10 Most Horrifying Urban Nightmare Movies

Takashi Miike’s seminal Gozu may be a Japanese feature with a lot of specific Japanese culture featured within, but when it comes to nightmarish urban hellscapes there is few better. Gozu is a film about a Yakuza gangster, Minami, who is told to kill his boss, Ozaki, when Ozaki begins to act irrationally. However, Ozaki’s body suddenly goes missing in a car park and Minami is sent on an adventure through a series of surreal urban hellscapes to try and recover Ozaki.

Gozu is a film that pulls no punches when it comes to messed up ideas. Like the films of David Lynch, Gozu blends the real with the unreal in strange and compelling ways. The film begins with a story grounded in reality, but quickly deviates from that reality through the addition of stranger, more demented characters as Minami falls further down the rabbit hole: such as the three years dead waiter and the siblings who own a hotel where they look after their cow-headed son.

The creativity behind such a movie has to be applauded. Miike shows us reality before destroying it altogether in such a nightmarish way. Although it can be considered quite tame in relation to his other extreme works, Gozu is nonetheless a horror of strange ideas that creates an uncomfortable world that can also be considered realistic at the same time. It’s a very jarring film to experience.