We watch movies for plenty of reasons: to laugh, to cry, to learn new things. But often what we want most is a mind-blowing jolt to the system — whether it be a revealing line of dialogue, an horrific act of violence or simply a star playing against type.

1_The Crying Game
(1992, dir. Neil Jordan)
Best Seen: Artisan DVD
Time Code: Chapter 18, 63:57
What started as a fairly routine political thriller takes a jaw-dropping turn into the unknown when former IRA member Fergus (Stephen Rea) goes home with his girlfriend, Dil (Jaye Davidson). Dil changes into a robe, and then, standing before Fergus, lets it slide off her shoulders. The camera pans down . . . and she has a penis. “An awful lot of red-blooded Irishmen were very shocked because they really fancied this girl,” Rea says. The unveiling abruptly jerks the film into a no-man’s land of genre; it’s now an odd hybrid of romance, politics, and sexual declaration, but what most people remember is that infamous shot. “There’s only one penis moment,” Rea says. “Once it’s been done, really, you can’t do it again.”

2_The Public Enemy
(1931, dir. William Wellman)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 23, 81:23
Titular gangster Tom Powers is coming home from the hospital where he’d been treated after a gun battle. So says the call received at the Powers household, and that call sets the household buzzing. While the phonograph blares “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” there is a knock on the door, and suddenly there’s James Cagney’s corpse wrapped in a blanket, his eyes still open in horror, standing rigid in the doorway, as his killers placed him. He falls with an ungodly slam into the foyer, the phonograph still merrily crackling.

3_Alien
(1979, dir. Ridley Scott)
Best Seen: Twentieth Century Fox DVD
Time Code: Chapter 10, 54:27
Forever linking extraterrestrials and indigestion, Scott proved how truly sickening science fiction can be: The crew of the space hauler Nostromo are having dinner. Kane (John Hurt)—who just survived an attack from a face-sucking crustacean—starts choking, then whips into seizures as his comrades lay him out on the table. Suddenly, a small, phallic creature with glinting silver teeth bursts out of his chest, spewing blood and viscera everywhere. It surveys the room with a squawk and runs off into the depths of the ship. Pepto-Bismol stockholders are still singing this film’s praises.

4_Psycho
(1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Best Seen: Universal DVD
Time Code: Chapter 24, 100:25
By killing off his star (Janet Leigh) in the first 50 minutes, Hitchcock made it clear he couldn’t care less about our expectations. Then he made it even more evident that he wasn’t too concerned about our heart rates or mental health, either. While investigating her sister’s disappearance, Lila Crane (Vera Miles) stumbles upon an elderly woman in a fruit cellar sitting in a chair, staring at the wall. The chair slowly turns, revealing a corpse more prune than person. As Miles lets out a piercing screech, the iconic Bernard Herrmann score returns and a swinging lightbulb throws jagged shadows on the ghoulish scene.

5_Bonnie and Clyde
(1967, dir. Arthur Penn)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 34, 106:37
Having just avoided yet another run-in with the law, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde are enjoying a sunny day, blissfully ignorant of the local police lying in wait to ambush them. We think we know what’s in store, but the savagery of the final shootout is worse than moviegoers of the time could have ever imagined. In a surge of unprecedented violence, the cops riddle the freewheeling duo with bullets from head to toe. The spareness of the setup—a flock of birds taking flight, the look exchanged by the lovers—and the awful silence of the aftermath make it all that much more unsettling.

6_Reservoir Dogs
(1992, dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Best Seen: Artisan DVD
Time Code: Chapter 13, 54:50
After a jewel heist goes terribly wrong, would-be thief and grade-A psychopath Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) is not happy. And that’s very bad news for the young L.A. police officer he has taken hostage. Left alone at a deserted warehouse, Blonde turns on the radio, which is playing the ’70s Stealers Wheel hit “Stuck in the Middle With You.” While grooving to the music, he cuts the cop’s ear off with a razor and douses his victim with gasoline. “[After the film was released], a lot of people would hesitate to get in an elevator with me,” Madsen says. “Parents would grab their children and go, ‘No! Don’t go near that guy! I’ll explain when you grow up.’ ”

7_Deliverance
(1972, dir. John Boorman)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 13, 42:00
Few fears tear deeper into the fragile fabric of being a man than this: getting anally raped by a hillbilly in the woods. And Deliverance, largely, is to blame. This cautionary tale about four friends who venture into the Georgia backwoods for a canoe trip reaches fever pitch when Ned Beatty is forced, at gunpoint, to “squeal like a pig” by the gnarliest mountain men imaginable. Boorman and writer James Dickey get credit for crushing the cushy, protected world of the white-collar professional. But it’s Beatty whose *** is on the line; it’s his pink, dirt-slathered flesh and wails of anguish that leave a lasting, disturbing impression.

8_Carrie
(1976, dir. Brian De Palma)
Best Seen: MGM DVD
Time Code: Chapter 31, 94:20
Okay, so there’s no doubt that seeing Carrie doused in pig’s blood at the prom by her bitchy classmates, and the telekinetic massacre that follows, is enough to make you wish you never made fun of that mousy girl in math class. They may have all laughed at poor Sissy Spacek, but the real joke was on prissy Amy Irving, whose character is grabbed from beyond the grave by the disgraced prom queen at the end of the film. Granted, the touch from beyond was only a nightmare, but it’s undoubtedly one that she, and everyone who has ever seen this movie, has had more than once.

9_The Exorcist
(1973, dir. William Friedkin)
Best Seen: Warner DVD
Time Code: Chapter 15, 73:20
Spinning heads, projectile green vomit, and endless obscenities—no one ever said demonic possession was pretty. But when 12-year-old Regan (Linda Blair) stabs herself in the crotch repeatedly with a bloody crucifix, shrieking in a voice that is half grown man, half rabid dog, “Let Jesus **** you,” it’s no wonder that audience members were passing out in the aisles. Yet the most disturbing thing about the scene—which is disrespectful at best, blasphemous at worst—is the image of such a young girl performing an act that combines self-torture and child abuse.

10_Un Chien Andalou
(1929, dir. Luis Buñuel)
Best Seen: Translux Films DVD
Time Code: Chapter 1, 1:27
A brutishly handsome young man—Buñuel himself—sharpens a razor on a strop while a lovely young woman sits patiently in a chair. From the balcony of their room, he spies a cloud sliver slicing across a full moon, and inspiration strikes. Holding open the unresisting woman’s lid, he slashes her eyeball in unsparing closeup. (It’s actually a calf’s eye and socket.) Pretty much contextless and utterly disquieting, this scenario kicks off the galvanic Buñuel–Salvador Dali short, a self-described “passionate appeal to murder,” which continues to inspire épater-le-bourgeois types and freak out film students.

11_Saving Private Ryan
(1998, dir. Steven Spielberg)
Best Seen: DreamWorks DVD
Time Code: Chapter 2, 9:43
D-Day, 1944, Normandy. Nazi machine guns mow down American GIs like cardboard cutouts at a shooting range. Yet even in the midst of such carnage, one image stands out: A soldier, seemingly unaware of the chaos surrounding him, searches for something on the ground. It soon becomes horrifically clear what it is he seeks—his own severed arm. “I’m sure it [really] happened,” says cinematographer Janusz Kaminski of the soldier’s gory task (an apparent homage to Kurosawa’s Ran). “But our aim was not to shock the viewers through violence. It was to accomplish a sense of reality that would allow them to understand what the war must have been like.”

12_The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(1974, dir. Tobe Hooper)
Best Seen: Pioneer DVD
Time Code: Chapter 8, 39:22
Say what you will about psychological terror and fear of the unseen, but when Gunnar Hansen, as the hulking Leatherface, hangs hapless Teri McMinn on a meat hook while she screams like someone who has, well, just been skewered by a cannibal in a raggedy mask, it’s one of the most chilling moments in the screw-subtlety-go-for-the-grisly horror genre. We thought it couldn’t get any more gruesome than when Leatherface first appeared and sledge-hammered William Vail’s head with a sickening wet thwack. Oh, we were so wrong.

13_The Usual Suspects
(1995, dir. Bryan Singer)
Best Seen: MGM DVD
Time Code: Chapter 31, 97:35
Possibly the most cerebral shock in cinema history, the revelation that pathetic con man Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) has masterminded the whole convoluted Kobayashi–Keyser Soze–Dean Keaton swindle comes as a slowly unraveling stunner. Verbal has finished his tale, which has taken more twists than Mulholland Drive, and detective Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) disparagingly dismisses him. Verbal collects his belongings and limps out of the police station. And then he transforms—his stride becomes the confident swagger of the sociopath who engineered it all.