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(eccentric film buff, her head lines out several dozen titles)

Specify..."dark".

Art direction-wise, or subject matter?

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Dark? Hmmmm...dark, dark, dark.

Well, I'm a film buff, so many taste in films is rather vast, going into silent films, to classics, to foreign, to cults, and modern movies.

Farewell My Concubine/Ba wang bie ji (1993) was a Chinese film that makes me want to commit suicide. After seeing it, you will feel chronically depressed for a week! It's SOOOO tragic, yet SOOOOOO beautiful. It involves around Chinese opera, which is glitter, glitz, and glamour, but behind all of that is love, heartache, child abuse, child molestation, rape, pedestry, prostitution, art, beauty, perfection, war, politics, propaganda, and betrayal. Just rip my heart out and stomp on it why don't you!

M (1931) - The genius that brought you Metropolis brings you M! This was the first German talkie, the first (unofficial) film noir, the first psychological thriller, and the first serial killer film in cinema. This is also the film that arguably ruined Peter Lorre's acting career because he was SOOO convincing as Hans Beckert, a candy-chewing baby-faced child molester and serial murderer. This film also got a lot of publicity because it was used by Nazi propaganda films in WWII.

The Penalty (1920) - Don't let it being a silent film fool you. Lon Chaney, Sr, suffered for his art in this film. Lon Chaney plays a legless crime boss who attempts the murder the doctor amputated his legs and wants to kill the doctor's son-in-law, hack off his "perfect" legs, and graph them on his own. Phantom of the Opera? Hunchback of Notre Dame? Nothing compared to this film!

The Unknown (1927) - This is my favourite Lon Chaney film and my favourite Tod Browning film. It has a young Joan Crawford in it as well. Lon Chaney is an armless circus performer who throws knifes with his feet, but you find out he's a murderer-on-the-run and has to hide his arms because he has a genetic deficit, double-thumbs, and blackmails a doctor to amputate them. Ewww!

Freaks (1932) - Released a few months in the infamous Code Era, this film has been banned in 30 years in US because of its graphic content, butchered by edits or not. Director Tod Browning casted real "sideshow freaks" for this film. You kinda have to see it to believe it!

Ichi the Killer/Koroshiya Ichi (2001) - I have seen some messed up films in my life, most of them I thoroughly enjoyed -- American Psycho, Se7en, Taxi Driver, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Blue Velvet, Braindead/Dead Alive, Devil's Rejects, Clockwork Orange (which is a movie I despise) -- but I will never watch this movie again! Why? One word: DAMMMMNNNNNN!

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Anything Takishi Miike has done, most notably, Audition and Visitor Q.

Agree with No Country For Old Men, will add There Will Be Blood to the mix.

Angel Heart (Mikey Rooney at his best; Robert De Niro is a great Devil)

Quills

Milos Foremen's Goya's Ghosts (Javier Bardem's torture scene is intense)

Miller's Crossing (I still don't know why John Turturro didn't get an Oscar for that. His 'I can't die!" speech is amazing)

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Never heard if Miike. So I found a version of Ichi the Killer on youtube and did some "research".

Good grief!

Now I've heard of him.

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It's now between A Bug's Life and Wall-E for me.

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He did it.

Explain!

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WTF, man? However, when it comes to Disney, the darkest ones in my opinion are:

Alice in Wonderland

Hunchback of Notre Dame

The Black Caludron

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Oh, I love Quills! "You're not the Antichrist, you're just a malcontent who knows how to spell..."

Ahhhh...animation. I'm an animator and these are my two cents:

Black Caludron's pretty dark Disney film. Hunchback would have been a lot darker if they stuck to original novel, same with Alice...but it's close. But you should try the 3 Caballeros! The Nine Old Men were on some SERIOUS DRUGS throughout the entire production. The ending is enough to make your eyebrows shoot up; it's literally an acid trip! Lots of severed heads, dismembered legs, insinuations of sexual assault and other sexual references. (And I'm not talking about them singing about being "three gay caballeros" either.)

Disney-wise, from a 2D animator like myself, have you seen "Der Fuehrer's Face"? It was one of Disney's shorts used as propaganda during WWII; due to its nature, it's been banned by Disney. Donald as a Nazi? Why are you surprised by that? That's pretty dark, right?

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Wall-E did indeed make Total Film's Most Accidentally Depressing list

Cute little robot takes care of future Earth / rubbish tip.

Pass the razorblades: Nothing you do today matters. Just like yesterday and tomorrow. Whether you’re building a house, composing a song, or writing a book, it’s all meaningless, none of it’s going to last. One day, every conceivable human achievement will be reduced to garbage.

In fact, unless you’re currently working on a design for a cute little robot that has an innate sense of curiosity, you should probably lay down your tools right now, go home and climb into bed. Forever. That’s the true message of Wall-E.

Light at the end of the tunnel: Who cares if every human endeavour is ultimately pointless when there are flicks as brilliant was Wall-E in the world? Live for now! But, you know, recycle while you’re doing that.

Glum quote: WALL.E: “WALL-E.”

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Se7en
The Departed
Lost Highway
Eraserhead
Who's That Knocking At My Door?
Kiss Me Deadly
Children of Men
Mean Streets
No Country for Old Men
Sunset Boulevard
There Will Be Blood
The Shining
A Clockwork Orange
Night of the Living Dead
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

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My unofficial and offical work-> http://www.youtube.com/movieboyandco

I think "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" deserves a mention.

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He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you...

Brain: Why do you have The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover in your DVD library? Is this porn?
Me: No, it's ART! The film is all about lust, obsession, murder, torture, cannibalism, politics, food, and such. Great cast, with the great Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon, beautiful atmosphere, nice director -- Peter Greenaway, you know...
Brain: But it says here that's it's NC-17, right?
Me: Well, yeah...this is the uncensored version. They removed 25 minutes from the film in the theatrical release because sexual content. This is what the director originally intended, his original vision.
Brain: Like really graphic sexual content?
Me: Yeah.
Brain: So it's a porn?
Me: No, it's not!
Brain: But you just said...?
Me: SO!
Brain: But...?
Me: SOOOO!
Brain: Alright, alright...wait, is that an unrated version of Damage?
Me: Oh, come on! Jeremy Irons is hot!
Brain: I KNOW! SQUEEEE! Let's watch that!

(Both very dark films! )

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"Interview With The Assassin" gets four out of five. The fifth got lost in the car on the way to take the movie back to Blockbuster TWO WEEKS LATER.

Talk about going to a very dark place...
Ray Barry is an incredible actor. It's a shame he's not better known.

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"Ah, walking into a field of flowers. Nothing says 'I'm going to rip your f*cking head off' like walking into a field of flowers!"--MadWorld

It really does depend entirely on your definition of dark. Here are some that haven't been mentioned:

Klass, an Estonian film from 2007, almost immediately comes to mind, primarily because it was extremely difficult for me to watch. Anyone who's ever been harassed in school (just about everyone) or even witnessed extreme forms of harassment is going to have a difficult time with it. The ending, in particular, is absolutely perception shattering.

Takashi Miike has already been mentioned, but I'd have to say that Imprint, his Masters of Horror episode -- which never aired in the U.S., despite Showtime's statement that no director would be censored -- is by far the most darkest thing he's ever done. The torture sequence alone is horrifying, but the entire thing is dripping with a sense of dread that you really can't shake.

Roman Polanski's Repulsion was released in 1965, but I still think it's one of the most disturbing films ever made. It details the slow descent into madness of a sexually repressed, misandric manicurist after her sister leaves her alone in a flat that seems to become more and more confining as the woman becomes more and more deranged. It's also been ripped off quite a bit since its release, and if you've ever seen a scene where arms are to coming out of a wall or a wall is stretching out or distorting, the idea was likely stolen from this film.

Obviously, anything by David Lynch qualifies as dark and disturbing, but I'd have to say that Blue Velvet is still his best work.

There are others I'm sure I'm forgetting, but chances are, they'll be mentioned eventually.

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"I didn't know what his racket was. I start hitting him and I think 'Jeez! He's breathing funny! Does he have asthma?'"

For me, that'd be Andre Tarkovsky's The Stalker from 1979.
The whole film is set in the realm between this life and and the realm of death as it was depicted by Jean Cocteau in his 1949 film Orphee, a 'zone' of bombed out buildings and ruined streets( Cocteau filmed his in WWII-bombed Paris streets at night). This is never explained though, and it was only years later when I saw Orphee that I made the connection and fully understood the Tarvoksky film. A new arrival in the Zone needs a guide to navigate their way through, a stalker, and this is what the film is about.
I was in the burns ward of a hospital, drugged up on synthetic morphine and having quite an extreme time of it, when friends rented me a tv/video unit and gave me a bag of vhs' to watch, excellent disctraction as holding a book and turning pages was out of the question. They had filmed this at the recent film festival with a video camera secreted in a bag.
The film gelled perfectly with the situation i was in, which was a little dark to say the least.
I have never tried to watch it again, the original viewing experience was too... unique.

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...evidently chicken-town.

I've been looking for a copy of Roadside Picnic (the short novel Stalker was based on) for years now. I've never been able to find it.

I enjoyed the film quite a bit, but it didn't click with me quite as well as I thought it would. I've found myself saying the same thing about both Solaris and Andrei Rublev in the past, so I suppose it's something about Tarkovsky in general.

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"I didn't know what his racket was. I start hitting him and I think 'Jeez! He's breathing funny! Does he have asthma?'"

I just read the lengthy exposition on Stalker on wikipedia. Amazingly, no reference to Orphee is given, or seems to have cropped up in any references. If you watch these two films, the link is undeniable and glaringly obvious. No-one seems to have noticed!
Heh. So much for film school and all them theory lectures. Losers.

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...evidently chicken-town.

The Vanishing (Spoorloos) - the original dutch version not the execrable remake with Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges. The ending is really dark. I'd second both Dead Man's Shoes and Naked (still two of my favourite films though). Surprised no one's mentioned Liya 4 Ever, which is terribly bleak, as are Irreversible and Baise Moi. As has been mentioned most of Lynch's films (and the first season or so of Twin Peaks) are pretty dark, including The Elephant Man. And then there's The Wicker Man, another film with a horrible ending.

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Someone must have been telling lies about Walter K.

OK - I'm pretty forgiving w/ movies. I sat through Battlefield Earth... but Wicker Man blew. Hard.

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He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you...

You didn't like the Wicker Man? Really? What didn't you like about it?

EDIT: Wait there's a remake isn't there, with Nicholas Cage. I'm talking about the original with Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward!

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Someone must have been telling lies about Walter K.