framethrowerSign up for free

Best Incest Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of incest cinema — measured across 2,076 indexed frames from 30 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Incest films over-index on wallpaper, staircase and bed — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Crimson Peak (2015)

    Guillermo del ToroDP Dan LaustsenIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    Edith Cushing's mother died when she was young but watches over her. Brought up in the Victorian Era she strives to be more than just a woman of marriageable age. She becomes enamored with Thomas Sharpe, a mysterious stranger. After a series of meetings and incidents she marries Thomas and comes to live with him and his sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe, far away from everything she has known. The naive girl soon comes to realize not everything is as it appears as ghosts of the past quite literally come out of the woodwork. This movie is more about mystery and suspense than gore.

  2. 2

    The Dreamers (2003)

    Bernardo BertolucciDP Fabio CianchettiIMDb 7.1TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Paris, spring 1968. While most students take the lead in the May 'revolution', a French poet's twin son Theo and daughter Isabelle enjoy the good life in his grand Paris home. As film buffs they meet and 'adopt' modest, conservatively educated Californian student Matthew. With their parents away for a month, they drag him into an orgy of indulgence of all senses, losing all of his and the last of their innocence. A sexual threesome shakes their rapport, yet only the outside reality will break it up.

  3. 3

    The White Ribbon (2009)

    Michael HanekeDP Christian BergerIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    An aged tailor recalls his life as the schoolteacher of a small village in Northern Germany that was struck by a series of strange events in the year leading up to WWI.

  4. 4

    Oldboy (2003)

    Park Chan-wookDP Chung Chung-hoonIMDb 8.3TMDB 8.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Abducted on a rainy night in 1988, the obnoxious drunk, Oh Dae-Su, much to his surprise, wakes up locked in a windowless and dilapidated hotel room, for an unknown reason. There, his invisible and pitiless captors will feed him, clothe him, and sedate him to avert a desperate suicide--and as his only companion and a window to the world is the TV in his stark cell--the only thing that helps Oh Dae-Su keep going is his daily journal. Then, unexpectedly, after fifteen long years in captivity, the perplexed prisoner is deliberately released, encouraged to track down his tormentor to finally get his retribution. However, who would hate Oh Dae-Su so much he would deny him of a quick and clean death?

  5. 5

    Cat People (1982)

    Paul SchraderDP John BaileyIMDb 6.2TMDB 6.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    The Cat People originated way back in time, when humans sacrificed their women to leopards, who mated with them. Cat People look similar to humans, but must mate with other Cat People before they transform into panthers. Irene Gallier was raised by adoptive parents and meets her older brother Paul for the first time since childhood. We follow brother and sister - who seem to be the only ones of their kind left.

  6. 6

    Enter The Void (2009)

    Gaspar NoéDP Benoît DebieIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Tokyo's nasty underside, seen primarily through the eyes of Oscar, a heavy drug user, whose sister Linda is a stripper. Oscar also has flashbacks to his childhood when trauma upends the siblings. Oscar's drug-fed hallucinations alter Tokyo's already-disconcerting nights, and after the police shoot him, he can float above and look down: on his sister's sorrow, on the rooms of a love hotel, and on life at even a molecular level. The spectrum's colors can be beautiful; it's people's colorless lives that can be ugly. And what of afterlife, is there more than a void?

  7. 7

    Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

    Tim BurtonDP Dariusz WolskiIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    In the Victorian London, the barber Benjamin Barker is married to the gorgeous Lucy and they have a lovely child, Johanna. The beauty of Lucy attracts the attention of the corrupt Judge Turpin, who falsely accuses the barber of a crime that he did not commit and abuses Lucy later after gaining custody of her. After fifteen years in exile, Benjamin returns to London under the new identity of Sweeney Todd, seeking revenge against Turpin. He meets the widow Mrs. Lovett who is the owner of a meat pie shop who tells him that Lucy swallowed arsenic many years ago, and Turpin assigned himself tutor of Johanna. He opens a barber shop above her store, initiating a crime rampage against those who made him suffer and lose his beloved family.

  8. 8

    Black Christmas (2006)

    Glen MorganDP Robert McLachlanIMDb 4.7TMDB 5.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    In the 70's, the boy Billy is born with yellow skin due to a liver disease and his dysfunctional mother rejects him. Later he witnesses his mother and her lover killing his beloved father and burying him in the basement of their house, and he is locked in the attic alone along his childhood. When he is a teenager, he is sexually abused by his mother and she has a baby girl called Agnes. During Christmas, the deranged Billy escapes from his imprisonment, kills his mother and stepfather and blinds one eye of Agnes. He is declared insane and his sister is sent to an orphanage. In the present days, Billy escapes from the Clark Sanatorium to spend Christmas with his family. Meanwhile, his former house is the Delta Alpha Kappa sorority house in the campus of the Clement University, and the housemother and the sisters Kelli Presley, Dana, Lauren Hannon, Megan, Heather, Megan Helms, Melissa and Eve Agnew are preparing the house for Christmas party in a stormy night while Clair Crosby is in her room writing a card to bury the hatchet with her sister. When three sisters vanish, the others receive weird phone calls and believe something is wrong, but they find that they are trapped in the location.

  9. 9

    Angel Heart (1987)

    Alan ParkerDP Michael SeresinIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    A down-and-out Brooklyn detective is hired to track down a singer on an odyssey that will take him through the desperate streets of Harlem, the smoke-filled jazz clubs of New Orleans, and the swamps of Louisiana and its seedy underworld of voodoo.

  10. 10

    The Cider House Rules

    Lasse HallströmDP Oliver StapletonIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Homer is an orphan in remote St. Cloud, Maine. Never adopted, he becomes the favorite of orphanage Director Dr. Larch, who imparts his full medical knowledge on Homer, who becomes a skilled, albeit unlicensed, physician. But Homer yearns for a self-chosen life outside the orphanage. When Wally and pregnant Candy visit the orphanage, Dr. Larch provides a medically safe, albeit illegal, abortion, Homer leaves with them to work on Wally's family apple farm. Wally goes off to war, leaving Homer and Candy alone together. What will Homer learn about life and love in the cider house? What of the destiny that Dr. Larch has planned for him?

What incest films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a incest frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — wallpaper is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • wallpaper2.4×
  • staircase2.2×
  • bed2.1×
  • book2.0×
  • vest1.9×
  • blood1.9×
  • pillow1.9×
  • doorway1.7×

How incest films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate incest from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 25%closeupvs 21% baseline

What breaks the pattern

My Own Private Idaho (1991) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 2,076 frames from 30 films carrying the incest label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/incest

What is FrameThrower?

Great films start with great references.

The numbers on this page come from the same index you can search directly. Every frame is tagged for lighting, lens, shot size, colour and mood — so you can find the reference you already have in your head, by describing it, by dropping in an image, or by picking a colour.

  • The largest film library in the world — searchable frame by frame
  • Search by light, colour, lens or mood — or by dropping in an image
  • Script to lookbook in an afternoon — a board for every scene, from real frames
  • Moodboards you can share on one link — your DP, designer and client see the same film
  • API and MCP access — for agentic and developer workflows
  • Free to start — no card required

A pitch trailer takes weeks of work and a budget most projects never get. The lookbook gets you there in an afternoon.

Start free — search the library7-day free trial of everything · cancel anytime

DiscoveryResearchReferencesEducation

These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used