Into The Darkness: 10 Unsettling Films that Explore the Haunting Descent into Madness

In The Mouth of Madness is a later career masterpiece from legendary filmmaker John Carpenter that tells an extraordinary and unnerving story about the relationship between reality and fantasy. The film follows an insurance investigator and book editor as they journey to New Hampshire to find a missing author.

But they’re not going just anywhere in New Hampshire; they’re going to the fictional town that only exists in the books written by the author they’re seeking. It’s a brilliant movie that takes several meta-turns, each more surprising than the last.

Sometimes described as “Hellraiser in space,” Event Horizon owes just as much, if not more, to the original Alien film as it follows a crew sent to investigate an abandoned ship that disappeared years ago and recently reappeared.

You can expect what happens from the Hellraiser comparison, but unlike those movies which feature monstrous creatures, Event Horizon relies entirely on the human crew, and one character in particular, to slowly unleash hellish evil.

Many people recommend The Lighthouse as one of the best films about descending into madness; several say it is their favorite film.

It makes sense that people have such strong feelings about it; it’s genuinely unlike anything else with its black-and-white cinematography, 4:3 aspect ratio, gothic seaside horror aesthetic, and a surprising amount of fart jokes.

The Lighthouse centers on two lighthouse keepers in the late 19th century who are stuck on an island with each other and the titular lighthouse for an extended period, and as that time goes on, they begin to lose their sense of reality, or are the fantastical mermaids and the magic in the light real?

Perhaps best known as the movie that Christian Bale lost a genuinely alarming amount of weight to star in, The Machinist is much more than the stories behind the scenes.

The film follows Bale’s Trevor, a machinist who has insomnia. He begins to see a man that no one around him sees and struggles to solve a hangman game puzzle that appears on his refrigerator one day.

It’s a bleak movie, both in content and form (the film’s primarily gray), but Bale’s performance and the expertly built tension make it one of the best movies about madness.

Not all “descent into madness movies” are brutal and bleak. May is overwhelmingly a sweet film about the titular May (a fantastic Angela Bettis), an awkward young woman trying to connect with the people around her.

Most of the film centers on May’s relationship with Polly (Anna Faris), her colleague at the vet clinic where she works, and Adam (Jeremy Sisto), a handsome young man with whom she begins a romantic relationship.

There’s excellent chemistry between Bettis and her costars, even when May is being a little too strange for other people’s comfort leading them to distance themselves from her. But as the film goes on, she grows creative about making them close to her in an equally beautiful and terrifying way.

One user suggests that the first half of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket is not only a horror movie about a descent into madness but also one of the best, and I’m hard-pressed to disagree.

The film is split into two parts, the first at Marine training and the second in the war with the young men we met in training, but the first half is arguably far more horrific than the second.

We see one of the men struggle to succeed in training, abused by the drill instructor, and eventually break, leading to one of the most memorable and disturbing scenes in film history.

Excision features some of the most interesting hyper-stylized visuals in recent horror movies. But it’s not a science fiction or fantasy film; these wild images are all inside the lead character’s head.

Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) is a teen who struggles to fit in with her peers and her family but has grand ambitions of being a surgeon at the first opportunity. Her drive to make herself into what she wants makes the film perhaps more heartbreaking than scary, but don’t worry, it delivers on the blood, too.

A classic of the descent into madness subgenre, Repulsion tells the story of a young woman who struggles with men, their advances, and isolation after being left alone by her sister in their shared apartment.

It’s also an iconic piece of feminist horror, whether it was intended that way or not. One person who recommends it says the film “is hands down [their] favorite movie about someone losing their marbles.”

One of the greatest anime films of all time, Perfect Blue, follows Mima (Junko Iwao), a young woman who shifts her career from that of an idol (a Japanese pop star) to an actress.

But not all of her fans are happy about that change, and one of them takes it upon themselves to create an online diary as if they were Mima. That diary and an attack on the set of the show where she works lead Mima to begin a not-so-slow descent into paranoid madness that’s brought to the screen in gorgeous animation.

This thread inspired this post.

Jacob’s Ladder is another descent into madness film related to the Vietnam War. But unlike Full Metal Jacket, which in part focuses on the madness brought on before the war, Jacob’s Ladder tells a story of madness that emerges after.

The film centers on a veteran with hazy memories of a horrible and chaotic skirmish during his time in the war and his uncertainty about whether his life is real or an all too believable death dream.

The film keeps the audience and the protagonist guessing throughout but never lets up on the tension and delivers some incredible horror scenes along the way.

With hundreds of thousands of horror movies available on streaming services, it can be tough to know which ones are terrifying and which are not. Horror buffs often struggle to feel absolute terror when we've watched so many scary movies over the years.

A user on a popular online horror forum wonders what other lovers of the genre find to be the most terrifying movies ever. Fans came together in the thread to recommend their favorites. Check out the Top 15 Fan-Voted Hands Down Scariest Movies of All Time.

From the Blue Ridge Mountains to the blue waters of the Great Lakes, these vast and mysterious areas are home to more than just wildlife.

They harbor mythical creatures that terrorize people, protect trees from loggers, and warn miners from embedding doom. From local versions of the Loch Ness Monsters to indigenous tales told to children to keep them from wandering off. See the Creepiest Mythical Creatures from Each State in America.

Part of the thrill of watching horror movies after dark is that enhanced feeling of terror, whether it's a psychological scare that messes with your mind or a jump scare that has you levitating out of your seat. So when a community of horror film buffs was asked which movies were the most frightening to watch in the dark, they replied with films that will make you want to watch them in a well-lit place.

See the 10 Films That Are Hands Down the Scariest Movies to Watch in the Dark.

Horror movies don't often get awarded at the Oscars, so when they do, you know they must be terrific. Whether they won best picture or original screenplay, these terrifying films are sure to impress and scare their viewers.

See the 10 Scariest Movies That Have Actually Won Oscars.