10 Most Underrated Psychological Horror Movies
8. The Cell
Visionary director Tarsem Singh has constantly had trouble bringing his singular, visually spectacular imagination to life on cinema screens. His later films The Fall and Immortals fell victim to lacklustre reviews upon release, but the most unfairly over-looked film in his considerable career has to be 2000's The Cell.
The film follows a scientist attempting to enter the mind of a comatose serial killer, seeing the grand designs behind his killings once in his strange and unsettling mental world. This world is brought to life via hallucinatory sequences which leave the film feeling like a mashup of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silence of the Lambs.
Yes, the actual plot is perfunctory at best, but that's true of almost all the Hannibal Lecter carbon copies from the nineties (a lot of people bit the cannibal's style, ironically). It's the sumptuous and unforgettable imagery, like the sight of a bisected horse, which makes this one utterly unmissable.
That, and a pair of surprisingly solid central performances from Jennifer Lopez's resourceful scientist heroine and Vincent D'Onofrio's tragic villain.