10 Most Twisted Asylum Horror Movies

More than any other film genre, the world of horror is one brimming with plentiful familiar tropes.

In amongst the final girls, the killers who aren't really dead, the long-lost psycho relatives and many other clichés showcased brilliantly by Wes Craven and his Scream franchise, one other particular horror trope is that many a filmmaker loves nothing more than using a mental asylum as the setting for their respective pictures.

Over the decades, audiences have seen numerous great (and not so great) horror films based in and around an asylum, a psychiatric ward or a mental health facility, and it's often been a case of the more abandoned and derelict this building is, the better.

Some such movies have become all-time classics, others have inspired generations to come, and others have embraced the insanity and amped everything up to 11. With this list, it's all about spotlighting the more demented and disturbed offerings of this particular subgenre, with the attention on those efforts that left you questioning what you've just seen.

Here, then, are ten of the more terrifying and twisted asylum-set horror movies out there.

Realistically, Grave Encounters and Grave Encounters 2 could both be included here in this list, but this time it's the Vicious Brothers' first GE picture taking the spotlight.

An abandoned asylum-set found footage offering, 2011's Grave Encounters centred on paranormal TV presenter Lance Preston and his crew as they explore the eerie Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital for an upcoming episode of their Grave Encounters show.

Of course, a night spent in this spooky location brings way more terror and supernatural shenanigans than Preston and Co. could've hoped for, and the group's endless walking down dead-end corridors eventually results in them becoming patients of Collingwood themselves.

For those who got off lightly, they become unhinged, unstable and deranged, but a particularly gnarly fate is waiting for Lance Preston, with him attacked by demonic nurses and lobotomised. By the time of Grave Encounters 2 a year later, a bunch of fans of the GE TV show decide to venture into Collingwood, where they find a nuts, murderous Lance stalking the asylum's halls.

Considering the found footage subgenre was on its arse by 2011, Grave Encounters - and, to a lesser extent, its sequel - showed that it was still possible to put together a genuinely good found footage offering.