Between 1971 and 1983 Los Angeles hosted an annual film festival called Filmex. The people behind it went on to found the American Cinematheque. In 1975 they received a submission from Belgium that caused the judges to cringe so hard that they planned to reject it. Thanks to an eloquent plea from Buck Henry, the film was screened. By the end of that screening the audience had mostly fled, but the film took on mythic status. It was rarely screened at underground film festivals, and never got any sort of VHS or DVD release during the 20th century. When it showed up on the gray market, it was often simply labeled “the pig-fucking movie.” In 2009 a DVD of a restored version of Vase de Noces (1974) was released in Germany, featuring an interview with director Thierry Zeno nearly as long as the film itself. An all-region version of the director’s collected works is currently in print in Belgium, and can be ordered on the Walmart website in the United States. Because there are digital versions, you can usually find a copy posted on YouTube.

The power of the film to disturb people owes a lot to the matter-of-fact way that everything is portrayed. It feels almost like a documentary. There is no point where the director signals any intention to be shocking. The action all takes place in a rural setting. The film is shot in black and white, which gives it a dreamlike quality. It starts off looking like an innocent meditation on country life. Nothing about the setting feels modern. The world in which the film takes place might have existed 200 years ago. None of the farm chores require any modern equipment. The lone human cast member cavorts with his pig in the way that one might interact with a smart dog. It all feels so natural that by the time he is having sex with the pig, it is likely to catch an unwarned viewer by surprise. It’s also the point where the audience started to flee the Filmex screening.

The pig eventually gives birth to a litter of human piglet-hybrids. Her human lover becomes enraged with jealousy at the attention she is showing them, and hangs the piglets where she can see their corpses. She dies of shock at the sight. He buries her body in the farmyard, and digs a grave for himself. At this point he goes crazy. After saving his excrement and urine in jars (at least a wall full of them), he starts to consume these. At this point the action starts to look like a Paul McCarthy performance. The film concludes with the protagonist hanging himself.

It’s probably telling that this film is now considered a classic in the horror genre. That’s the easiest way to explain a film that is so disturbing to so many people. In a world where a major TV sci-fi anthology devotes an episode to tricking a politician into sodomizing a pig for shock value, it’s even more shocking to see the same activity portrayed as if it were just another documentary on rural life.