6. Mulholland Drive
When I first saw Mulholland drive I was so scared I didn't want to leave my house. It was light outside and it isn't even a scary movie. But I was so frightened that I felt lost. I literally did not know what had unfolded before me. The ending of Mulholland Drive is so strange that it left me speechless. The film begins coherently. The first half of it is one solid narrative that all makes perfect sense. It feels like an R rated Nancy Drew story except Nancy is a smoking hot Naomi Watts and Laura Harring is her Hottie McHothot friend who's lost her memory and the mystery becomes finding her true identity. Then half way through, when the cowboy shows up (you know what I'm talkin' 'bout Willis) it starts to get weird, which everyone should expect and anticipate when watching a David Lynch film. But it made just enough sense before that, that you figured, "Wow, Lynch is going to make a film that ends with a bow on top." Then the girls go to some Spanish music show, and a scary demon man opens a weird box behind a dumpster and tiny little old people come out and the girls become lesbians and they hate each other and Naomi Watts finds her own self dead on a bed in a strange house and she's so tortured by her secret love for Harring that she ends up shooting herself. The end. Things spiral out of control so fast that by the time it ends you feel like what has just transpired was unnatural and wrong, and you're terrified because your brain can't process the strangeness. It wasn't until I watched it a second time a few years later that it made sense. It's Lynch folks, an exploration into surrealist filmmaking. Much of the movie involves going in and out of dream sequences, causing the audience to question what was real and what was surreal. Well, all of it was surreal but still, when those credits hit after a screaming Naomi Watts offs herself and that beautiful haunting score chimes in, soiled drawers were inevitable.