2. Fight Club (1999)

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Fincher’s most culturally important film is also one that plays on the brutality and anarchy of humans’ primal nature. We’re not even supposed to be talking about Fight Club right now (that’s literally the first rule of Fight Club), but Edward Norton beating Jared Leto’s face into a bloody pulp after he was already unconscious, and letting lye eat through his flesh because his alter ego told him to do so, is too gruesome to not discuss. There’s nothing inherently depraved about dissociative identity disorder until it manifests as Brad Pitt leading you to beat yourself up to frame your boss as part of an extortion plot, or to blow up buildings in order to erase everyone’s credit history.

Honestly, the most depraved part of Fight Club is how much we are drawn to the film because of its visceral dissection of our subservience to the jobs we have, the government we live under, and the herd mentality we mask, all under the guise of societal norms. It just does it with gallons of blood.