10 Most Mind-Bendingly Confusing Horror Movies

10. Beyond The Black Rainbow

The Film

In 1983, mad scientist Dr Barry Nyle runs the Arboria Institute – a quasi-futuristic, New Age facility apparently dedicated to the pursuit of happiness but actually a front for his nefarious experiments on a young psychic woman named Elena who he keeps captive in a prison-like compound underneath the institute.

As the psychedelic, synth pop backed film unfolds and Elena tries to escape the facility we learn that both she and Dr Nyle are the product of a drug experiment gone wrong conducted by the institute’s founder Dr Mercurio Arboria in the 1960s designed to make them achieve transcendence that made Nyle go insane.

What The Hell It Means

Trippy, incredibly slow-paced and practically plotless, Beyond the Black Rainbow has been dismissed as pretentious arthouse twaddle but director Panos Cosmatos has stated that it’s actually a critique of the Baby Boomer generation’s ideals and its attempts to establish alternative belief systems which Cosmatos views as having corrupted subsequent generations.

So, basically it’s a two-hour long mindf*ck indictment of the generation that buggered up the economy and ruined the planet which is okay by us.