10 Terrifying Dream Sequences In Horror Movies

When deployed correctly, the reveal that the action within a story was actually only an extended nightmare can be a shocking and effective twist. But let's face it: The vast majority of the time, revealing that a sequence was "all just a dream" is a lazy way of justifying trippy imagery without actually embedding it in the context of the story.

Since long before old Fredward Krueger cropped up in his first nightmare, horror moviemakers have relied on dream sequences to add in a handful of scares which the narrative simply didn't have room for or the internal logic to justify. However, not every dream sequence is guaranteed to be a lazy excuse for jump scares.

What makes the sequences featured here stand out is how they are used to deepen the film's existing themes and how cleverly they reflect and distort the film's story. Not to mention the fact that they're terrifying to boot.

With that in mind, here are ten dream sequences scarier than any jump scare nightmare.

And speaking of nightmares, to make things a little less predictable, this list has opted to leave out the adventures of one Mr. Krueger.

Coming from The Duke of Burgundy director Peter Strickland, 2019's In Fabric is the strange, spooky story of... A haunted dress.

Look, like the director's earlier hit Berberian Sound Studio, it's scarier than it sounds. And a lot of this scariness comes from the film's foreboding atmosphere, an unsettling dream-like tone which renders the potentially ludicrous story surprisingly chilling.

Strickland utilizes the giallo aesthetic of seventies Italian horror to ground this odd anthology, rooting its strange story in colourful sets and skewed camera angles. Never is this more pronounced, and more deeply creepy, than in the sequence wherein poor everyman Reg recounts his nightmare from last night to a pair of flippant superiors.

This odd sequence owes a debt to king of weirdness David Lynch - particularly Eraserhead - as Reg looks on in horror, seeing his wife give birth as uncaring physicians smoke, watch, and refuse to let him inside the delivery room. However even Lynch stopped short of having his leading man scream cathartically in an attempt to carry his wife's agony, not to mention the creepy, and undeniably funny, spectacle of his newborn baby flipping him off upon its messy exit.

"She wasn't having it", indeed.