10 Horror Movies That Purposefully Mess With Your Head

Much like a certain later entry on this list, 1962's infamous indie horror Carnival of Souls is a dizzying, nightmarish horror masterpiece whose inscrutable and unsettling imagery is revealed to have a surprisingly simple, if poignant and profound, meaning behind it.

This trippy black and white horror from the sixties, unnoticed upon release but later re-evaluated as an arthouse classic, follows the strange and increasingly scary adventures of a women escaping from a car crash outside an eerie ghost town.

Pursued by a tall, smiling man throughout this strange burg, our heroine grows more and more horrified as an innkeeper, a doctor, and a minister (the three comforting presences of shelter, medicine, and religion) are unable to help her with these hallucinations and her occasional fear that she can't be seen or heard.

It’s a terrifying misadventure, and which makes a lot more sense once you realise that the film's heroine never actually survived the car crash, and the entire film has seen her attempting to avoid joining the souls of the dead and remain amongst the living instead.