BANNED: The most controversial films 359062.bin

120 Days of Sodom (1975)

Banned in Italy, Finland, Australia, West Germany, New Zealand and Norway

Also known as Salò, this film is based on the book by Marquis de Sade which he wrote while imprisoned in the Bastille in 1785. Sade was incarcerated in prison and in an insane asylum for nearly half his life.

In Pasolini's film, four men of power in Italy: the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President, collect a group of teenagers, and subject them to 120 days of torture. Graphically violent, the film was, and is still, banned in several countries for its depiction of sexual torture - particularly to children, as they are raped, mutilated and forced to eat faeces. Despite all of this - the film still excludes some of the horrors of the book - it's no wonder why the word Sadism was derived from Marquis de Sade's name.

The director, Pier Paolo Pasolini was no stranger to controversy himself. His first film Accattone (1961) was based on his own novel and its violent depiction of the life of a pimp in the slums of Rome caused a furore in Italy. Many of his films expressing his contentious views on Marxism, atheism, fascism and homosexuality, and with an end as dramatic as a scene in one of his films, he was brutally and mysteriously murdered by being repeatedly run over by his own car.