Some films are so disgusting, repellent, violent, prurient, or tasteless that audiences find themselves unable to easily define them.

Films like Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom," Lars Von Trier's "Antichrist," Gaspar Noë's "Irreversible," Ruggerio Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust," Takashi Miike's "Ichi the Killer," Tom Six's "The Human Centipede" trilogy, or even John Waters' "Pink Flamingos" are all brazenly confrontational films, each seemingly intended not to draw the audience in, but send the audience out. To keep viewers repelled and disgusted. One might argue that such "extreme" cinema seeks not merely to elicit a visceral response from an audience -- as, say, a mid-2000s torture porn film may do -- but to move them to a level of disgust so intense that they cannot help but push their mind into the realm of politics and philosophy.

To state a broad point: "Extreme" horror,...