We assigned one of our resident horror connoisseurs to watch what some have called the most disturbing movie of all time, directed by famed late gay director Pier Paolo Pasolini, released in Italy 40 years ago on November 22, 1975, before changing cinema forever. Here’s what it means for a Salô virgin to watch the in this day and age.

I thought I had seen horror. Not actual horror, but movie horror. I spend every October solely watching horror movie marathons. I’ve seen Hostel, The Last House on the Left, and the recent Goodnight, Mommy and never lost a wink of sleep. I’ve seen videos of actual deaths. I think there might be a benefit in seeing an actual death once in your life – just to know that we are truly mortal. I only needed to see two or three of them. I hate to judge, but I think it could be unhealthy to have your TV diet consist of only snuff films. Turn off that “Woman gets hit by train” video and check out Crazy Ex-Girlfriend! It’s the fall’s best new show!

Anyway, I thought I had seen plenty of horror, but then I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salô: or the 120 Days of Sodom.

I knew only a little of Salô’s controversial content: I knew it portrayed some rough stuff and was based on a work by the Marquis de Sade, and all I knew about him was based on vague memories from Geoffrey Rush in the not very good Quills. Which is to say, I knew he liked bondage and was scandalous. I know I should have known more about him, but I went to a public school in California, OK? There’s a price to this great weather! It wasn’t until I read the back of the synopsis on the Blu-ray’s back cover that I learned it was set at the end of 1940s fascist Italy and not the French Revolution. I learned it premiered 40 years ago in Italy, and it was Pasolini’s final film before his death (he was supposedly killed when a trick he picked up ran him over with his own car). Finally, the fact that is was in the Criterion Collection did prep me to think of this movie as a “serious” film. Ah, Criterion’s endorsement – you can carry so much… even The Rock.

As with any 40-year-old foreign film, I was worried about being bored. I needn’t have. It starts with a jaunty jazz tune over the opening credits, so I’m thinking, “This isn’t so bad!” Then a title card says “Antechamber of Hell”. Okay, this movie wasn’t fucking around. In the opening moments, a group of soldiers arrives in a gloomy Northern Italian town that’s under fascist rule (Northern Italy was a puppet state for Nazi Germany at this time - I learned that on Wikipedia after watching the movie. Public school, remember?). So the soldiers casually walk by a corpse in a village square (that’s what we call an “omen”) and round up a group of teen boys and girls. The teens are brought before a group of four powerful fascists, known only as The Duke, The Bishop, The Magistrate and The President. These men force the boys to show them their genitals, the camera leering like the four fascists, making us, the audience, leer right along with them! We’re implicit in the act! And we’re titillated – it’s exciting to see pretty naked bodies. Still, I’m thinking, this isn’t so bad, Saw is so much worse! The teens are taken to a castle where we learn that they’re going to be subjected to whatever the four fascists have in mind.

The rest of the movie consists of a parade of rape, torture, debasement and sadistic murder. It’s awful and more than scary – it’s disturbing. It’s not even the acts that are happening; it’s the glee the fascists take in torturing their helpless victims, both physically and mentally. And it’s not like the gore and rape look real; they don’t. All the sex, violence and coprophagia is clearly fake. It’s the pleasure the torturers are taking in their game. That’s scary because that’s real. That has happened and still happens.

I struggled with how to write about this movie. I told some friends about it and they all said that it sounded awful. I get that. Some people shouldn’t see the movie. It shows humanity at its worst. Experiencing that isn’t how a lot of people would choose to spend two hours. And I can’t fault them for that. But that said, I haven’t stopped thinking about this movie since I watched it three days ago. The last movie that stuck with me like this was Guardians of the Galaxy, but that was because it had a talking raccoon! Maybe Salô resonated because it ends without a resolution. There is no Tarantino-style wish fulfillment when the American Army swoops in and saves the day. These fascists get to live out their darkest fantasies. They win. We never see them punished. Which happens every day. To portray anything else would be a lie, wouldn’t it?

This is a beautiful movie about an awful thing. It made me think about what humanity is capable of, how all torture is sadistic, and how sadism is something humanity needs to fight against, not embrace. I thought of the torture in Abu Ghraib prison and the joy expressed by the torturers in the photos. Is that so different than the joy the four fascists take in their work? My reaction wasn’t all cerebral; I felt awful for the victims for the horrors they were subjected to for no other reason than a fascist’s pleasure.

Our world is full of countless horrors that we do nothing about, but Pasolini puts them right in our face. He wants us to see the terror of the victims, to smell the shit. The fascists win, because fascists will always win when we do nothing. I’m not sure if Pasolini intended his audience to have such an empowering reaction; he himself seems to have a pretty grim view of humanity. But that’s what I took from it – guess I’m a rebel. I’m glad Salô exists because it’s a weapon against fascism, and while movies like Guardians of the Galaxy are great, they’re not going to wake anyone up. Salô showed me that real horror isn’t Freddy Kreuger tormenting a teenager, it’s people with unchecked power. That’s true horror. So congratulations to Pasolini on creating a piece of art that still resonates as strongly as it did 40 years ago. The themes that he broaches shouldn’t be a human constant, but they are, and Pasolini reminds us of that.