15 of the Most Frightening Non-Horror Films

7. Nil by Mouth

Often, horror films are the most successful when they forge a strong connection between audience and character. The reason that the first Paranormal Activity works so well, for instance, is because you legitimately care about the characters and want to see them make it to the other side intact. Interestingly enough, a strong sense of empathy can sometimes make an already tragic film into something truly frightening. Nil by Mouth is a great example of that. It remains to this day the only film Gary Oldman has ever directed, and it takes its basis from Oldman’s own childhood experiences in a South London council estate. It stars Ray Winstone in the finest performance of his career as a perpetually drunk father and husband fuelled by violent, perpetual rage. Watching this film feels like you have a hand gripping the back of your head, forcing you closer to the action.

It’s almost exclusively shot in uncomfortable, dimly lit close-ups and every moment of violence and abuse is presented exactly as is, there’s no room for the implicit here. If this were a production of Oliver!, Bill Sykes wouldn’t be beating Nancy to death behind a piece of set dressing, he’d be under a spotlight, dragging her through the stalls just to make sure everyone in the audience got a good long look. What’s most frightening about Nil by Mouth is, as mentioned, that you feel for these people, even the nasty ones and what they’re going through is so potent and so affecting that the anguish that Oldman was likely channeling when he wrote it is practically palpable. The real world is more scary than any fantastical creature ever conjured, this film is here to remind you of that.

6. Perfect Blue

Perfect Blue, a film which I’ve discussed on here in the past, remains one of my favourite films and most certainly my favourite anime. It was an early, low budget effort by the late master Satoshi Kon, and it’s a great example of the way in which anime basically acts as entertainment on the cheap in Japan. Perfect Blue doesn’t need to animated, everything that happens in it could have been achieved relatively easily in live action, but if you’re working with limited money, you animate. It follows the tragic story of Mima, a pop-star who turns her back on that world to try and prove her worth as an actress. It doesn’t go very well. She’s shuffled from one demeaning role to the next, hounded by past fans, stalked and generally treated like shit.

It’s a shocking, vital indictment of the appalling way women are treated in showbusiness. The fear comes firstly once again from a deep sense of empathy, but also from a crushing, haunting atmosphere of dread which continues to hang over everything like a darkening storm cloud as Mima’s sanity becomes an increasing concern. Throughout the film, she is menaced by a kind of idealised version of her old, pop-star self, berating and abusing her for straying from the plan. It’s this persistent phantom, alongside the incomparably freakish soundtrack and Kon’s reluctance late into the film to differentiate fantasy from reality which make this film so gripping, yet so hard to watch. It’s a masterpiece of suspense and terror.

5. Threads

I wouldn’t characterise Sheffield as a particularly scary place (although when you’re 3 quad-vods deep and end up falling down the stairs in Corp, your heart rate tends to spike), but Threads does a great deal to turn it into one, aided by a nuclear bomb. Adhering to the grim, depressing stereotype of BBC drama better than anything before or since, it imagines what the northern city would descend into if suddenly faced with a nuclear holocaust. It isn’t a particularly original idea (although it was much more of one back in 1984), but nothing else has really approached the subject matter with the kind of social realism that Threads employed.

It was George Miller by way of Ken Loach, with a bit of Cormac McCarthy thrown in for good measure. Every excruciating detail of the looming attack, the bombing itself and the aftermath is addressed, all laden with a sense of hopelessness so pungent it almost makes you feel physically sick. The scenes in the hospital after the blast are shocking enough, but it’s when, years down the line, you see the frayed, tattered remnants of humanity, warped by years of devolution, that things really get scary. All post-apocalyptic fiction tries to represent a new breed of humanity, but here it’s almost unwatchably grim, especially when you see what’s become of the children. The prevailing message seems to be that even if our race did somehow manage to survive past such a massive calamity, we wouldn’t deserve to, and death would be preferable.

4. Mulholland Drive

Welcome back, Mr. Lynch. This list isn’t necessarily in order from most tame to most pants-wetting, so I couldn’t really say which film between this and Eraserhead will keep you up at night the longest, but they both give it a good go. The difference is that Eraserhead maintains a fearful tone more or less throughout, whilst Mulholland Drive is a lot more varied. When it turns the terror taps on though, they gush. It’s another film that you are not going to fully understand when you see it for the first time, and in fact you’ll probably need to see it at least twice more before your grasp of it gains any strength, but you’ll want to watch it again, even if you spend parts of it peering out from between your fingers. The story, at least on the face of it, is largely about a woman named Betty (Naomi Watts) as she arrives in California in the hopes of pursuing her acting career. Spoiler alert – that’s not what the film is about, like, at all, that’s just the launchpad.

Through a series of strange events, seemingly unrelated side-stories and plain outlandish weirdness, a far wider, mangled narrative begins to blur the lines of reality as an overarching sense of ghoulish imbalance gradually filters in. Seemingly mundane or unimportant moments are imbued with an inexplicable, but powerful dread and one early scene hits you with a moment so beautifully, balletically shocking that it sets you on a razor’s edge for the remainder of the film. The tone fluctuates endlessly, raising you up and then plunging you back down again, but for all the queasiness and uneasiness, you’re never anything less than enthralled. Once you do understand what’s going on the film is, if anything, even freakier. Knowing why that seemingly friendly old couple from the opening share such a sinister look after Betty gets out of the taxi doesn’t make you feel any more comfortable with it. Mulholland Drive is a wonderful example of the fact that, with expert film-making, an audience doesn’t have to understand what’s going on in order to understand how to feel about it.

3. After Lucia

I first watched this film as research for another article, the Mexican entry of the Essential World Cinema series I did for the site some time around the Cretaceous Period. From what I’d read, I was expecting a harrowing, thought provoking drama about bullying. What I got was straight up one of the scariest films I had ever seen. It charts the batteringly bleak journey of Alejandra, a girl who moves to Mexico City with her father after the death of her mother. The relationship between the two of them is strained and fragile, so she seeks out new friends at her new school, both as a means of a escape and as a way to feel normal again. Initially, it goes well, but a drunken tryst with one of the boys sends everything into bedlam almost instantaneously. Unknown to her, he filmed it on his phone and starts showing it to everyone, provoking the whole social circle, if not the whole school to devolve into a vile pit of ruthless pack mentality, motivated by jealousy, misogyny and entitlement, by turns.

Alejandra is treated as sub-human, verbally and physically abused beyond the bounds of even the most awful high school horror stories, and what makes it so frightening is that you never question the plausibility of it. Exaggerated maybe, but unrealistic? Not at all. Eventually, heartbreakingly, she stops fighting back, but rather than relenting the other kids react like sharks to blood in the water. I won’t detail what comes next, only that the final shot of the film is one of the most torturous that I’ve ever had to endure. Even thinking about it sends chills down my spine. You spend most of the film wishing you could just phase your hand through the screen and intervene, as with each passing scene the situation worsens and you feel all the more helpless. If ever there was a film that deserves, even needs, to terrify its audience, After Lucia is it.

2. The Act of Killing

Is it cheating to include a documentary on this list? Well I wrote it, so no. There are a lot of deeply frightening documentaries out there, but The Act of Killing stands well above the rest because the fear comes from gaining an understanding of human extremes that you probably didn’t want to ever gain. It details the lives of a series of Indonesian men who acted as death squad enforcers during the mass killings that took place after the attempted 1965 coup. During this period, over a million people were brutally murdered in a bid to stamp out any lasting insurgency. It remains of the worst massacres in human history, but most if not all of the still-living perpetrators have never faced any kind of punishment.

The director, Joshua Oppenheimer, spends time with several of these men and asks them to recreate the things they did, using their favourite films as a thematic basis. This brilliantly twisted concept sets the mood for probably the most awful, painfully clear insight into the worst tendencies of humanity you’ll ever experience. Most of the men feel nothing even vaguely resemblant of regret about what they did. Rather, they revel in it, even to this day. The really scary thing about this is that while they might be monstrous, barbarous people, they are still, and will always be, people. The Act of Killing confronts you with a side of the world that you would rather ignore, deny or at least push to the background, but it holds your eyes wide open and makes sure you drink it all in. Is it every person’s responsibility to understand the extremes of our race, and the nature of evil? Oppenheimer seems to think so. You can watch any number of slasher films and never really contemplate the finality of death, or the brutality of murder, but this film never lets you escape it, and isn’t that so much more frightening?

1. Under the Skin

There’s beauty in everything, even the most horrible, nightmarish things. Under the Skin, only the third film by masterful director Jonathan Glazer, is a beautiful monstrosity. Loosely based on a 2000 Michel Faber novel, it follows an alien being (Scarlett Johansson) which has adopted the disguise of a beautiful woman in order to harvest her prey – people, primarily men. Driving around Glasgow in a white van (massive red flag straight away), she uses a combination of her looks and a feigned naive innocence to lure them into her clutches, then takes them back to her house. Initially at that stage all you see is her walking through the house gradually undressing as the man excitedly follows, and then nothing. Eventually you are offered a more detailed glimpse into the process, and it will haunt you until your dying day.

It’s very difficult for any film, or any other kind of narrative fiction to present itself from the point of view of something which truly isn’t human, I can only think of a handful of examples but this is one of them. The scariest scene in the film comes when the creature witnesses a tragedy on a beach, whether or not her intervention would have helped is neither here nor there, it’s the way she coldly watches the whole thing unfold, completely and utterly devoid of even the vaguest echo of care, that really seeps into your bone marrow. As the film progresses things do take a bit of a turn, but it doesn’t get any less disturbing, if anything it makes everything that much worse. The sparse, social realist style of the film plays heavily into how frightening it is, and a lot of the scenes in which Johansson approaches her victims were done for real, with the unsuspecting men having had no idea they were being filmed. It’s a commentary on the fragility, and in some ways the hopelessness of humanity, and you certainly feel fragile as you watch it, as well as cold and isolated. A lot of the scenes show fairly run of the mill activity but through the lens of such a hostile, uncaring outsider, it turns the whole nature of life in on itself. As I said, there is a certain desolate beauty to it, but it will frighten you in acute, primordial ways.