Horror
movies, barring the funny ones, are intended to scare audiences. Visual scare tactics like jumpscares, auditory ones like off-screen noises, psychological ones like morally dubious circumstances, and straight-up nightmare fuel in the form of monsters and unforgettably haunting locations and situations — horror movies use all kinds of scary motifs. The scariest supernatural horror movies often feature horrifying imagery and soundscapes that are permanently burned into the mind and might come back later in the form of nightmares.
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Some of the best horror movies from the past 10 years feature such nightmare-inducing elements that potentially scar a viewer forever. Alternatively, it’s sometimes not a monster or a scary location that works like nightmare fuel. Some movie premises are even more horrifying if someone starts thinking of themselves in those situations. Drama films that verge on becoming horror movies do so precisely through the use of this narrative tactic, but the most effective nightmare fuel is a horrifying monster who’s impossible to forget.
10
The Pale Man
You are watching: 10 Horror Movies With Monsters That Are Actually Nightmare Fuel
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
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Guillermo del Toro is known for creating immersive worlds that leave lasting impressions. The creative fantasy realms in his works often coexist with reality as it is known, and the parallels drawn between the real and the fantasy make the fantastic elements believable and memorable. Viewers are drawn into these settings and their minds start to occupy them. So, when del Toro creates a horror movie, it feels so real that it can give viewers nightmares.
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Pan’s Labyrinth: The Real Meaning Of Guillermo Del Toro’s Dark Fairytale
Pan’s Labyrinth is a simple story, but director Guillermo Del Toro explores complex themes about human morality and free will in the dark fantasy.
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While not traditionally a horror movie del Toro’s coming-of-age fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth definitely fits the bill. The fantastic takes a bleak form and hope exists in the form of resilience, faith, and belief in fairies. While the protagonist has to encounter quite a few horrific monsters in Pan’s Labyrinth, none are quite as viscerally impactful as the Pale Man. With his eyes glued to his hands that he holds splayed over his face, and the knowledge that he feasts on children, everything about his terrifying existence can be considered nightmare fuel.
9
The Mob
Mother! (2017)
Darren Aronofsky never shies away from creating scarring visuals. Each of his films is like a horror movie, irrespective of the genre. His exploration of angst commonly takes the form of horrifying circumstances, visuals, and often even literal monstrous manifestations of people’s fears. Apart from Requiem for a Dream, which plays out like a horror movie, all Darren Aronofsky movies are characterized by a buildup to one particularly harrowing scene after which an emotional release occurs.
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Mother!
R
Drama
Thriller
Horror
Release Date
September 13, 2017
Runtime
121 minutes
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Mother! isn’t nearly as subtle as it should be with its metaphor about people’s mistreatment of Mother Nature. The viewer gets hit over the head with an exploration of how the titular mother is misunderstood and ignored, even by her own husband. However, the most disturbing part occurs when he allows his fans, the police, and a whole unruly crowd to access their home while she’s giving birth and afterward. The mob holds up her baby and passes it around, and in a freak accident, its neck snaps.
8
The Brundlefly
The Fly (1986)
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Body horror is often a common source of nightmare fuel, as the genre explores the extreme nature of anxiety people experience about their bodies. Extreme mutilations and mutations result in disgusting and disturbing visuals that instill fear in viewers. Many of these movies are highly immersive because they’re premised on the human need to alleviate suffering that’s caused by the body. So, naturally, David Cronenberg, a maestro of the genre, often creates movies that horrify audiences.
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The Fly
R
Horror
Sci-Fi
Drama
Release Date
August 15, 1986
Runtime
96 minutes
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Cronenberg’s The Fly features one of the most gruesome deaths in 1980s horror movies. Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle starts mutating into a fly, and in a depressing turn of events, he slowly loses human attributes as his body disintegrates. The final form he takes before his girlfriend has to shoot him is a scarring image that will haunt viewers. The prospect of experiencing Brundle’s fate and the emotionally heavy exploration of having a terminal illness both make The Fly disconcerting.
7
The Thing
The Thing (1982)
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John Carpenter is known for directing trendsetting, genre-defining movies. His horror movies aren’t just remembered for their harrowing kills and disturbing antagonists, but also for exploring more human anxieties. They feature excellent visuals and soundscapes that have inspired horror filmmakers in the years to come, but the highlights are the themes. Even his creature feature, one of the best monster movies of all time, isn’t focused on the horrifying appearance of the monster or the havoc he wreaks.
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The Thing
R
Horror
Sci-Fi
Mystery
Release Date
June 25, 1982
Runtime
109 minutes
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The Thing can transform into anyone, and this is easily its scariest attribute. It looks terrifying, and the grotesque appearance could definitely give someone nightmares. But, the real reason The Thing works as nightmare fuel is that there’s nothing more scary than the prospect of discovering that people one knows and trusts are actually murderous monsters who are secretly waiting to kill them.
6
The Rotten
When Evil Lurks (2023)
Demián Rugna has made a name for himself by making terrifying and gory supernatural horror movies that feature disgusting monsters and visuals that don’t leave one’s memory any time soon. The 2017 film Terrified put him on the map as a director who doesn’t shy away from extreme gore, but that’s been his signature for a long time. His next film, arguably his best, features one of the most terrifying beings ever featured in a horror movie.
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When Evil Lurks
NR
Horror
Thriller
Release Date
October 6, 2023
Runtime
100 minutes
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The Rotten, the main antagonistic presence in When Evil Lurks, is a formless spirit that possesses someone and waits for the host’s death to be reborn as a demon child. It has the power to make others around the host murderous so they might kill the host quickly. The horrifying acts committed by people in proximity to those possessed by the rotten will give anyone nightmares. The shot where a dog mauls a little girl in the face is particularly scarring.
5
Moder
The Ritual (2017)
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The Ritual
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Horror
Thriller
Release Date
October 13, 2017
Runtime
94minutes
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Based on Adam Nevill’s novel of the same name, The Ritual is a horror movie that follows a group of four as they venture into unknown woods for a hike to commemorate their recently deceased friend. They experience strange phenomena and come across multiple corpses during their journey through the forest. An enormous and terrifying creature is possibly haunting them, but they don’t know that for certain until it’s too late and only two of them remain.
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The Ritual’s Creature Jötunn & Norse Mythology Origins Explained
Netflix’s The Ritual has delivered both Norse mythology and a terrifying premise to streaming audiences since 2017, but what exactly is the Jötunn?
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The Moder, a Jötunn, is a horrifying monster that doesn’t get much screen time but doesn’t need much to make an impression either. It can simply pick people up and impale them on tree branches and the only way to survive its wrath is to worship it. Otherwise, people will get sacrificed to it by a cult of worshipers. It looks menacing, like a nightmarish monster, and viewers must be warned, it could potentially haunt their dreams.
4
The Crawlers
The Descent (2005)
Neil Marshall’s creature feature is a treatise on grief. It follows a group of thrill-seekers who go into a dark cave, led by protagonist Juno Kaplan. However, Juno is one of those horror movie heroes who’s really the villain because she intentionally endangers her friends by lying about the cave, which ultimately exposes them to the monsters inside. She unwittingly leads the team into the residence of the crawlers.
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The Descent
R
Horror
Adventure
Thriller
Release Date
August 4, 2006
Runtime
99 minutes
Movie
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The crawlers look terrifying from the little glimpses that viewers get. They are agile and rapidly snatch their prey away before anyone can get a good look at them. The sounds they make and the screams of the victims as they get dragged away by them are more effective nightmare fuel. It’s not so much their specific appearances but the way the setting terrifies the characters that makes the film so terrifying. The prospect of being trapped in that cave is the stuff of nightmares.
3
The Zombies
REC (2007)
Zombies have been around forever, and they haven’t always been so scary. One of the most hilarious horror comedy movies, Shaun of the Dead, uses them for body horror-comedy. With parodies and caricatures, and even sympathetic takes over the years, zombies have been demystified and are not necessarily terrifying in the cultural zeitgeist anymore. But at the peak of the 2000s, with its obsession with them, RE offered a uniquely terrifying take on zombies.
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[REC]
R
Horror
Thriller
Release Date
November 23, 2007
Runtime
78 Minutes
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Two genres that both peaked in prominence during the 2000s are zombies and found footage. Rec combines them in a single-location horror movie where a journalist-in-training is trapped in a building with the firemen she was interviewing and the friend who’s filming her. Because of the use of found footage, viewers feel like events are happening to them, and the close-up shots of the zombies bathed in the dark vision color scheme are sure to frighten.
2
The Bear
Annihilation (2018)
Alex Garland has a reputation for overtly exploring dystopia. His latest film about journalistic photography, set in an imagined civil war in the future, is one of the best thriller movies of 2024. On the other hand, Annihilation is much more removed from reality as many of its scenes are set in a Lovecraftian location, known only as The Shimmer, where inexplicable phenomena haunt anyone who ventures inside.
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Annihilation
R
Sci-Fi
Mystery
Horror
Release Date
February 23, 2018
Runtime
115 Minutes
Movie
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7/10
11
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Among the horrors that plague people who dare enter The Shimmer is a mutant bear. Inside The Shimmer, the normal laws of nature don’t hold up, and DNA composition is almost always in flux. This is why many creatures are mutated or mutilated. However, the bear is particularly horrifying to look at — but that’s not the most scary thing about him when his victims somehow live inside him. He can use their voices, and sometimes his victim’s pained exclamations make themselves heard inside the heads of others around him.
1
The Troglodytes
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
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Bone Tomahawk
Not Rated
Western
Adventure
Documentary
Horror
Thriller
Release Date
October 23, 2015
Runtime
132 minutes
Movie
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8.6/10
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Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk is one of the most daring directorial debuts, and not entirely in a good sense. While it established him as an unflinching director who won’t shy away from depicting gory scenes in full detail, its villains seem too closely inspired by Indigenous tribes for it to be an acceptable representation. The Bone Tomahawk villains are different from any Westerns, as they’re typical nightmare fuel.
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Bone Tomahawk’s Cannibal Villains, The Troglodytes, Explained
Kurt Russell’s 2015 horror Western, Bone Tomahawk, has one of the most disturbing villains in any Western movie, the cannibal Troglodytes.
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The cannibalistic Troglodytes, a tribal people, brutally tear people open and feast on them. Zahler depicts each of their horrifying acts in close-ups, through extended scenes that allow viewers no respite from the gore and the torture. The Troglodytes look menacing, but they don’t seem monstrous until they start grabbing people and flaying them alive before eating them. Extreme physical reactions to watching this horror movie aren’t unexpected, and viewers should be prepared to have nightmares for weeks.
Source: https://dinhtienhoang.edu.vn
Category: Entertainment