There are all kinds of ways to frighten an audience, as the proud, diverse catalogue of horror movies demonstrates, but psychological horror is a particularly tricky technique to pull off. All of cinema is an exercise in empathy, but to drag an audience down into the pits of a disturbed mind requires vision, technical precision, and a willingness to put your viewer through absolute hell.

We're taking a look back at some of my favorite psychological horror movies that really got inside my head and did some dirty work. These films aren’t necessarily about psychology, though many of them are by nature of they genre, they’re films that make you feel like you’re having a psychological episode — films that wring the phobias, anxieties, torment, and afflictions of their characters from the audience so that you're transported into an experience of mental chaos.

So you won't see titles like Silence of the Lambs or Les Diaboliques -- they're some of the best movies ever made in the psychological horror genre, but their effect is different. What you will find here are a whole bunch of mentally taxing freakout films that will prod at your psyche and put you through the ringer. It's by no

This is obviously nowhere near a comprehensive list, it's an assortment of my favorite (or perhaps most dreaded) movies that mangled my mind. Along the same train of thought as my list of visually stunning movies, sometimes I just like to celebrate a few faves without getting into qualifiers and rankings. Think of this as a starting ground, a conversation starter, and a few of my personal favorites, and be sure to keep that conversation going sound off in the comments with the movies that messed you up the most.

Jacob's Ladder

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Image via TriStar Pictures

Part war movie, part political thriller, and all emotional torment, Jacob’s Ladder is one of the most fearless, ambitious, and enduring head trip movies ever made. The film stars Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, a man who finds himself tortured in a hallucinogenic limbo between nightmare and reality after a mysteriously framed trauma on the Vietnam battlefield. Trapped in recurring nightmares from the war, grief over the death of his young son, and a series of recurring visions and panic attacks that leave him reeling to regain his grasp on reality, Jacob attempts to adjust to his post-war life while battling a growing suspicion he might already be in hell.

Directed by Fatal Attraction helmer Adrian Lyne, Jacob’s Ladder grips the audience tight from the first moments and never lets go. Subway stations with no exit, pick-pocketing Santa Clauses and visions of demonic infiltration torment Jacob; the entire film presented from his unreliable, but always sympathetic view. Tim Robbins gives an aching, soulful performance as Jacob.; a performance that rightfully elevated his career from a supporting and comedic actor to that of a respected dramatic lead.

It’s unusual to see such a brazen, oddball script carried out with the freedom of a big studio budget, and the result is a visually engrossing, nerve-jangling trip down a rabbit hole of depression and anxiety that uses paranoid visions of hell on earth to evoke true-life traumas of war, grief, and love lost; all encapsulated in the heart-breaking tale of a fractured man desperately searching for a moment’s peace.

Session 9

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Image via Universal Pictures

Brad Anderson’s thoroughly creepy, slow-burn slip into insanity takes place in an abandoned mental hospital, where a team of asbestos cleaners hard up for cash take on a hazardous, rushed gig to clear out the facility with only a week’s time. As you might expect, the crew you pull together for that kind of gig isn’t the most upstanding bunch of fellas, and as the week wears on, each man’s dangerous secrets start to come to the surface inside the haunting, possibly haunted walls of the asylum, where all manner of cruel, crude procedures were once conducted on the patients. When the team starts listening to the discarded, deeply unsettling recordings of a patient who suffered from multiple personality disorder, each new tape more disorienting and chilling than the next, and their obsession with the archives seep through them like a corrosive force of madness.

An early adopter of digital filmmaking, Session 9 certainly isn’t the most visually accomplished film on the list, but Anderson uses the gritty, lo-fi imagery to enhance the film’s gothic style, digging the dingy sense of rot and morbid mental degeneration. Session 9’s violent climax doesn’t quite live up to the moody, atmospheric escalation that precedes it, but when it’s focused on the horrors of the mind, it plays out like a campfire tale of encroaching psychosis that digs deep under your skin.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

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Image via Oscilloscope Laboratories

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a spectacular, shattering movie that takes on one of the most hot-button, haunting issues in contemporary America — school shootings — and refracts it through the shattered psyche of a woman who feels wholly responsible for and trapped by the incomprehensible violent deeds of her son. Tilda Swinton gives a bravura performance as Eva, mother to a son who seems to hate everything about the world, including his mother, from his very birth. As an infant, he screams incessantly. As a toddler, he fouls his own diapers long after he should be potty trained. As a teen, he's downright sinister. Doctors say there’s nothing wrong with him, Kevin’s father says there’s nothing wrong with him, but Kevin always shows Eva exactly what he is, an unrepentant monster in the making, and she watches in horror, and anger, every step of his maturation from budding sociopath to full-grown murderer, trapped by the bonds between mother and son.

Skipping through time and memory, We Need to Talk About Kevin fragments Eva and Kevin’s story into a nightmarish kaleidoscope of misdeeds and psychological warfare between them -- we see Kevin played by three young actors, Rocky Duer, Jasper Newell, and Ezra Miller, each as impeccably cast as the next. In exploring their hideous, unconventional journey, Ramsay crafts a visually stunning onslaught of mental torment, rich with metaphor, where blood red beacons of the dread past and still to come haunt Eva in every frame. And they’ll haunt you too.

Watching We Need to Talk About Kevin is like feeling a noose of despair and helplessness tighten around your neck. It sucks the breath out of you, and Ramsay uses every tool in a filmmaker’s supply to needle the senses, from the skewed deployment of chipper music to expert instances of poetic imagery. When Eva goes to the store to buy eggs, they’re all shattered, and when she goes home, she grimaces through her bitter feast, pulling the shells from her teeth. And so it is for the entire film; Eva grits her way through her lot, part circumstance, part self-prepared; a prisoner to inconceivable misfortune she can never escape. Likewise, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a film that’s hard to get away from. Ramsay never gives you easy answers, denying them most of all in the final moments before the credits roll, making the film a marathon of mental torment you can never seem to outrun.

Excision

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Image via Anchor Bay Films

Annalynne McCord abandons her tradition of playing vixens and femme fatales in Excision, turning out a career best performance as Pauline, an obviously disturbed teenage girl who isn’t getting the help she needs. And Pauline knows she needs help, but her parents don’t, and they’re not willing to lay down the funds for the psychiatrist she keeps asking for, so in between her contentious therapy sessions with her under-qualified priest (played by cult film icon John Waters), Pauline indulges her fascination with anatomy and medical procedure, only furthering her descent into deranged obsession.

An outcast at school and in her own home, Pauline plays life by her own rules, growing more intimately involved with her grotesque fantasies with each passing day. She dreams of toe-curling sexual encounters with a half-decapitated corpse. When she loses her virginity, she plans it so she’ll be on her period, imagining rivers of blood pouring over her. The only person she can bond with is her sweet younger sister (Ariel Winter), the golden child, who also happens to be dying of Cystic Fibrosis. It's only a matter of time before her visions start to bleed into her real life, and while most of Excision’s runtime plays out like a gory dark comedy, balancing cringes with laughs, when Pauline gets it in her head that she’s her sister’s only hope for survival, the film becomes a tragic tale of horror.

Make no mistake, McCord carries Excision on her ever-haunched shoulders, but the biggest surprise is the performance from Tracie Lords, who plays Pauline's tightly-wound, image-obsessed mother and proves herself a genuinely talented actress, delivering the film’s most crushing emotional blow with one primal scream. Excision isn’t just a heartbreaking tragedy about delusion and the way we abandon the mentally ill, it’s also an incredibly effective exercise in anxiety that trades in the paranoia of pathology (STDs are a present motif) and stomach-churning visuals of surgical violence. Equally heartfelt, delightfully deranged, and downright nasty, Excision triggers unwavering unease, but always displays a warmth for the misfit and attention to character that’s all to rare in the well-mined tradition of body horror.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

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Image via A24

Who knew a single plate of spaghetti could be so damn distressing? The Lobster and Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a career of helming perversely punishing, psychologically upsetting films, and in that regard, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is his most potent accomplishment yet.

Cynical as it is singular, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a tale of crime and punishment that harnesses the capricious cruelty of the old golds in order to turn the failings of man into a horrific show of penance. Colin Farrell stars as Dr. Steven Murphy, a venerated surgeon who lives a pristine suburban life with his elegant ophthalmologist wife (Nicole Kidman) and their two children, teenaged daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and young son Bob (Sunny Suljic). It all goes to hell in a hand-basket when Steven takes an unusual teen, Martin (Barry Keoghan), under his mentorship. The relationship between the possesses a potent awkwardness that makes you want to shield your eyes and turn away from second-hand embarrassment, but that niggling discomfort elevates into full-blown primal horror when Martin blindsides Steven with a demand for sacrifice.

Played out with Lanthimos’ signature deadpan and absurdism, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is instantly unnerving, always enigmatic, and occasionally confounding. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what this film even is, let alone why lodges so deep under your skin — aside from the performance by Keoghan, which is downright mesmerizing and blood-chilling — but it crawls inside your mind and unleashes discord with precision. A terrifying tragicomedy mined from myth (seek out the tale of Iphigenia if you find the film too oblique), The Killing of a Sacred Deer drops you directly into a surreal world of pain, where spaghetti-twirling monologues become the stuff of nightmares -- and like any true nightmare, it's almost impossible to describe the effect once it's over.

Funny Games

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Image via Concord-Castle Rock / Turner

Funny Games will fuck you up. This movie doesn't pull any punches, so I won't either. Michael Hanneke's 1997 take on home invasion horror wants to hold you responsible for your taste for cinematic violence, taking the audience captive along with the characters and forcing you down a path of provocative punishment that can be downright sadistic. It is not a pleasant watch.

The film follows two smirking young sociopaths (Arno Frisch and Frank Giering), who come knocking at the door of an average suburban family -- mother Anna (Susanne Lothar), father Georg (Ulrich Mühe), and young son Georgie (Stefan Clapczynski) -- and unleash a psychological and violent hell on them, while Hanneke spares no effort doing the same to the audience. Funny Games puts you through the ringer, scene after scene, moment by moment, as the misdeeds grow from imposition to outright torment.

Hanneke frames the film like a middle finger to audiences who come looking for cheap thrills, breaking the fourth wall, toying with reality, teasing payoff and relief that will never come, and delivering instead a crushing portrait of human depravity -- one that makes you complicit in every moment. The film practically begs you to turn it off to stop the senseless parade of torture. After all, you're the one holding the remote, you're the one with the power to make it all stop. But you won't. But even if Hanneke seems to forget he's being wildly indulgent in his quest to punish audiences for their indulgence, he is an exceptional filmmaker, and he wraps you up in the lurid suspense so that you stick with the suffering through every unflinching frame. It's a taxing, discomfiting experience that reaches through the screen and slaps you in the face.

In the Mouth of Madness

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Image via New Line Cinema

When it comes to transmitted madness via psychological horror, nobody does it like Lovecraft, and nobody's done Lovecraftian horror on screen as well as horror maestro John Carpenter did with his 1994 tribute In the Mouth of Madness.

Rich with references to the literary great, In the Mouth of Madness takes an almost meta approach to psychological horror with the story of John Trent (Sam Neill), an insurance investigator who we know is about to go mad. When we first meet him, he’s in a padded cell, telling a psychiatrist a confused story of twisted horrors and the end of days. Trent finds his way to madness on the hunt for Sutter Cane, a renown horror author a la Stephen King (who the film honors and pokes fun at simultaneously) who recently went missing. When Cane’s publisher hires Trent to track down his cash cow, the investigator’s mind overturns every possible stone on the hunt for the author, always looking for a scam, even as his grip on reality slips out from under him in the increasingly surreal journey that greets him.

This is not what you’d call a coherent film. In the Mouth of Madness strains at its own logic sometimes, and the scripting is a bit jarring, but logic is nowhere near the point and jarring is the names of the game because Carpenter masterfully conjures that specific, singular Lovecraftian terror — the menace of a great unknowable threat, the knowledge of your own inevitable descent into insanity, and the plummeting sensation of feeling your world turn upside down.

The Vanishing

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Image via Argos Films

To this day, my first viewing of The Vanishing (Spoorloos) remains one of the most devastating cinematic experiences of my life. It’s inescapable. Years later, I’m still hung up on the ending, haunted by its impact and steadfast humanity. This film opens you up, with precision, not without care, and very intentionally leave you vulnerable. There’s a blunt, matter-of-fact honesty to the story that cuts much deeper than melodrama, and director George Sluzier crafts an impeccable, intoxicating mystery, with intelligent work from writer Tim Krabbé, that demands resolution even if you dread each turning of the page.

Sluzier sets an exquisite trap and the lure is Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), a radiant young woman who disappears at a rest stop during a road trip with her boyfriend, Rex (Gene Bervoets). In a film full of masterful tricks, perhaps the most impressive is the way The Vanishing makes us fall in love with Saskia so quickly so that when she is gone, her absence haunts us along with Rex, who obsessively searches for her. His endless devotion catches the eye of Saskia’s abductor, played with chilling, understated menace by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, who seeks out contact with Rex, culminating in a horrific, haunting mindfuck finale.

The Vanishing presents two types of madness, each terrifying in their own way — the cold, calculating psychosis of a serial killer and the blistering, unhinged desperation of a grieving man desperate for closure. Either one is fuel enough for nightmares aplenty, but together they’re the yin and yang of human suffering, perfectly matched, opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s devastating. The Vanishing is a masterpiece, an essential experience in empathy and agony that grips you by the throat and never, ever lets go.

(Disclaimer: Kluzier went on to remake his own film in English and that 1993 redo abandons everything that made the original so special. Be sure to seek out the original — no imitations.)

Creep

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Image via the Orchard

The horror of Creep is all about the terrifying uncertainty of what the hell is going to happen next, and it works like a nauseous charm thanks to one extraordinary performance from Mark Duplass. You never know what to make of Duplass in this tightly-constructed paranoid horror pic. He's charming, disarming, and absolutely offputting, raising alarms with every cocked eyebrow and eager smile. You never know what he'll do or say next, and the whole film crackles like a livewire with the tense anticipation of what's around the corner.

Duplass co-wrote the film with director Patrick Bice, who also stars as Aaron, a naive videographer who heads to a remote mountainside cabin after responding to a mysterious Craiglist gig. All he has to do is film for a day and he'll make an easy grand, so he heads off to the woods where he meets Duplass' Josef, and from the moment he comes into frame, there's never a doubt he's an absolute weirdo, and probably a dangerous one, so all of their their queasy interactions course with jaw-clenching tension.

Bice and Duplass methodically build up the tension and intrigue, always knowing when to deliver a payoff and when to hold back, and it all leads to one last nasty surprise to top them all. Not your average found footage flick, Creep is all in your head and takes its time rooting around in there before following the natural path to  more traditional horror beats.

More Recommendations: UnsaneAmerican Psycho, A Tale of Two Sisters, Black Swan, The Invitation, Oldboy, Eraserhead, and obviously, The Shining.