Great Horror Movies With The Most Uncanny Atmospheres

Summary

Horror can be found in mundane settings with an uncanny twist, focusing on psychological fears within characters.
Films like Donnie Darko and Jacob's Ladder explore psychological horror through visions and traumatic experiences.
The Shining, Cube, and Session 9 create an eerie atmosphere through isolation, puzzles, and disturbing revelations.

Horror movies cover a wide range of subjects, and for creative producers and writers, horror can be found literally anywhere. The realm of psychological horror often uses mundane or everyday settings that turn weird, uncanny, or terrifying depending on the character's state of mind.

The definition of "uncanny" is something that starts as familiar and becomes mysterious or frightening through a strange turn of events. Television shows like The Twilight Zone popularized this kind of horror — not the blood and guts or zombie kind, but the fears that come from within — and these movies picked up the mantle of uncanny horror and ran with it.

6 Donnie Darko

Welcome To The Tangent Universe

Directed By: Richard Kelly
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Mary McDonnell, Patrick Swayze
Distributed By: Pandora Cinema, Newmarket Films
Release Date: October 26, 2001

Is it science fiction, dark fantasy, horror, or schizophrenia? An upscale suburb in a typical American neighborhood is the setting for one of the most unsettling and uncanny horror movies ever made, the notorious Donnie Darko, which can be about an alternate reality or a mental illness, depending on whether or viewers are watching the Director's Cut.

The movie goes off the rails almost immediately when Donnie, after sleepwalking, wakes up on a golf course. This is uncanny to start with, but it isn't so unusual for troubled teenager Donald Darko. What's different about this time, however, is the giant rabbit that appears and tells him how much time Donnie has left before the world ends.

5 Jacob's Ladder

Demonic Hallucinations And Dreams Of Death

Directed By: Adrian Lyne
Starring: Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello
Distributed By: Tri-Star Pictures
Release Date: November 2, 1990

The Ladder of Jacob is a story that isn't part of any official Biblical text, but it's considered to be apocalyptic literature in the same category as the Book of Revelations. The author describes climbing a grotesque ladder covered with the figures of deformed human beings, which is the nature of the demons, or hallucinations, that torment Jacob Singer, the main character of Jacob's Ladder.

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By Amy Cowley

The horror of this movie isn't just the disgusting and detailed visions of demons and deformities that haunt Jacob. His very real history of post-traumatic stress after serving in Vietnam, the loss of one of his children to an accident, the failure of his marriage, and the further pain of wondering how much of his life is real and how much of it is his mind playing tricks on him, are all terrifying. Despite the film's surreal nature, all is revealed in a strange twist at the end.

4 The Hole

Trapped In A Psychotic Mind

Directed By: Nick Hamm
Starring: Thora Birch, Desmond Harrington, Laurence Fox, Keira Knightley
Distributed By: Pathé Distribution
Release Date: April 20, 2001

Depending on which character you ask, there are two versions of this movie in the same movie. One is the typical story of teenage angst and the stupid drunken partying that goes along with it, and the other involves a malicious plot by a sadistic psychotic to trap a certain boy she's obsessed with in a bomb shelter.

The Hole starts with Liz, the main character and sole survivor of a weekend gone wrong, stumbling into her school and calling for help. According to her, she escaped from a bomb shelter that her jealous friend locked her and three other people in, culminating in their tragic deaths. As the real story unfolds in flashbacks, however, what really happened in that dark little space underground is revealed.

3 The Shining

A Hotel That Devours Souls

Directed By: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd
Distributed By: Warner Bros.
Release Date: October 2, 1980

As adaptations go, The Shining is a notoriously bad one, but only because it has little resemblance to the book on which it's based. Kubrick's vision still has an undeniably creepy charm, and the iconic scenes of bloody elevators and ghosts in bathtubs have served as nightmare fuel for decades.

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By Brad Hill

It's not just the isolation of the hotel in the stark Rocky Mountain foothills in the dead of winter that makes this movie creepy and uncanny. The use of music, colors, long shots, and even dead silence make this movie even more terrifying, with few things being more uncanny and threatening than a cold winter's night.

2 Cube

Escape The Deadly Puzzle

Directed By: Vincenzo Natali
Starring: Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller
Distributed By: Cineplex Odeon Films, Trimark Pictures
Release Date: September 9, 1997

Although a relatively small Canadian production, the uncanny nature of Cube earned the movie a cult following and enough critical notoriety to inspire an American remake in 2015 and a Japanese version as recently as 2021. The setting and premise have been described as "Kafkaesque" in reference to that author's use of the surreal and disorienting.

The first scene of this movie features a character exploring a square room, only to be killed in a very dramatic and shocking manner by an elaborate trap. The rest of the plot focuses on a group of five people (more or less, since traps kill random people throughout) and their efforts to try and figure out where they are, why they've been put there, and how they can escape.

1 Session 9

The Mess That Is The Human Mind

Directed By: Brad Anderson
Starring: David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, Paul Guilfoyle, Josh Lucas
Distributed By: USA Films
Release Date: August 10, 2001

Desperation, money, and time are three of the main factors that get under a human being's skin, sometimes to the point of driving them mad. All three factors are turned against Golden Fleming, the owner of an asbestos abatement company, which is why he takes a dangerous job cleaning up an old abandoned sanitarium even though he's not even sure he can finish the job on time.

Gordon cobbles together an equally desperate crew, each with their own emotional issues, the only other people he can find willing to do such a dirty and hazardous job in this crumbling monolith of a building. The place is filled with sordid and terrifying secrets, revealed through disembodied voices, old therapy session tapes, and even a cache of treasure hidden in the crematorium.