Erotic Movies: “Killer Joe”: Directed by Oscar Winner William Friedkin (“French Connection”), Starring Matthew McConaughey (NC-17)

William Friedkin’s black comedy Killer Joe, starring Matthew McConaughey, earned an NC-17 rating for “graphic disturbing content including violence and sexuality and a scene of brutality.”

While an unrated cut of the movie was eventually released on DVD, the movie originally opened in theaters with its NC-17 rating intact.

Friedkin pushed back against the distributor’s request to cut the movie for theaters in order to get an R-rating, saying, “Cutting would not have made it mass appeal. Cutting it would have been the equivalent of what members of the U.S. government and military leaders said about the Vietnam War.

They said, ‘We have to destroy Vietnam in order to save it,’ and that’s what I would have done to ‘Killer Joe.’ To get an R rating, I would have had to destroy it in order to save it, and I wasn’t interested in doing that.”