10 Most Anxiety-Inducing Horror Movies EVER

Released in 1981, Possession may have been branded a video nasty by over-zealous UK censors, but viewers would be hard pressed to work out why for most of the film's runtime.

Not that the lack of gore makes it an easier watch.

Following the gradually dissolving marriage of a squinty, paranoid Sam Neill (in full In the Mouth of Madness nervous tic mode) and a spectacular Isabelle Adjani as his deeply troubled wife, the film makes mincemeat of other relationship breakdown movies like Marriage Story and Kramer Vs Kramer. The first hour is a brutal and almost unwatchable-y tense portrait of a marriage falling apart.

Both participants are being put through some psychological hell in a film that hews closer to Nic Roeg's Bad Timing or Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon than any more conventional break up film. But just when this sad story of love lost to distrust has put viewers through the wringer, it takes a sharp left turn into an entirely different genre.

Marrying violent, disturbing horror with upsettingly intense domestic drama makes this a rare film where the arrival of a monster feels like it would be a relief from the vitriol of the character's hate for one another.

You know, until it happens.