This desolate and monumentally disturbing film is based on real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas (who confessed to killing over 300 people). An illiterate ex-con, Henry (Michael Rooker) kills randomly, without emotion or motive. But he knows what he's doing, actively changing his methods to avoid capture. Flatmate Otis (Tom Towles) joins the bloody spree, and the pair delight in videoing and replaying their handiwork, which gets gorier as the film continues. By cataloguing depravity as matter of fact, the film brilliantly triggering our fears of the dangers that roam the streets.

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A butter-lubricated sex scene made the film infamous, but Bernardo Bertolucci's movie is far more than just porn. Marlon Brando delivers an astonishing performance as Paul, a middle-aged man whose wife has committed suicide – Bertolucci coaxing him in to revealing far more of his inner self than he would have liked. Brando begins a brutal affair with Maria Schneider, which, at his insistence, remains as impersonal as possible. The film was deemed an arthouse breakthrough on its release.

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When the Italian director Pasolini was murdered in 1975, this ambitious adaptation of Marquis De Sade's mammoth study of spiritual corruption, updated to Italy in 1944, became the filmmaker's final screen testament. The film is unsparing in its depiction of the various humiliations and tortures inflicted on a group of handpicked youths by a cartel of monstrous libertines, in an effort to expose the moral vacuum of fascism. Featuring some of the most brutally sadistic scenes imaginable, Salo is incredibly provocative and deeply disturbing.

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Martin Scorsese's film about what Jesus really got up to irritated everyone from the Pope to Alvin Stardust. The thing that most upset believers initially - Christ's crucifixion fantasy about renouncing his divinity to live a normal life with Mary Magdalene - now plays like a superb recruitment advertisement for Christianity. It's incredible he liked mankind enough to give up any chance of marrying that nice Mary Magdalene and save himself from the cross. William Defoe gives a fine performance as Jesus, and even David Bowie turns up as Pontius Pilate.

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Lars Von Trier created one of the most provocative films of the 90s - hardcore sex, domestic horror and the injunction to "find your inner spastic". A desperate and vulnerable woman joins a cult of Danish yuppies who are attempting to break free from the confines of 'acceptable' behaviour by pretending to be educationally sub-normal. If the hardcore sex doesn't make you squirm (first erection on film to get a BBFC certificate), the challenge to political correctness certainly will.

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