This article was published to HorrorFam.com on 01/03/2024
We love slashers, we love killers, and we love monsters, but sometimes we want something a little stranger.
Sometimes it feels like we’ve seen it all. Whether its teens going for an unsupervised camping trip or another deadly virus that turns people into zombies, we know that Horror can get repetitive, and when it’s repetitive it’s not scary. The following list is for readers looking for something out of the ordinary. Uncanny, haunting, and just plain wrong, these films will stick with you long after the nightmare is over.
Inland Empire (2006) dir. David Lynch
If we’re talking surreal, we may as well get Lynch out of the way first, right? The king of the strange and the weird, filmmaker David Lynch proved his mastery of the art of the Surreal Horror with his debut indie film Eraserhead (1977) and has gone on to rewrite the book over and over again ever since. Anything that has his Lynch’s name on it (including adverts for Adidas and PlayStation) could easily make it onto this list. However his final feature film, Inland Empire, stands tall as the strangest feature the legendary auteur has ever made.
As disorienting as it is skin crawling, Inland Empire is, in the director’s own words, a film about ‘A woman in trouble’. Through hazy, shot on digital footage, the ‘story’ follows Laura Dern’s as Nikki Grace/Susan Blue as her life begins to fall apart after her husband begins to suspect her of infidelity. Her sanity fragments and smears across a series of nightmares broadcast to a crying girl in a miserable looking room somewhere in Poland. This static-laden broadcast is occasionally broken up by non-sequiturs, flashbacks, and nightmares, including what could be a sitcom about a family of rabbits, possibly beamed in from some other dimension.
Inland Empire is Lynch firing on all cylinders. Its languid, twisted vision of an unravelling consciousness and its sinister energy is guaranteed to stick with you, provided you aren’t expecting any serious answers to the many questions you’ll probably have.
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