10 Terrifying Dream Sequences In Horror Movies

10. Reg's Dream Baby - In Fabric

Coming from The Duke of Burgundy director Peter Strickland, 2019's In Fabric is the strange, spooky story of... A haunted dress.

Look, like the director's earlier hit Berberian Sound Studio, it's scarier than it sounds. And a lot of this scariness comes from the film's foreboding atmosphere, an unsettling dream-like tone which renders the potentially ludicrous story surprisingly chilling.

Strickland utilizes the giallo aesthetic of seventies Italian horror to ground this odd anthology, rooting its strange story in colourful sets and skewed camera angles. Never is this more pronounced, and more deeply creepy, than in the sequence wherein poor everyman Reg recounts his nightmare from last night to a pair of flippant superiors.

This odd sequence owes a debt to king of weirdness David Lynch - particularly Eraserhead - as Reg looks on in horror, seeing his wife give birth as uncaring physicians smoke, watch, and refuse to let him inside the delivery room. However even Lynch stopped short of having his leading man scream cathartically in an attempt to carry his wife's agony, not to mention the creepy, and undeniably funny, spectacle of his newborn baby flipping him off upon its messy exit.

"She wasn't having it", indeed.