20 Movies That Could've Been Horror Movies
12. We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lynne Ramsay's superb We Need to Talk About Kevin is pretty much about 90% of the way towards being a horror film, honestly, revolving as it does around a mother, Eva (Tilda Swinton), coming to terms with her troubled son Kevin (Ezra Miller) committing a brutal killing spree.
Ramsay's film has a more terrifying "villain" than most outright horror films, given that Kevin's precise motive for his rampage is left ambiguous, and the script rebukes the typical attempts to overtly pathologise his behaviour.
With America's school shooting epidemic only getting worse in recent years, the film's themes remain horrifyingly relevant, all while Ramsay digs deep into the psychology of a mother reckoning with the role she may or may not have played in inadvertently creating a "monster."
In addition to all this, it's scored for maximum dread-infused impact by the great Jonny Greenwood, and there's more of the colour red in this movie's colour palette than even most gore-splasher horror flicks.