For Halloween, writers from The Guardian have selected films outside the horror genre that left them feeling shellshocked. Radheyan Simonpillai highlights Lee Chang-dong's Burning as a masterclass in creeping anxiety. The film follows an aspiring writer named Jong-su, played by Yoo Ah-in, who tends to his incarcerated father's farm while grappling with disaffected male rage. As a spirited young woman disappears and a wealthy playboy exhibits serial killer vibes, the movie tilts into thriller territory, utilizing horror language to evoke existential fear reminiscent of Taxi Driver and Michael Haneke's Caché.
Morgan Jerkins identifies Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame as their most terrifying non-horror experience. A scene depicting Quasimodo bound to a pillory while townspeople jeer at him remains seared in their memory from childhood. The film explores deep themes of xenophobia, bigotry toward Romani people, and sexual predation by a religious leader. Jerkins notes that the movie proves real monsters are often human beings wielding social standing through money, beauty, or authority, requiring no jumpscares to frighten.
Alaina Demopoulos points to the 1952 noir The Sniper as a grimly prescient portrait of urban alienation and misogyny. The film features an insane loner who methodically shoots women from his window while writing letters to the police begging them to catch him. Released decades before Taxi Driver, it feels disturbingly familiar to modern audiences numb to gun violence and incel culture. Demopoulos also notes the haunting backstory of director Edward Dmytryk, a member of the Hollywood Ten who was blacklisted, later imprisoned, and eventually turned informant against his contemporaries.
Veronica Esposito finds existential terror in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film presents human creativity as a mysterious force delivered by an alien monolith, encapsulated by the iconic jump cut from a primate tossing a bone to an orbiting nuclear satellite. While the movie ends on a note of hope with astronaut Dave Bowman disconnecting the runaway AI HAL 9000, Esposito argues that in the real world, humanity has already passed the point where such a disconnection is possible, leaving a lingering fear that our greatest strengths will lead to our collapse.
Andrew Lawrence recalls Howard the Duck as a source of childhood dread due to its animatronic realism. The film features an adult-sized mallard with golf ball eyes who arrives in Cleveland, Ohio, looking like a mascot fallen into primordial ooze. Lawrence describes the experience of seeing the character in bed with Lea Thompson as unprepared for a nine-year-old mind, noting that releasing such a film two years after Child's Play inevitably led to it being mistaken for horror.
Juan A Ramirez compares How to Have Sex to the coercive backseat scene in Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade, describing it as unbearable dread blown up to 91 minutes. In Molly Manning Walker's debut, Mia McKenna-Bruce plays a 16-year-old on holiday in Greece who realizes that keeping up with a shot count does not equal sexual maturity. The film creates a queasy viewing experience where the threat of the worst-case scenario suffuses every frame, even if the girls often stumble home safely.
Jesse Hassenger recounts how 8mm left him and his friends rattled after they ducked into it following a screening of The Rage: Carrie 2. Starring Nicolas Cage as a private investigator hunting for a real snuff film featuring a teenage runaway, the movie is described as exploitative yet viscerally upsetting. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, known for Seven, sneaks horror elements into the detective thriller genre through gruesome deaths and an extended confrontation with a creep played by James Gandolfini.
Shrai Popat finds Awake terrifying due to the concept of anesthesia failing while a patient remains conscious but paralyzed. Hayden Christensen plays a wealthy finance bro who undergoes a heart transplant and becomes aware that his friend, a cardiac surgeon played by Terrence Howard, is conspiring with his new wife, Jessica Alba, to kill him. The film combines this medical horror with hallucinations of an abusive father and a race against time involving the protagonist's mother, Lena Olin.
Rafaela Bassili highlights Dark Waters, Todd Haynes's 2019 legal drama based on Nathaniel Rich's profile of lawyer Robert Bilott. Mark Ruffalo portrays Bilott as he spirals obsessively while fighting DuPont, a corporation that knowingly poisoned West Virginians with forever chemicals. The terror lies in the indifference of the corporation toward human life and the overwhelming scale of the work required to fight them, symbolized by Bilott kneeling among towering stacks of paper.
Benjamin Lee describes The Hunt as uniquely terrifying due to the nightmare of defending oneself against a false accusation. Mads Mikkelsen plays a kindly kindergarten teacher falsely accused of sexual abuse by a young girl whose confused comment is taken as proof. The film exposes how fragile trust can be as a tight-knit community turns on him, illustrating how a pitchfork can be scarier than a knife when the system mechanically focuses on destroying an individual.
Adrian Horton identifies a specific scene in David Fincher's Zodiac as a pathway to panic. About 20 minutes into the film, a masked man carrying a gun strides toward a picnicking couple in broad daylight. The camera focuses on the female victim's face as her curiosity morphs into terror, a shift that resonates with real-world fears of strangers approaching on empty sidewalks or in parks.
Finally, Andrew Pulver selects Requiem for a Dream as the supreme example of cumulative dread and misery. Darren Aronofsky's adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr's novel depicts three youthful protagonists and an older woman descending into abject misery through drug addiction. Heroin acts as a silent, remorseless slayer that cannot be stopped, leading to amputations, prison beatings, and gruesome sex work, creating a profoundly disturbing experience without relying on traditional horror tropes.
Sources: The Guardian Film.