No Ghosts Required: Writers Name the Non-Horror Films That Scared Them Most

A Nicolas Cage thriller about snuff films, a Disney cartoon and a Todd Haynes legal drama top a new list of the scariest movies ever made — none of them horror films. Writers for the Guardian have each named the non-horror film that left them most frightened, and the picks share one mechanism: real human cruelty, not monsters, does the work.

What makes a non-horror film scary?

Radheyan Simonpillai opens with Lee Chang-dong's Burning, in which Jeon Jong-seo's spirited young woman disappears and Steven Yeun's wealthy playboy gives off serial-killer vibes. For Simonpillai, the film's real horror is "disaffected male rage", which he calls "the most commonplace horror of our times", surfacing steadily through Yoo Ah-in's performance as Jong-su, an aspiring writer stuck tending his incarcerated father's dilapidated farm.

Morgan Jerkins goes further back and younger: Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, first watched at age six. The pillory scene, where townspeople jeer and throw food at Quasimodo, "will for ever be seared into my brain", she writes, adding: "Sometimes, the real monsters are human beings with a bit of social standing over someone else due to money, beauty, authority or all of the above."

Alaina Demopoulos picks a 1952 noir with grim contemporary resonance. Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper follows a misogynist loner shooting women from his bedroom window and writing letters to police begging to be caught — released more than two decades before Taxi Driver covered similar ground. Demopoulos also notes the director's own blacklist backstory: Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten, named names to McCarthy's committee after a six-month prison sentence, ending countless careers.

Technology, trust and system-scale terror

Veronica Esposito argues Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey reads scarier now than in 1968. Its famous bone-to-satellite jump cut frames human creativity as a carrier of both liberation and destruction. Dave Bowman escapes HAL 9000 by disconnecting it, but, as Esposito puts it, "in our world we've already passed the point where that would have been possible."

Benjamin Lee picks Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, where Mads Mikkelsen's kindergarten teacher is falsely accused by a child. We know from the start he's innocent; the terror is watching a community mechanically turn. "In The Hunt, a pitchfork is far scarier than a knife," Lee writes.

Rafaela Bassili finds horror in paperwork. Todd Haynes's 2019 Dark Waters, based on Nathaniel Rich's 2016 New York Times profile of lawyer Robert Bilott, shows DuPont knowingly poisoning West Virginians with "forever chemicals". One image haunts her: Mark Ruffalo's Bilott kneeling among stacks of paper "that tower over him as menacingly as Nosferatu's shadow". The terror, she says, is one of scale — "To DuPont, crushing Bilott is as simple as swatting a fly."

The personal picks

Not every choice runs on moral dread. Andrew Lawrence confesses an enduring fear of Howard the Duck (1986), with its "human adult-sized mallard" landing in Cleveland, golf-ball eyes "screaming Help!", and a Dark Overlord whose goals "still remain somewhat unclear". His nine-year-old mind, he writes, was not prepared for the duck in bed with Lea Thompson.

Shrai Popat defends Awake, in which Hayden Christensen's heart-transplant patient stays conscious through the entire operation. Being paralyzed and unable to signal failed anesthesia "feels unnecessary", she notes, but the film is "weirdly exhilarating. Everyone commits fully to the madness, acting with a capital A."

Jesse Hassenger supplies the list's headline quote. After ducking into Joel Schumacher's 8mm (1999) — Cage as a PI investigating whether a snuff film is real, with James Gandolfini as a creep and a masked performer called Machine — "my two buddies and I left shellshocked." He hasn't revisited it: "the truth is, I'm still a little afraid of the damn thing."

Juan A Ramirez picks Molly Manning Walker's debut How to Have Sex, with Mia McKenna-Bruce as a 16-year-old holidaying in Greece. The worst rarely happens, Ramirez notes, yet "the threat of the worst-case scenario suffuses every single frame".

Adrian Horton's fear lives in one Zodiac scene: a masked man striding toward a picnicking couple in broad daylight, filmed on the victim's face as curiosity becomes terror — a re-enactment of an actual 1969 murder. "Sometimes, as in this actual 1969 murder, your fear was right," she writes.

Andrew Pulver closes with Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, where heroin is "the silent, remorseless slayer THAT CAN'T BE STOPPED", and Ellen Burstyn's diet-pill addict descends into amphetamine psychosis. "Their collective descent into abject misery is as profoundly disturbing an experience as cinema has ever recorded", he writes.

What does this change for viewers?

Mainly, where to look for a scare this month. Every pick is currently streamable: Burning on Mubi and Tubi (US), The Hunchback of Notre Dame on Disney+, Dark Waters and The Hunt to rent, Zodiac on Paramount+ (US) and Netflix (UK and Australia). The list's quiet argument — that dread migrates from genre films to dramas about money, medicine, accusation and chemistry — suggests the most reliable horror now carries no genre label at all.

By Grace Kim