10 Most Underrated Psychological Horror Movies

As far as sub genres go, psychological horror has a pretty polarized time of things.

Beloved by critics, it's the horror sub genre which is most often singled out as being more "mature", "thoughtful", or "deep", mainly because it doesn't ask the audience to believe in the idea of ghosts or monsters and doesn't rely on masked murderers for its scares.

However, for the same reason psychological horrors are more likely to be overlooked by audiences who are simply after a scary good time and don't want to probe the depths of troubled psyches in the process.

After all, Friday the 13th Part VI and David Fincher's Se7en are both stories of likeable protagonists trying to stop a spree killer from offing more victims in increasingly inventive and gruesome ways. But only one of those two titles is a fun Friday night watch (unless you've got a really, really dark sense of humour).

But despite its reputation as a more mature and often more demure brand of horror, psychological horror can provide the same intense scares and fast-paced twisty plots as any good film in the genre, as evidenced in this rundown of the most underrated horrors that look inside disturbed minds for their twisted thrills.

2001's intense Nicole Kidman vehicle The Others is a masterpiece of psychological horror, a stripped down and potent piece of suspense cinema which relies on brilliant performances for its subtle scares.

It's also not remotely underrated, which is why this list is instead highlighting the director's previous film that netted him the job making The Others.

Director Alejandro Amenbar’s deeply creepy 1996 debut Tesis (or Thesis) is a Spanish language thriller which starts off slow and subtle, but soon turns into a full blown horror as the filmmaker displays his promise in this genre.

A dark satire of the Spanish film industry, the movie follows a student as she delves into researching what initially appears to be a genuine snuff film. Fascinated by the sort of troubled mind that would create such a sickening thing, she's soon drawn into a dark underworld in this intense and gritty psychological horror.

Surprisingly reserved in its use of onscreen violence, Tesis uses the same approach as Joel Schumacher's underrated 8MM by showing little but leaving the audience disturbed by the twisted premise of viewers who get off on watching real life violence and murder.