10 Horror Movies Nobody Understands
Films like masked strangers, breaking into your brain at night to move the furniture...
No other genre enjoys f*cking with your head quite so much as horror. After all, the only mandatory requirement for a horror story is that it gives you the willies, freaks you out, unnerves you or otherwise melts your mind.
They’re the oldest stories in the world, from a time before language, because they’re the stories we tell ourselves when we’re afraid: afraid of loss or pain, afraid of the unknown… or afraid of fear itself.
The thing is, so much about fear is irrational, primal stuff. It’s the crawling chaos of the subconscious, where linear thought cracks and fragments; where repressed feelings and memories come bubbling to the surface dressed up to look like someone (or something) you thought you knew.
Because of that, the horror genre gels perfectly with the 'show, don't tell' mise en scene of experimental film - and also with the warped perspective of filmmakers who don't care about holding your hand as you stumble through the dark.
So here: a selection of disturbing movies that delight in messing with your head, movies that no one truly understands. And of course, here be spoilers…
10. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1991)
Shinyu Tsukamoto's low budget horror is a psychosexual acid trip rendered in heartstopping stop motion and shot on 16mm monochrome film. It tells the story of a Japanese office worker who crosses paths with a metal fetishist intent on a gradual metamorphosis into a machine, and who is also transformed - and ultimately transfigured - as a result.
Those are the bare bones of the plot, but the execution is something else. Veering wildly between the subgenres of body horror and cyberpunk like a suicidal driver steering into oncoming traffic, Tetsuo is obsessed with a hypermasculine idea of the generative impulse as aggressive penetration, reconstructed on a dirty factory floor.
The protagonist's transformation, at first a nightmare, spills uncontrollably into reality, destroying his relationship in a grotesquely sexual ordeal as his groin becomes a huge drill. A chase across the city climaxes with the man and the metal fetishist, both irrevocably mutated into tool-vehicle-factories, merging into a single monstrosity and promising to - what? Destroy the world? Remake it? Who knows.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man might have a lot to say about the rapacity of industrialisation in modern Japanese culture, but whether you can bear to watch it enough times to figure any of it out is another story...