‘It still preys on my mind’: readers on their scariest non-horror movies

A Short Film About Killing

The murder of the taxi driver is utterly excruciating and the hanging at the end equally so. Both are shown in full, in close up and in real time. The condemned man’s last cigarette is smoked in full. The unease (to put it mildly) of the audience was palpable. Wiscot

Aftersun

Not horror but horribly tense. I was convinced when he went into the sea at night that he wasn’t going to come out. A personal response from me, but I found it almost unbearable to watch. annarachel

The Manchurian Candidate

The brain washing sequence scared the living daylights out of me: never could watch Angela Lansbury in any thing after that without a shiver going down my spine! JobsworthWilkins

Lilya 4-ever

Lilya 4-Ever for me, a harrowing journey through a young girl’s experience of being seduced and then sex-trafficked. It’s excellent, but grim – oh, so grim – and it left me feeling hollowed out afterwards and disgusted with the human race. AdamK

Still from Melancholia. Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Allstar

Melancholia

The existential dread of an extinction level event – so lyrically and beautifully evoked. It embodies the desolate inevitability of the end of all things. RishiSambora

Salvation

Its portrayal of mountain village clan feuds, superstition and the mass delusion that might enable a charismatic individual to dehumanise others, with mass-murderous consequences, was very scary. Even more frightening was that the film was roughly inspired by a real-life massacre, in Bilge in 2009. appealforsanity

The Truman Show

It’s one of the best horror-non-horrors ever made. The premise is pure terror. Your friends, family, job are all lies. You have no secrets. Every moment of your life, every lesson you thought you learnt in private is seen, recorded, witnessed forever. Your deepest paranoia is real. Yes, even the sky is fake. The Truman show was so ahead of its time with the horrors of digital life. Scary as fuck! materofvirii

Watership Down

I was six when Watership Down came out, and saw it in the cinema (Birkenhead Odeon, no less, scary in itself in 1978). I don’t think anything has ever had a greater long-term effect on me than the images of the rabbits crushed together in plugged and gassed burrows, blood-red eyes and gasping desperately for air. That evil Woundwood rabbit wasn’t much better; that night I wouldn’t go upstairs to bed in case the fucker was hiding in my wardrobe. Wrighthanes

The most frightening, nightmare inducing film for me will always be Watership Down. First saw it in the cinema aged around nine, it has some very memorable scenes. Flowerpotty

A still from Wake in Fright. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

Wake in Fright

An Australian movie about a young teacher who gets stranded in an outback town while trying to get home for the holidays. Gradually the dark side of the town and of a certain type of Australian culture is revealed, until it ends in utter bleakness. Not a horror movie, but horrifying. The sort of movie that sticks with you. Good acting too. Rabbigator

Still can’t sit through it even after all these years. “The Australian Experience” distilled down to its nasty, toxic, alcohol soaked chauvinistic worst. cantgettakick

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go is ostensibly a sci-fi (alternative reality) drama, I suppose, but its central premise is terrifying. As is the ultimate acceptance of their fate (after some inevitably failed resistance) by all the characters. It still preys on my mind. boavisteiro

The Tribe

There was a Ukrainian film set in a deaf school and told entirely in sign language with no subtitles called The Tribe that really was particularly grim and shattering. Not seen it since it was in the cinema, don’t want to revisit it as I don’t think it would have the same impact on a TV set-up. One of those films you come out of and you can hardly speak. vammyp

United 93

United 93 was as horrific a film as I’ve seen – needed nonstop cartoons and a lie down after that film, the mundanity of the run up to it, not showing the villains as pantomime characters and knowing the outcome all feed in to the feeling of it. RobRoy1975

A still from Compliance. Photograph: Bad Cop Bad Cop Film Productions/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Compliance

Worth watching if you get the chance – basically just about someone crank-calling a fast food restaurant and convincing the duty manager to do some pretty terrible things, all just with the power of assumed authority. It’s very uncomfortable and to find out that everything in it happened – multiple times – is truly chilling. getoutofmydreams

Yellow Submarine

There’s something about the animation style which was absolutely skin-crawling, and the image of people being apparently turned to stone, but still with an occasional tear running down their frozen cheek, was deeply unsettling. 1AngryMan

Goodfellas

I had spent my life since early childhood watching horror films that I was probably too young for, but I’d never felt so frightened watching a film until, aged 18, I saw GoodFellas – my first Scorsese in the cinema. I thought it was absolutely terrifying. It certainly didn’t make me want to be a gangster. TheManWithoutFear

A still from Kiss Me Deadly. Photograph: Allstar Collection/Cinetext/United/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Kiss Me Deadly

Takes the disillusionment and fatalism of noir to its logical endpoint in the age of atomic anxiety. Becomes something more akin to cosmic horror in its final stretch, just leaves you haunted by the spectre of an unleashed and irrevocable annihilation. penny_lane00

Dreams of a Life

The docudrama about Joyce Vincent who lay dead for nearly three years in her London flat before being discovered is one of the saddest and most troubling films I have ever seen and all the more disturbing because it is true. That nobody could miss her or not care about not seeing her for three years highlights the hidden horror of social isolation and the cracks through which the lonely and mentally troubled can fall. Truly haunting and unforgettable. lilactime

Blue Velvet

How could you not give a nod to Blue Velvet, in which Dennis Hopper plays Frank Booth, who’s got to be one of the scariest villains ever. Every time he’s onscreen, I tense up, knowing that he’s so strung out & malevolent that only pain or death will ensue. Dennis Hopper plays him to the hilt, especially after he sucks in his nitrous oxide. BobManchesterCT