Are you a curious moviegoer who loves to watch creepy, weird horror films with twisted plots? Here, we have some recommendations for you, brave heart!
The Lords of Salem
This is a creepy, terrifying film that focuses on a young woman residing in an apartment building. She is chosen by a coven of witches to carry the devil’s spawn. The film packs some extravagant static shots that exude a menacingly beautiful quality. The shots of long foreboding corridors, doors leading to other realms, and grand buildings representing hell bring to mind several moments of absolute, cold horror. Watch it if you like visual, visceral horror.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
This is the sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It is an absurd black comedy horror film with a relentless sense of nightmare. The characters are so deranged that they have their own demented sense of justice. Their wild eyes and dual wield chainsaw attack, elevates an already crazy film into a carnival of the bizarre.
The Beyond
This is a film in which violence is combined with the bizarre and grotesque. With only an extremely basic storyline to tie these gory images together, this film poses a unique combination of trash aesthetics and dreamlike surrealism to create a zombie epic. Combining such audaciously gruesome images as tarantulas eating a man’s face with illogical, hallucinatory nightmare visions, the film immerses the viewer in a terrifying dreamscape.
In the Mouth of Madness
One of the most underrated horror films of the 1990s, this is a film that manages to bring to the screen intangible, indescribable horrors. What begins as frightening dreams and strange occurrences turns into an inescapable nightmare where the simple act of reading a book can bring about the end of the world. Adding an extra layer of weirdness, the film also blurs dreams and reality, fact and fiction, film and reality to shocking effect.
Evil Dead II
This film follows a secluded protagonist battling demons in a cabin. It takes everything that is nasty and horrifying about so-called serious horror and plays it for laughs, exposing the inherent silliness that lies at the heart of even the most hardcore of nightmares. This can clearly be seen in the film’s transformation of the hero into a bumbling fool, blood that becomes a cartoon green liquid, and a severed hand made into a little tyrant. As he begins to realize how ridiculous his predicament has become, he can’t help but laugh, and neither can you.
The Old Dark House
This was one of the first films to focus on a demented family of weird individuals. The film centers on the Femm family; encompassing a violent mute butler, the camp, an exceedingly eccentric Horace Femm, his religious, aging obsessed sister, their ancient bed-ridden father, and the maniacal pyromaniac kept locked upstairs. When a rainstorm forces a group of travelers to seek refuge in the old dark house, they are forced to spend the evening getting to know some of the strangest characters in horror cinema history.
Suspiria
This is a film that showcases the absolute peak of surreal Italian horror cinema. In the film, the plot is unimportant, it is merely a tool with which images of beautiful brutality, eye-catching visuals, and bombastic sounds are threaded together. The effect of the overall cinematic experience is most important in this kind of filmmaking, and this film totally delivers.
Phantasm
This is a horror film that blends dreamy visuals and fantastical imagery. It is punctuated by jolting nightmare visions of zombie dwarfs, killer flying spheres, and a menacing Tall Man. The realm of dreams and reality blur into one unfathomable whole, making this a difficult film to decipher as it is often impossible to tell what is a dream and what is reality. The focus is on the images and less on the storyline, but even then, revealing anything will take away the creeps.
The House by the Cemetery
This is a film about The Boyle family who relocates to a mansion near Boston to enable their father to conduct some research. But the son starts seeing the ghost of a girl and discovers the basement’s sinister secret. While scenes such as a shop window dummy’s head falling off and bleeding lend the film an indecipherable sense of intrigue, violent images of knives penetrating skulls fulfill the grossness quota. It is this melding of the uncanny and intangible that makes the film such a uniquely strange viewing experience.
The Car
This isn’t an inherently weird film, but it is a solid, cult movie with thrilling action sequences and commendable performances. The film has a completely ridiculous premise of a driverless demonic car terrorizing a small desert community. There is a great deal of fun to be had if you are willing to embrace the film’s outlandish premise and simply go along with the ride. The best thing about the film is the car itself; an indestructible, customized 1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III with a demonic visage and memorably menacing horn. The car is an iconic movie monster in its own right.
