20 Movies That Could've Been Horror Movies

You know what's scarier than all the masked murderers and supernatural monsters you could possibly imagine? Progressively losing your sense of self until you're literally nothing.

That's the terror at the core of Florian Zeller's Oscar-winning drama The Father, in which Anthony Hopkins stars as an octogenarian man living with dementia.

Zeller does a masterful job using non-linear storytelling to place the audience within the failing mind of Hopkins' protagonist Anthony, a man only able to watch as the walls close in.

Anyone who's seen a loved one succumb to dementia will surely see a whole lot of devastating truth in Zeller's film, shot and edited for maximum disorientation as it is, and performed so impeccably by Hopkins.

For both the individual directly afflicted and every shell-shocked person in their orbit, The Father conveys the relentlessly destructive nature of mental decay, and we can't even comfort ourselves that it's the sort of supernatural, cinematic fear object that doesn't exist in real life. It could come for just about any one of us.