Controversy doesn’t age well. The same things that inspired waves of outrage just a couple decades ago often seem downright silly by modern standards, but major controversies are nonetheless important reflections of public opinion.

While all art is meant to elicit a reaction, these films spawned dozens of outraged responses that were often more about the sociopolitical atmosphere of the times than they were about the film’s actual content. Here are the 8 most controversial movies in film history.

The Interview (2014)

Seth Rogen and his writing-directing partner Evan Goldberg intended to follow up their Hollywood apocalypse comedy This Is the End with another satire that this time took on the totalitarian regime of North Korea and leader Kim Jong-un, as well as standard media vapidity.

The North Korean government threatened to take action against the US if Columbia Pictures released The Interview as planned, prompting the company to delay the release and re-edit the film to appease the North Korean regime. After Sony was hacked by a group called “Guardians of Peace” with alleged ties to the North Korean government, The Interview was unceremoniously dumped on online rental services. Funnily enough, the admittedly entertaining film doesn’t say much about the famously oppressive country that wasn’t already common knowledge.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Italian exploitation director Ruggero Deodato made a routine of endangering his crew of underpaid actors and indigenous extras during the production of his violent mockumentary Cannibal Holocaust in the Amazon rainforest. But he was accused of even worse upon the film’s release in Italy, when he was brought up on charges that he had actually killed some of his actors on camera.

Deodato had made his actors sign a contract not to appear in any media after the film’s production to heighten the realism of the story, but he was cleared after explaining how he achieved some of his gore effects and several of the supposedly killed actors appeared on television. Nonetheless, the film was banned in multiple countries for showing real violence against animals on camera—including one ghastly scene where a large turtle is deshelled and has its entrails removed.

I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

Roger Ebert famously called I Spit on Your Grave “a vile bag of garbage...without a shred of artistic distinction.” Ebert, who had a bad habit of denouncing violent horror films that later proved influential, was only one of the many critics who denounced the film for its graphic depiction of a young woman’s gang-rape and subsequent bloody revenge against her attackers.

The rape scenes are painfully drawn out, causing many to accuse the film of glorifying violence against women, though director Meir Zarchi claims his intent was to highlight the horrors of rape and felt the violence was necessary to telling such a story. Despite a slew of bans from nations like Ireland, West Germany, Norway and Iceland, I Spit on Your Grave gained cult status and even inspired a more polished remake in 2010.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

The Last Temptation of Christ sparked a torrent of Catholic outrage even before its release, simply because it follows in the footsteps of its source material and depicts Christ as a man as much as a God, plagued by doubts that (spoilers!) inspire an extended dream sequence wherein Jesus marries and consummates his relationship with the prostitute Mary Magdalene and lives a normal life, just as Satan wants, instead of sacrificing his life on the cross.

After its release, an Integrism Catholic group set fire to a Parisian theater that was showing the film, and many nations banned the films for years. In the US, fundamentalist Christian groups organized mass protests at film screenings and outside the headquarters of MCA, inspiring several theater chains to not screen the film. For what it’s worth, director Martin Scorsese was raised within the church and has described himself as a “lapsed Catholic.”

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

The philosophical inspiration for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom comes from the likes of Dante and Nietzche, but it’s easy to see how many of the film’s critics looked past its ideas — in terms of actual plot, the film is about four powerful fascist libertines who subject a large group of teenagers to months of physical, mental and sexual torture.

Pasolini was mysteriously shot and killed shortly before the film’s release, so he couldn’t see the international controversy he had caused. It was rejected by the British censorship board, and a Soho theater was raided by Metropolitan Police for screening it anyway. In 1994, long after the original 1975 release, an undercover cop found a copy of the film at a Cincinnati gay bookstore and arrested the owners for “pandering.” The court made no ruling on the merits of the film, but determined the officer had violated the owners’ fourth amendment rights.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

The Birth of a Nation is a landmark film in terms of cinematic language, as DW Griffith’s 1915 Civil War epic invented many of the visual techniques still used by filmmakers today. Its historical impact cannot be denied, but its actual message is a vile one that glorified the Ku Klux Klan and depicted black freedmen as uneducated sexual brutes.

Under President Woodrow Wilson (a Klan sympathizer), it became the first film to screen at the White House, while the NAACP unsuccessfully lobbied to ban the film and organized protests that occasionally erupted into riots in major cities. Because of its twin status as a turning point in cinema and a pro-KKK propaganda piece, The Birth of a Nation is still controversial today, inspiring a 2016 film of the same title from black director Nate Parker, which tells the story of a slave boy who becomes an ideological leader and aims to reclaim the title to challenge racism.

The Great Dictator (1940)

Charlie Chaplin ruthlessly criticized German dictator Adolf Hitler long before it became America’s national pastime in his 1940 film The Great Dictator, which predated US entry into World War II.

Chaplin was deeply disturbed by the rise of fascism around the world and cast himself as both a victimized Jewish barber and a megalomaniacal Hitler surrogate to satirize and draw attention to issues of anti-Semitism and imperialism. It was welcomed in the UK for its value as propaganda and banned in many European and Latin American countries that had sizable populations of Nazi sympathizers.

It was one of Chaplin’s last great successes and ends with a sequence wherein he speaks directly into the camera and delivers a humanistic speech that may have alienated some viewers with its blatant political messaging (though it all sounds remarkably inoffensive by today’s standards). His left-leaning political sympathies also made Chaplin a target of government prosecution in subsequent years with the rise of McCarthyism, and he was effectively banned from the US in 1953 while attending a film premiere in London.

Bonnie & Clyde (1967)

Sometimes it takes a lot of controversy to reinvent cinema. Bonnie & Clyde is often cited as one of the major films of ‘60s counterculture and the first of the New Hollywood era, when sanitized studio epics focusing on biblical epics and escapist musicals were replaced by gritty, personal depictions of societal ills.

The graphic depiction of sex and violence divided critics and audiences alike. Like many films that have since followed in its footsteps, Bonnie & Clyde was routinely accused of glorifying violence, despite the famously prolonged deaths of its murderous heroes in the film’s final minutes.