SHARING THE SICKNESS

Why These Six Films Define the Extreme Cinema Canon

Every great underground archive has a selection principle. At Sharing The Sickness, the films on this page were not assembled by algorithm or popularity metrics. They were chosen because they represent a specific, irreplaceable quality: they disturb in ways that are difficult to shake off. These are films where transgression is the argument — where the filmmaker uses shock not for sensation, but to force a psychological confrontation that commercial cinema cannot and will not attempt. The six transmissions available here represent different national traditions and different kinds of courage. What unites them is that each paid a real price — censorship, banning, suppression, or permanent exile from mainstream distribution — for existing at all.

Larry Clark's Ken Park (2002): The Most Suppressed American Film

Ken Park remains the most aggressively suppressed film by a significant American director. Shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman — one of Hollywood's most respected lens artists — and directed by Larry Clark (Kids, Bully), the film follows four California teenagers across a single summer, exposing the catastrophic damage inflicted by their respective home environments. The film was immediately banned in Australia after police intervened to cancel a scheduled Sydney Film Festival screening. In the United States, it never received any theatrical release. Its continued survival is entirely due to underground archives, making it one of the clearest examples of why Sharing The Sickness has cultural value. Ken Park (2002) is not exploitation. It is anthropology — unsparing, intimate, and formally accomplished, directed by a filmmaker who genuinely lived inside the world he depicts.

Gaspar Noé: Two Masterworks From the Most Dangerous Director Working

The archive contains two films by Gaspar Noé, which is appropriate: no other living director has contributed more to the extreme cinema vocabulary. Climax (2018) is the more immediately accessible entry — a French dance troupe's celebration collapses into collective madness after their sangria is laced with LSD. Shot in a single Parisian warehouse location with largely improvised performances, the film is structured as a dance film for its first act before detonating into something primal and terrifying. The cinematography, handled by Noé himself, is among the most technically astonishing work of the decade.

Enter the Void (2009) is the larger demand. Running 154 minutes, it follows Oscar, an American drug dealer shot dead in a Tokyo nightclub, whose consciousness drifts over the neon city in a continuous first-person POV shot that recreates the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a psychedelic odyssey. No other film in the digital era is quite like it. If Climax is the entry point, Enter the Void is the deep end. Both are available in the archive — stream more Noé and extreme cinema titles here.

David Cronenberg's Crash (1996): Desire at the Speed of Steel

Crash arrived at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival and immediately divided the jury — it won the Special Jury Prize while jury president Francis Ford Coppola reportedly refused to award it the Palme d'Or. David Cronenberg, adapting J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel, produces a film that is icy, clinical, and deeply strange: a group of car crash survivors find themselves erotically fixated on collisions, seeking increasingly dangerous impacts. The film refuses to condemn, explain, or comfort. In the UK, Westminster City Council attempted to have it banned from London cinemas. The controversy only confirmed what the film was actually doing: exposing a cultural discomfort with the relationship between technology, the body, and sexuality. James Spader and Holly Hunter deliver performances of extraordinary controlled stillness. Crash (1996) remains one of the most rigorously challenging films in the Cronenberg canon.

Andrzej Żuławski's Possession (1981): Body Horror as Marriage Collapse

Andrzej Żuławski's Possession was shot in West Berlin during one of the most creatively intense periods in the Polish director's career, and the intensity bleeds through every frame. On the surface, it is a story of a marriage disintegrating: Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani play a couple coming apart in a divided city. But Żuławski escalates the material into something far beyond domestic drama — body horror, supernatural transgression, and sequences of performance that border on genuine psychological rupture. Adjani's subway breakdown sequence is among the most ferocious two minutes in cinema history; it won her the Best Actress prize at Cannes. The film was banned in the UK, listed on the Video Nasty register, and suppressed for years. A full restoration confirmed what its defenders had always argued: Possession is a masterpiece.

Nagisa Ōshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976): Still Banned in Japan

In the Realm of the Senses is the most extreme film ever produced with significant institutional support: a formal French-Japanese co-production, shot in Japan with a professional cast and crew, based on a documented historical incident from 1936. The film depicts the affair between Sada Abe, a domestic servant, and her employer Kichizo Ishida — a relationship of complete erotic obsession that culminated in strangulation at Ishida's own request. Nagisa Ōshima uses the story as a vehicle for a completely explicit investigation of desire as a force that obliterates all social boundaries. The film was sent to France for post-production to circumvent Japanese censorship law. It has never been legally screened in its uncensored form in Japan. Fifty years after its production, In the Realm of the Senses (1976) remains a work of undiminished power — formal, political, and completely uncompromising.

The Archive Reference: Essential Extreme Films Available Now

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