Cultured patrons attending the Westside’s Landmark Nuart theater on Friday might want to bring a cushion and their warmest slippers as the renowned indie movie venue prepares to screen a five-hour dramathon called “The Red Riding Trilogy.”

However, the audience would also be well-warned to go with strong stomachs, as the British made-for-television series features some of the most unsettlingly brutal and hauntingly realistic images of violence ever captured on screen.

Adapted by screenwriter Tony Grisoni and based on a celebrated quartet of novels by author David Peace (“Red Riding-1977” was nixed for budgetary reasons), the films are a highly ambitious descent into the darkness of the human soul.

Encapsulating and interlinking a decade of modern British history, the trilogy mixes fact and fiction to expose heinous police and political corruption in a northern industrial town, as a backdrop to a spate of child serial killings and the real-life hunt for the “Yorkshire Ripper.”

The child slayings evoke the infamous and gruesome 1960’s “Moors” murders by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who killed and tortured five children aged between 10 and 17.

It became so named because three (one discovered 20 years later) of the bodies were found on Saddleworth Moor near the Yorskshire town of Oldham.

Three different directors tackle the epic project: “1974” is helmed by Julian Jarrold, “1980” by James Marsh and “1983” by Anand Tucker.

It also boasts a who’s-who of British acting talent, including Sean Bean (“Patriot Games,” “Lord of the Rings”); Andrew Garfield (“The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus”); David Morrissey (“The Reaping”); and Rebecca Hall (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona).

It’s hard to say, but either Grisoni is either a masochist or quite possibly insane in apparently jumping at the chance to re-create the novels.

The unrelenting drama assaults the senses with pictures of child mutilation (the serial killer has a passion for swans and attaches their wings to his victims), extreme violence (a priest is blasted to death with a shotgun at short range) and torture (interrogating police unleash a live rat to gnaw at a man’s groin).

All the while, the action is mostly framed through a nihilistic vision of what Northern life was like in the 1970s and ‘80s for ordinary, working class folks trapped in ugly concrete tenements, and crime-infested, virtually abandoned housing estates.

“This is the North where we do what we want,” a line uttered in toast by a cabal of senior, corrupt Yorskshire police officers, sets the scene in 1974 where rookie journalist Eddie Dunford (Garfield) returns from London for his father’s funeral as a young girl goes missing.

Perhaps trying to prove himself for not making the grade down south, Dunford latches onto the case and persuades the gruff editor of the Yorkshire Post to let him investigate how the police are handling it.

The short answer to that is “any bloody way they want,” as the cocky scribe tragically falls for Paula Garland (Hall) the mother of another recent victim and his investigation rubs local business tycoon John Dawson (Bean) the wrong way.

Then, as the central characters arc and overlap, a series of flashbacks unravel the other two films as the increasingly riveting hunt for the serial killer becomes a grand guignol of superior storytelling.