A taste of the forbidden: movies that feel like you probably shouldn't watch them

We all have those films from when we were kids. You know the ones your parents told you not to watch so you had to secretly procure them from your mates?

The Calibray Job is a serialised sci-fi/horror novella. This essay is the behind-the-scenes commentary for the seventh episode. Read The Calibray Job, Episode Seven.

Image: Warner Bros.

I remember the first time I watched The Exorcist. Sure, the demon bile and backwards stair walking scared me but what I found more terrifying was how the act of watching the film itself felt profane. It wasn’t just that the movie was scary, it was the fact that you had placed it into your DVD player and hit play, inviting demons into your home. The DVD itself felt like a cursed object.

Warning, this trailer contains flashing images.

The Exorcist wasn’t the only film that had this effect on me. Hellraiser felt much the same. These films felt dangerous to me. They stuck around in my mind for weeks afterwards, haunting my dreams. I saw Pinhead in every shadow and the piercing visage of Pazuzu flashed in the darkness whenever I blinked. It was too late, the DVDs were in my house. There was no escape.

Of course, the on-screen horror in both of these films is rich and powerful, but nothing quite compared to the fear of watching something I felt shouldn’t be. Coming out of the cinema this past weekend after seeing the movie Talk to Me, gave me a similar feeling. The deeply nihilistic and modern take on the possession genre reminded me of what it’s like to not just fear the premise of a film but to fear the film, as an object, itself.

The Calibray Job, Episode Seven [Novella]

That’s my aim with The Calibray Job. By the time the story is wrapped up, I want it to feel like a forbidden object. A cursed text. Something that will haunt your phone screen long after you’ve closed the Substack app. In films like Ringu and last year’s Smile, the curse is very much on-screen. What forbidden films do so brilliantly is let you take the curse home with you.

Of course, horror is subjective and what feels cursed to one person might be passé to another. For many members of my generation, movies like The Human Centipede are considered forbidden films. Films so heinous and so violent that they demand to be experienced in a group at a party after being peer pressured into watching through your fingers. These films are a rite of passage for teenagers. Like your first beer or cigarette, they change you forever.

What makes a forbidden film will differ for everyone. The Blair Witch Project was considered a forbidden film upon its release. Cannibal Holocaust was so controversial that the filmmakers literally needed to announce that the cast wasn’t actually dead following allegations that the filmmakers had actually made a ‘snuff film’. Both of these films were instrumental in developing the found-footage genre. A genre that lends itself well to the idea of the forbidden film. Nothing feels more cursed than a movie depicting the most diabolical content that’s styled to look like it has been discovered buried in a forest or locked away in a vault somewhere.

I grew up in the age of the Creepypasta. A sub-genre of horror that draws on the tropes of found footage, while making use of the collaborative nature of the internet. Stories are published on forums and subreddits like r/NoSleep and are written to feel like real accounts written by real people. Stories like Candle Cove¹ and the infamous Slenderman all grew out of Creepypasta’s or Creepypasta-adjacent phenomena creating the modern cursed text.

Lately, filmmaker Kane Pixels and his terrifying YouTube series The Backrooms², based on the online urban legend, pulls from the legacy of forbidden films. The core thread between these texts, for me, is that the meta-textual nature of the viewing experience makes them less of a passive experience and more of an active one.

Sure, you might jump once or twice watching The Pope’s Exorcist, but are you actually going to be looking over your shoulder to check for demons late at night? And even if you are looking for demons in the darkness are you likely to place your copy of the DVD (or your Roku?) into the freezer to keep the demons at bay?

This is part of the reason why Shudder’s sleeper hit Skinamarink scared me so much. It was a step beyond a normal horror movie. A forbidden film isn’t just scary, it is an object to be feared. Don’t worry, though, they’re only movies and books. They can’t really hurt you, can they? Right?

The question is, what are some of your favourite forbidden films?

1. Fans of the Candle Cove Creepypasta should absolutely watch Channel Zero’s first season - it’s horrifying.

2. If you’re interested in a deep dive on The Backrooms, then I’d highly suggest watching Ryan Hollinger’s video on the series.