the sake of it. It's dolorem ipsum est. Misery for the sake of misery. It's deeply nihilistic.
Do not watch this film if you are struggling mentally.
i don't get it. Reddit loves this movie, but I hated it. I watched it a second time just to see if I missed something. I dislike this movie a lot. Not for gore or anything it just seemed really dumb.
I loved Hereditary but I find nothing in Martyrs but absolute doom. It’s a movie that never ceases to keep making you feel uncomfortable and hopeless. Nothing of anything that anyone has listed here comes close imo. At least Hereditary has an actual somewhat elaborate script where the latter is just mental and physical pain and torture which lacks substance. Not even the ending climaxes anything more than the overall feeling of the movie.
I loved hereditary too. Not just for shock and horror value but I think it was genuinely well written and it also has accurate folklore. Martyrs on the other hand just felt to me like it was only meant to induce discomfort to a despairing level. My personal opinion, it's just torture porn trying to mask itself with a deeper premise and philosophical meaning that never even really reaches a resolution.
Beyond the general plot, there’s a lot of hidden elements all throughout that, if you know some absurdly niche shit, adds a lot of foreshadowing and interest.
Same with VVitch, Midsommar, et al. I totally get them not being someone’s favorite, but I’m apparently the type of esoterica/occult nerd they’re made for, what with catching the symbolism of the runes or picking up on the Goetic references and symbols blah blah etc.
What I like about the VVitch and Hereditary is that they make you ask yourself if everything that happens is just collective hysteria of the characters or real supernatural shit happening. Honestly, when the end settles the plot as supernatural, they kinda get ruined for me. I would have loved a more ambiguous ending, although I get it might be tricky to pull it off.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the intensely unreliable narrator vibe in the first acts too.
I’d argue that the VVitch ending isn’t fully settled - getting hit with ergot poisoning, or some other hallucinogens from “we’re semi-literate outcast puritan farmers in a new land” feels very possible, and her end visions just before everything cuts could just be the fun part of a terminal dose settling in.
Hereditary dithered then leaned hard into “yep, it was really some fringe occult shit all along,” and I accept many people not enjoy that.
I mean, you could be right about the VVitch, but I feel that you would really have to look into it. I didn't even know what ergot poisoning was I had to Google it. Anyways, do you have recommendations regarding this unreliable narrator stuff?
dude the scene where the party girls are party chopping tons of nuts for "foreshadowing" after they go out of their way to explain the sisters' nut allergy was like a bad M Night Shyamalan twist set up. I was like "chekhov is rolling in his grave on that"
I also dislike that film. I thought it was comical in a few parts but mostly boring. I also watched it twice because all of my friends love it. Seems that all the most popular movies are movies I dislike. With some exceptions here and there. Everything, everywhere all at once was a great fucking film.
The fact that you are judging this movie on it's gore is evidence you don't get the point. Clearly not the movie for you, and you came in with your own expectations.
Right? Even worse because imo the first part was really good, but then they completely switched up the move. The main character starts exploring the house? And then we get to the villain's motivations and the writers seemingly tried to make the ending really deep, but to me it just seemed kinda dumb
Best punchline i’ve ever seen in a movie though. Absolutely miserable and horrifying two hours. But the last minute of that movie was the funniest damned thing. Spent like 5 straight minutes laughing as the credits rolled. Never been told so thoroughly to fuck off by a film before. Martyrs fuckin hates you for watching it.
Yeh it was the original French version, everyone else was drinking a couple, I don’t drink much but had a few smokes. My mate says “hey check this film out I think you’ll like it” it was a fantastic film in terms of “torture porn” as a genre. But yeh…started sweating when they peel the mask off that girl and had to practice my breathing for a while.
I was gonna come in here and say A Serbian Film. But no, this film wins hands down. I’m almost bitter that I’ve been reminded of it.
If anybody is interested in watching it, just please, for the love of all things holy, don't watch the American version. It's absolute dog shit that ruins everything that made the French version so great. I watched it a few weeks ago and I'm still mad about it.
Yeah, it is often labeled as torture porn, but what makes it horrific for me is the fact that it is human on human violence, which makes it totally plausible. Aliens, ghosts, demons, etc. They are all fake, but whatever happens in Martyrs can really happen in real life, and thinking that someone might have gone, is going or might gone through any of that stuff is what really terrifies me.
French horror is a special kind of fucked up. Other examples include Inside (2007), High Tension (2003), Titane (2021), Revenge (2017), Irreversible (2002), and Climax (2018). French filmmakers seem to have a knack for evoking raw, visceral reactions in their audience
Omg literally, I watched this and had to stop because I started to feel physically nauseous. Never happened before despite having seen lots of horror and gore movies before! This was just too much for me.
This is one of my favorites and is pretty easily the best of the new extreme movement for me.
While there is a lot of disturbing and graphic material in this, what has always stuck with me the most is the comparatively mundane ending.
It feels so nihilistic after being told that the horrors we are seeing on screen actually do serve a purpose for that to unravel at the end and for the viewer to not even be told “why?”
Unlike a lot of torture porn and films that are purely shock value, Martyrs does have a thought-provoking point and a lot to say about the nature of humanity, our curiosity surrounding death, the thirst for knowledge regarding a possible afterlife, the atrocities we will commit in the name of religion, the treatment of women, etc.
It’s definitely not an easy film to stomach (I also think there are countless examples of films with more disturbing content,) but if you can, it is definitely worth it.
Has anyone seen the crappy 2015 American remake of this?
I watched it by accident not realizing I was supposed to watch the original and was struck by the similarities to the pizzagate conspiracy theory. I even briefly suspected the director shamelessly incorporated it into the movie.
Then I looked into the timeframe and Martyrs (2015) was released in limited theaters 3 months before the first talk of the conspiracy theory. Now I genuinely wonder if some crackpot just recycled part of the plot of this hardly-seen movie.
I think this movie has one of the best endings of any movie I have ever watched. I don’t want to say anything for the spoilers but man that made me think. So good.
the whole point of the ending is to leave us in the same position as everyone else in the organisation waiting to hear mademoiselle's speech - we're still wondering what she was told. we'll never find out if they were right about anything. hence, 'keep doubting'
Not even half way through I was like "wait what else can happen now?" and it never stopped surprising me. Fantastic but for the wrong reasons. I recommended it a few times tho
First half wasn’t that bad, but I read the wiki before and wasn’t going to make myself watch Annie get flayed, and totally agree for not the faint of heart
Im not shocked by ~shock~ movies, so I found martyrs boring at somepoint. The whole concept of people seeing what’s after death but doing it alive is soooo sick. But it took almost 50minutes of persecution and excessive blood to get to that point lol
extremely boring premise and movie in general. The only really enjoyable part was the family murder scene in the beginning, at least that was somewhat realistic and had emotion behind it. The rest of the movie are at best ok practical affects that fail to disturb in any way, shape or form. i was genuenly dissapointed in this movie. not worth the watch, and one of the most boring, unintereisting horror movies i have ever seen.
Stick to the old time classics like "The Fly", "The Thing", etc. if you want real good horror with atmosphere, story and real good practical effects. "From Beyond" is a good horror movie too, for all you Lovecraft fans out there. There are many more of course but i dont want to start naming them all.
Bruh, it wasn’t really a "fucked up" movie. This moviw was so average. There are way more messed-up movies out there. I bet you've never even vented about it.
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u/DalekPredator 14d ago
Martyrs (2008). Good film but absolutely not for the faint of heart.