We love slashers, we love killers, and we love monsters, but sometimes we want something a little…stranger. Sometimes it feels like we’ve seen it all. Whether its teens going for an unsupervised camping trip or another deadly virus that turns people into zombies, we know that Horror can get repetitive, and when it’s repetitive it’s not scary.
The following list is for viewers looking for something out of the ordinary. Uncanny, haunting, and just plain wrong — these surreal horror films will stick with you long after the nightmare is over.
Inland Empire (2006) dir. David Lynch
If we’re talking surreal horror films, we may as well get Lynch out of the way first, right? The king of the strange and the weird, filmmaker David Lynch proved his mastery of the art of Surreal Horror with his debut indie film Eraserhead (1977) and has gone on to rewrite the book over and over again ever since.
Anything that has David Lynch’s name on it (including adverts for Adidas and PlayStation) could easily make it onto this list. However his last feature film, Inland Empire, stands tall as the strangest feature the legendary auteur has ever made.
As disorienting as it is skin crawling, Inland Empire is, in the director’s own words, a film about “A woman in trouble.” Through hazy, shot-on-digital footage, the “story” follows Laura Dern as Nikki Grace/Susan Blue as her life starts to fall apart after her husband begins to suspect her of infidelity. Her sanity fragments and smears across a series of nightmares broadcast to a crying girl in a miserable looking room somewhere in Poland. This static-laden broadcast is occasionally broken up by non-sequiturs, flashbacks, and nightmares, including what could be a sitcom about a family of rabbits, possibly beamed in from some other dimension.
Inland Empire is David Lynch firing on all cylinders. Its languid, twisted vision of an unravelling consciousness and its sinister energy is guaranteed to stick with you, provided you aren’t expecting any serious answers to the many questions you’ll probably have.
Junk Head (2017) dir. Takahide Hori
Junk Head is basically Aardman in Hell. It follows the story of a cute little robot named Junk Head who’s tasked with exploring an endless concrete labyrinth populated with monsters, genetic abominations, and tiny enclaves of survivors beneath a sky of grey pipes and steel beams.
The film is delightfully funny, despite its nightmarish vision of a mysterious apocalypse. The little characters, even the vicious ones, are as cute as they are terrifying and through all the horror there is an absurd sense of humour that runs throughout the story.
As Junk Head dives deeper into the depths of the great machine that has swallowed the world, he learns more about its hidden secrets, as well as the nature of the tense relationship between man and mutant. Soon, he discovers a power within his own hardware that has the potential to change everything.
Junk Head is more light-hearted than others on this list, that’s for sure, but its humour does not detract from the elaborate vision of hell it captures through the painstaking stop-motion animation. Fans of Junk Head should also check out the film Mad God (2021), another stop motion masterpiece depicting odyssey through a Bosch-like nightmare-scape.
Trash Humpers (2009) dir. Harmony Korine
Trash Humpers is a special kind of horror film in that it doesn’t require much blood or gore to terrify the audience. This bizarre vision from Harmony Korine gets under your skin without much direct violence. Instead, the sheer nastiness of its lead characters keep you locked in a state of unease and disgust throughout the film’s runtime.
The film (though some may refuse to call it one) follows a quartet of elderly degenerates. The “Trash Humpers,” so named because they like to, well… take a guess. They like to film themselves going about their days, causing trouble, harassing people, senselessly breaking things, and, well, humping trash.
What ratchets up the weirdness of it all is that the characters are old, really old, maybe even in their eighties. They hoot and screech like coyotes as they revel in destruction and chaos, drinking and drugging until it’s time to wander off somewhere else and do it all over again.
The film follows no discernible plot, it’s more of an odyssey through the barren landscape of a seemingly unending suburbia. Along the way, the trash humpers meet their “friends” (who are somehow even weirder than our titular heroes) and leave a trail of pointless violence and misery in their wake.
It’s not a film for everyone (now, that’s an understatement!) but if you can attune yourself to the eerie vibrations that this film puts out, it’s an experience unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
Suspiria (1977) dir. Dario Argento
Suspiria is heralded as a masterpiece of the Giallo genre (the name given to a string of low budget 70’s horror movies to come out of Italy) and for good reason.
The film follows a young dancing student, Suzy (Jessica Harper), as she travels to Berlin to enroll in a world-famous ballet academy. Before she can settle in, strange occurrences pull her deeper into a mystery regarding the academy’s founders.
From there the film becomes a kaleidoscope of dream-like trances. The horror emerges out of encounters with inexplicable phenomena and an enveloping evil that shrouds the school. Sinister energies suffocate the vibrantly coloured halls of the dance academy, and more than a little blood will be shed before the credits roll.
The film is rendered all the more haunting by Goblin’s terrific synth score. Suspiria is one of the earliest films to drench its soundscape in rich electric tones of foreboding and dread. The psychedelia of the film’s set design and the bizarre (borderline nonsense, at times) nature of the horror set pieces allow this film to flourish into something far more visceral and enveloping than your standard “haunted manor” film.
Mandatory viewing for anyone looking for the ultimate nightmare. Suspiria is best described as Alice in Wonderland (1951) meets Poltergeist (1982).
A Field in England (2013) dir. Ben Wheatley
My dad, a history buff who loathes horror films and particularly detests anything experimental, actively sought out A Field in England, after finding out that someone had finally made a film about one of his favourite periods of British history: The English Civil War. Imagine his surprise, then, when Ben Wheatley’s psychedelic horror masterpiece quickly ditches The Civil War setting to follow a group of deserters following a mysterious wizard named O’Neill (Michael Smiley), as they eat hallucinogenic mushrooms and trip out across the countryside in a search for buried treasure.
A Field in England is a bold film, noteworthy for its singular style and disorienting narrative. There is more than a little British humour thrown in, as the party of unlikely adventurers argue bitterly across the countryside landscape. Weird and unexplained mysteries pepper the film’s plot, such as O’Neill’s underground hibernation or his ability to transform fellow traveller Whitehead (Rhys Shearsmith) into some kind of dog-like treasure sniffer. The characters claim the field they are scouring is a site of magic, but it’s possible that the mushrooms they eat that are growing there are real cause of the “magic” they witness.
Daring, funny, and haunting, A Field in England is unlike anything else out there, and a must watch for any fan of surreal cinema.
Have You Seen Any of These Surreal Horror Films?
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