20 Movies That Could've Been Horror Movies

Dan Gilroy's brilliant neo-noir Nightcrawler may ultimately be a thriller about the tireless appetite of sensationalist news media and the perils of the American Dream, but it's basically also a vampire movie - just without the fangs and literal blood-sucking.

Jake Gyllenhaal's bug-eyed, unrelentingly ambitious freelance photojournalist Lou Bloom is basically a parasite who feeds off anyone who can do anything for him and elevate his position in Los Angeles' fiercely competitive news media scene.

With the film being set mostly at night and Gyllenhaal playing Bloom as an increasingly unhinged individual driven by an insatiable desire for more, he'd be a perfect horror movie monster with basically no tweaks whatsoever.

That is to say, Gyllenhaal is absolutely terrifying in the film, and while Nightcrawler doesn't feature any supernatural elements, the throughline of its story and presentation of its central character certainly invoke the conventions of the horror genre.

That Gyllenhaal was snubbed for a Best Actor Oscar nomination remains one of the great awards injustices of the past 15 years, though given the Academy's historic disdain for horror, it totally tracks that they wouldn't have much time for something so blatantly horror-adjacent.