10 Scariest Movies That Aren't Horror
4. The Zone Of Interest
Like basically every movie ever made about the Holocaust, Jonathan Glazer's Oscar-winning masterpiece The Zone of Interest can't help but be deeply horrifying, yet also approaches its subject matter in a wildly unconventional way.
Rather than relentlessly document the terrors of what occurred in the Auschwitz concentration camp in up-close detail, Glazer keeps us on the periphery, only able to observe from afar in a house next to the camp. And so, instead of showing emaciated prisoners and gas chambers as one might expect, we're left only to watch billowing smoke from trains pulling into a nearby station, and smokestacks belching human remnants into the sky.
The film also relies heavily on its Oscar-winning sound design, with much of the off-screen horror implied through bone-chilling screams, gunshots, barking dogs, and so on. By framing the film around one of the camp's commandants and his family living next door to Auschwitz, The Zone of Interest captures the banality of evil in uniquely nauseating terms.