The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The theme Disturbed Psychology refers to portraits of abnormal psychology as depicted in genre cinema. This is separate from the theme Films About Psychos and Serial Killers, which are so numerous they have been propagated to their own topic.
Depictions of Disturbed Psychology fall into roughly three categories:-
For more detail and an overview of the genre see the Theme Essay Films About Disturbed Psychology
Oxide Pang, one half of the Pang Brothers. goes solo to make a film about an obsessive girl who enjoys photographing death and her journey into a very disturbed mental space
A micro-budgeted production shot in a trailer in the woods with a cast of two that sits in a fascinatingly ambiguous place about whether the central character has sold his soul or gone off his psychiatric meds
This claims to be based on an unsolved true-life serial killer case from the 1970s, although dumps all but a handful of facts in favour of a B-movie thriller plot about a detective with mental illness
The director of Zombie Strippers! offers up Alice in Wonderland as a modern urban tale that becomes an allegory for a drug-induced journey into a disturbed headspace
An exquisitely directed homage to giallo cinema – a fascinating work that has been stripped of almost all dialogue that takes place on a purely visual level of sensation and body movement
A standout French-made stalker film that leaves Fatal Attraction in its dust. Isabelle Carré giving a frightening performance as a woman who becomes obsessed with a doctor
A film where a man encounters an instant messenger contact that knows his darkest secrets and suggests he can have godlike powers. This soon heads into some fairly disturbed headspace
Lars von Trier made this deeply unfathomable film after a bout of severe depression. Claimedly a work of misogyny, it features Willem Dafoe trying to deal with a deranged Charlotte Gainsbourg
This seems a generic ghost story. The second half has the protagonist’s dead girlfriend trying to stop him seeing another woman and becomes a descent into obsession that works rather well
Film about asylum inmates that goes for a gonzo approach but becomes an unwatchable mix of student artistic pretensions played out at a level of shrill caricature
Adaptation of the classic J.G. Ballard novel that deals with the surreal blurring and breakdown between media, architecture, celebrity and the protagonist’s disturbed state of mind
A film about childhood boogeymen that takes place as a work of psychological horrors, where everything could be happening in the imagination of a stressed mother’s collapsing mental state. An extraordinarily assured directorial debut
The story of a grown man with the mind of a child is launched into with a spectacularly over-the-top tackiness that has to be seen to be believed. Middle-aging Ruth Roman let all stops out in a Baby Jane-type performance
Pål Sletaune is a Norwegian director who deserves more attention for his reality-bending surrealism. Here mother Noomi Rapace moves into new apartment where ghostly screams come through the baby monitor and she soon finds that she cannot be sure what is real
Saw series Darren Lynn Bousman downplays sadism in favour of a psychologically ambiguous film about a series of attacks possibly conducted by the Jersey Devil
Unclassifiable film about two fans trying to enact Mad Max fantasies. About the point when this delves down into a seriously disturbed mental space, the results are quite stunning
Low-budget film where a couple move into her family home and she is haunted by childhood imaginary companion that may or not be real
Very obscure but undeniably interesting film in which boarding house owner Ida Lupino hires Robert Ryan as a handyman before finding he is mentally disturbed and he makes her a prisoner
Award-winning Darren Aronofsky film about the rivalry between two ballerinas. At heart though, this is no more than a Brian De Palma psycho-thriller with pretensions
One of the last films from William Friedkin, an astonishingly deranged descent into paranoia and madness, featuring an alarming performance from a young, unknown Michael Shannon
Shinya Tsukamoto of Tetsuo: The Iron Man fame turns his fascination with repressions to the story of a salaryman (played by himself) who deals with his girlfriend’s death by obsessively trying to obtain a gun
Neil Jordan makes a film about an abusive childhood that actually ends up asking us to cheer on the central character’s emergence as a murderer. Maybe the most cheerfully entertaining film ever made about child abuse.
Classic film that was groundbreaking for its designs – all distorted and angular sets, exaggerated shadows – that became defined as German Expressionism and its tale of a sinister hypnotist
A Canadian-made micro-budgeted Found Footage film about a couple filming themselves as they plan out a murder for the thrill of it – only to fall out in the midst of doing so
The dreamscape film was given extraordinary life by Tarsem Singh in his directorial debut who transforms a fairly ordinary script with visuals and costuming that is out of this world
A horror film set among the UK’s Video Nasties censorship controversy of the 1980s. Niamh Alger works for the censorship board and is drawn into a disturbed state of mind by material she uncovers
Actor James Franco directs an adaptation of a novel about a necrophile serial killer by Cormac McCarthy. Any McCarthy adaptation is doomed by an inability to visually replicate his incredible prose but Franco tries valiantly
Ron Bonk is a director out there making modern exploitation films that often push some fairly outrageous edges. This psycho effort was one of his earlier films
Film about a Vietnam Veteran snapping and going over the edge that gained acclaim when it came out. More a work of grim social realism than horror, it is frequently amateurish but contains an undeniably bleak charge
Canadian film about a girl’s strange obsessive relationship with her talking tattoo. The idea has been done before but the film and fine performances give it life
A strange but compelling tv movie in which an aging couple befriend a homeless man they find living in their crawlspace and adopt him as a son of sorts
An interesting never-quite-ran from the heyday of Anglo-horror cycle with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as Victorian anthropologists dealing with a prehistoric skeleton that is an embodiment of evil
From the Films That Could Never Get Made Today file – an exploitation classic about an obese woman who goes on a killing spree. This comes with a level of derangement that leaves you puzzled why this has never become a cult classic
An enjoyably twisted psycho film that heads into a fairly disturbed headspace concerning a waitress who has a habit of killing people and her former circus performer boss who feeds the bodies to his pigs
One of the films from the most promising Mickey Keating. Darling owes a great deal of debt to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion but Keating very effectively drags us into a disturbed mental space
David Cronenberg’s absolute masterpiece of the perverse with Jeremy Irons giving a tour-de-force performance(s) as twin gynaecologists who descend into drug addiction, obsession and madness
This is one of the rare failures from Hammer Films, a not uninteresting work set during the early era of 19th Century psychology and directed with some vivid effect
A strange and fascinating Swedish film about a lonely security guard’s obsessive love affair with a mannequin, which duly comes to life. Or does it? The film sits in a place of ambiguity whether he is imagining it or not
George Cukor was one of the legendary Hollywood directors. Here he dives into film noir with Ronald Colman as a stage actor who psychopathically over-identifies with Shakespeare’s Othello
Maybe one of the worst cases of a trailer ruining the film by giving away the big mid-film surprise. The film itself is an absurdly contrived Shutter Island copy that has nothing else up its sleeve beyond its big surprise
Gus Van Sant makes a film about the high school shooting phenomenon, although has almost nothing to say about it. Where the film does mesmerise is in Van Sant’s seemingly naturalistic style and non-linear narrative.
A standout work that starts as Riz Ahmed snatches his two boys, fearful of alien body snatchers, before leaving us wondering if this is not all in Ahmed’s mind
The story of the drug-addicted heir Andrew Getty determined to be a filmmaker is almost as fascinating as the one film he made before his death. The film is an extraordinary work, filled with jaw-dropping surrealistic imagery
A strong portrait of disturbed psychology – imagine a mash-up between The Neon Demon and its delve into the dark side of the modeling world and Single White Female about a woman and her disturbed roommate
Darkly subversive film about an alienated teenage girl, this digs its teeth into family values and depicts the uncomfortableness of puberty. On the other hand, this is only rarely the horror film others have reviewed it as
A Found Footage film from the early days before Paranormal Activity went big. This unnervingly charts the psychological disintegration of an ordinary English family under economic pressure
An anthology of Edgar Allan Poe tales narrated by Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi and others. Each episode is in a different style, where the succinctness allows the stories to be told as written
An extraordinary film, the story of a disturbed woman who keeps people prisoners in her barn. The stark effectiveness of the film all comes in the brooding black-and-white photography
Early silent adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story that treats the story liberally, drops Poe’s mood of desolation and despair for one more of melancholy, but holds an undeniable style
Maybe the worst Edgar Allan Poe adaptation ever, a version made for tv that fails utterly to project any of Poe’s gloom and despair, while a badly overacting Martin Landau is disastrously miscast as Roderick Usher
Not an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story but a film about a man in a troubled state of mind that comes filled with numerous Poe references
Though many people celebrated this as black comedy about Michael Douglas taking up arms on a shooting rampage against the petty frustrations of modern life, it is a film that is really a single redneck rant against the poor and minorities
A film that received great acclaim at awards season. Anthony Hopkins is a dementia-ridden senior and we experience his state of mind subjectively in a constantly shifting sense of what is real
A reality-bending film somewhat influenced by Pi about a withdrawn man who receives a mystery clock that may be able to bend time and space
Brad Anderson makes a paranoid nightmare as Sam Worthington takes his daughter to a hospital only for her to go missing and he to encounter a Kafka-esque bureaucracy that insists she doesn’t exist
A directorial outing from Bill Paxton, a strikingly original film quite unlike anything else where Paxton plays a man who has religious visions and invokes his sons to murder what he calls demon
Matthew Bright’s even better sequel to Freeway where he conducts an outrageous and quite brilliant modernisation of Hansel and Gretel now recast with two juvenile delinquents on the run
This came out the same year as Peter Jackson’s overrated Heavenly Creatures, although wasn’t as recognised, but is a much better, more socially realistic version of the lesbian lovers-killers theme
Ben Wheatley produced film that soon becomes a first order mindfuck. An detective undercover in therapy could just be a mentally ill man with delusions of being a detective or just as equally be having his reality manipulated
For a reasonable part of the runtime, this plays as a wilderness survival drama about a woman abandoned in the woods. Somewhat directionless before being redeemed by its twist ending
Imagine a version of Fatal Attraction where the Glenn Close character is the protagonist, this also has an unnerving Repulsion-like quality where what we think is happening keeps blurring and shifting
Big man Laird Cregar gained a sudden fame as the killer in The Lodger and was quickly repackaged as another psychopathic killer in this vehicle where he plays a mentally disturbed composer
Robert Pattinson (before he was a recognised name) as a convalescing pilot during WWII who is haunted by demonic spiders in an adaptation of a book by occult writer Dennis Wheatley.
One thing you don’t associate with Uwe Boll is a concern for social issues. Made in the aftermath of Columbine, this is an early Boll film that is a surprisingly solid attempt to address the scourge of US school shootings
This has quite a few similarities to the underrated The Wind with Sarah Paulson as a mother in the 1930s Dustbowl seeing possible supernatural figures amid the dust storms, which could just as easily be fraying sanity
One of the works of the celebrated Ingmar Bergman with Max Von Sydow as an artist tormented by insomnia who starts to slip into disturbing hallucinations where he (and we) can not be certain what is being seen is real
The first and best of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adapations with Vincent Price. Corman was piggybacking on the Gothic revival sparked by Hammer Films and creates a superbly brooding work that is the best adaptation of the story yet
Edgar Allan Poe would probably have difficulty recognising his short story, which has been turned into a work of softcore gay erotica in the hands of director David DeCoteau
Unique and quite remarkable film about a teen in a nowhere town who recognises the traits of a serial killer in himself and then discovers that aging neighbour Christopher Lloyd is actually a shapechanging monster
John Cusack leads a star cast line-up in what appears to be a slasher where a group of people gathered at a motel are being killed by someone among their number. Big conceptual twists then ensue
Fascinatingly perverse film directed and written by its star French actress Marina de Van who plays a woman who becomes obsessed with mutilating her own skin
Film about a man in his home fearful of demonic forces attacking those around him, this comes with decent atmosphere and at least one highly effective twist
From an early script by S. Craig Zahler, this is an incredibly brutal and harrowing work about a group of cooks trapped inside an asylum for the criminally insane during a power cut
This origin story of Batman’s Joker is less epic superheroics than a mundanely grounded work about one individual’s rage against modern life and alienation that comes closest to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver
Joker was a huge hit with Joaquin Phoenix winning an Academy Award for his role. This sequel emerged to very mixed reception, partly due to its rejection of the first film and then heading off to become a musical
This gained a minor cult in which an abused nerd snaps as a result of constant humiliations and goes on a killing rampage. Tony Radloff gives an extraordinary performance
A gender-flipped adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story, this is surely the equivalent of The Room among Poe adaptations and may be the worst Poe film adaptation ever
This asks the question of what happens to the final girl after a slasher film. This is less a slasher film than a work about post-traumatic stress before reaching a jaw-dropping ending
This was Robert Eggers’ second film, less a work of horror than a dive into a disturbed and fraying state of mind in the tensions between two men isolated at a lighthouse in the 19th Century
An entry from the revived Hammer Films directed by duo who made Goodnight Mommy. A slow burn of a film about cabin fever and fragmenting psychology often reminiscent of The Shining
A Finnish art project that consists of five episodes that subjectively depict stories of women with mental illness with strikingly surreal effect
This could be Lars and the Real Girl the horror version where a sex doll comes to life (maybe?) and makes Desmond Harrington’s life a misery. A film that becomes quite twisted
Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sanchez makes a film that sits in a fascinatingly ambiguous place as to whether a wife is being haunted/possessed or is mentally disintegrating
A smart and boundary pushing Found Footage film in which a regular joe wins a competition and is selected as an actor on a porn film only to be pushed to snapping point
A head scractchingly strange Sam Raimi produced film in which Raimi’s brother Ted plays a man suffering from hallucinations who tries to come to the aid of the girl of his dreams
Fascinating film from Brad Anderson where Christian Bale is subject to a series of reality blurrings. What hangs over the show most of all is Bale’s intensely physical performance for which he lost a third of his body weight to turn himself into an anorexic shell of a human
Before the spate of superheroes with no powers films with Kick-Ass and Super, there was this South Korean based-on-a-true-story film about a delusional man who believes he is Superman
This starts out seeming like another haunted house film before developing some conceptual reversal twists of the first M. Night Shyamalan-esque order
Film in which Christina Ricci fears her son is being drawn to a monster in the lake, this hangs around a very contrived twist ending
Shane Ryan is one of the most underrated independent directors out there. Here he retells the story of true-life teen murderer Alyssa Bustamante as part of a Larry Clark-type film about troubled youth. Not always an easy work but holds undeniable effect
As might be expected, a collaboration between Werner Herzog and David Lynch makes for an exceedingly strange film, involving matricide, mental illness and ostriches – and all apparently based on a true life murder. Very strange, if in the end it only produces a puzzled scratch of the head
A Stephen King adaptation, this is less the jumpshocks of It than a work of dark brooding psychology as a farmer contemplates the murder of his wife. Think Days of Heaven by way of Grant Wood’s American Gothic
Demented Joel Schumacher film in which Jim Carrey sees occurrences of the number 23 everywhere and finds his life is being predicted by a book. Featuring one of the most absurd scripts ever written
Forgotten silent Japanese avant garde classic set in a mental asylum. This has many similarities to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in its shifting perspectives that delve into the subjective mental space of the inmates
Rare cinematic treatment of the generation ship story that conducts it with a modest degree of affectiveness. Produced by Paul W.S. Anderson.
Ti West made the extraordinary X earlier in the year. Here he and the greatly underrated Mia Goth return to make a prequel
An interestingly strange film with Mia Wasikowska as a disturbed hooker and Christopher Abbott as a man who plans to kill her
Creepy and surprisingly well-made Canadian horror film in which a mentally disturbed David Hewlett has a strange relationship with an anatomical dummy that directs him to kill.
Film version of Pink Floyd’s best-selling album, an extraordinary surreal audiovisual dive into the fraying mind of a rock star
The second of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films with Vincent Price. This feels too much as though Corman was trying to make another House of Usher, nevertheless it creates its own thunderously overwrought atmosphere, even if it has little to do with the Poe story