What’s the difference between a psychological horror and a psychological thriller?
Well, it could be as simple as comparing the style of Stanley Kubrick to that of David Fincher. One is in love with emotional turmoil, and the other paints vivid images of realistic terror.
Psychological horror is not about catch and release — the formula of most horror thrillers. Most horror films you can think of fall into the cozy genres of suspense thriller (Silence of the Lambs), psychological thriller (Jacob’s Ladder), or slasher (The Strangers).
You’re outrunning Art the Clown, Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger when you watch a thriller.When you watch a psychological thriller, you’re figuring out a mystery in real time with the protagonist.
You’re figuring out the horrible truth of your fate, like Grace in The Others, or uncovering a diabolical plot, like in Chris in Get Out. But when you’re watching psychological horror, you are held hostage by a directing/writing team that is taking your mind on a roller coaster to Hell.
Psychological horror is purposely not formulaic or about escaping a single monster.
Usually, the “monster” or the conflict of the film is escaping the madness that surrounds you, whether you’re being held hostage by a madman or if you feel yourself going mad. Psychological horror revels in influencing psychological states in the viewer.
Directors create feelings of high tension, paranoia, and confusion, leaving the viewer exhausted – but eager to finish the story. You’re eager to be released from the distressing atmosphere that has captivated your mind.
Psychological horror explores our emotional vulnerabilities and may even reveal buried parts of the human psyche that we work so hard to repress.
With that said, here are 15 psychological horror films to watch on streaming this month to better understand this fascinating and, unfortunately, rare genre.
15. John and the Hole (2021)
John and the Hole is a slow, cautious dip into the deep pool of psychological horror movies. It’s not too intense but slowly unravels a disturbed plot of epic family dysfunction.
It’s ideal for beginners who aren’t interested in gore but in Hitchcockian thrills from a movie classic.
Bonus points for starring Michael C. Hall (Dexter), who gets to play the victim instead of the perpetrator for a change.
Watch John and the Hole Online
14. The Birds (1963)
Speaking of Hitchcock, while Psycho was one of psychological horror’s first blockbusters, The Birds is even better on a second viewing. It’s not just man vs. crazy man conflict — it’s man vs. forces of nature.
Hitchcock treats flocks of birds as a paranormal menace, perhaps reminding us how fragile we are as a species if you’re going just by numbers.
The fact that the mystery of why birds are attacking humans is never fully explained only makes it a prime example of psychological horror.
Watch The Birds Online
13. Mother! (2017)
Darren Aronofsky may be the loudmouth “bro” of psychological horror. Requiem for a Dream bashes you over the head with assaulting images, like a demonic afterschool special about the dangers of drugs.
Black Swan was also a trippy vision of beauty gone awry. But Mother! is his most ambitious and polarizing project to date.
Darren gets biblical with a surreal and allegorical film about a couple living in a Victorian mansion who open their home to a stranger — and all the chaos that follows.
I watched the film with a crowd of moviegoers expecting a suspense thriller. You can imagine their horror and frustration when the film gave them the exact opposite of a believable story.
Watch Mother! Online
12. Blue Velvet (1986)
One can’t create a list of great psychological horror films without giving one shoutout to David Lynch, the impenetrable genius who hates explaining his films – and apparently hates finishing most of his films, for that matter.
Mulholland Drive is an entire series recklessly crammed into a two-hour movie, while Eraserhead might as well be Lynch’s biopic. But he never surpassed Blue Velvet, deceptively his most linear film, which also makes no logical sense.
Blue Velvet, like all of Lynch’s films, is a dream. It’s a surreality that evokes visceral emotion and perhaps repressed feelings in the viewer. Lynch has admitted that his films come from his own phobias, experiences, and feelings.
Blue Velvet has no redemption or heroic plot line to latch onto. It simply assaults the viewer like a Rorschach painting designed to prick your conscience.
Watch Blue Velvet Online
11. Christine (2016)
Movies that do the unthinkable and attempt to empathize with a person slowly losing their sanity are hard to watch. Most mainstream movies follow a tragic villain who turns their wrath on society.
Movies like Christine, which follows a tragic protagonist who is only violent towards herself, are unnerving. The film follows real-life news anchor Christine Chubbuck hours before her 1974 suicide on live television.
It feels like watching an accident you see coming but are powerless to prevent. It’s a new kind of arthouse psychological horror, which mixes elements of shockumentaries and tearjerkers with the usual descent into madness.
The film was so revolutionary it inspired a much more successful trauma flicks to come…
Watch Christine Online
10. Joker (2019)
Someday we’ll forget the debacle of Joker: Folie à Deux, and remember that the original Todd Phillips’ film was a psychological horror masterpiece.
The iconic film delved into incel culture and zillennial counterculture, (safely explored through the lens of a 1981 DC alternate universe.
Joaquin Phoenix explores the perspective of a domestic terrorist who, in his own mind, has every reason to snap and rebel against what he sees as a corrupt and heartless society.
With so many Oscar-winning Joker performances, isn’t it a shame Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson weren’t also recognized?
Watch Joker Online
9. Audition (1999)
I avoided Audition for the longest time, as I tend to postpone slasher movies full of mindless gore. But Audition, while disturbing to watch, is a clever hybrid between psychological horror and adrenaline-pumping thriller.
Director Takashi Miike’s horror film has some element of catch-and-release. It tells the story of a middle-aged widower who meets a “model” through a fake casting call audition who turns out to be a violent psychopath.
It seems like one of those situations where the guy’s kind of asking for trouble, doesn’t it? Amazingly, the film was both called feminist and misogynistic upon its initial release because of the psychological and physical damage we’re forced to witness.
Like many Japanese horror films, Audition’s horror comes from an intuitive place, a parapraxis of our worst nightmares where we always pay dearly for our mistakes.
Watch Audition Online
8. The Lighthouse (2019)
Seeing formula horror films like Oddity or Caveat might scare you off the idea of visiting an isolated island. Why, of course, terrible monsters and insane murderers might lurk there.
But with a film like The Lighthouse, the horror comes from swallowing your fears and actually going on an insane adventure on an isolated island with a possibly mad sailor.
Experience for yourself the backbreaking work of a lighthouse keeper, the autophobic atmosphere, the starvation, the hallucinations, and the agony of being in close quarters with someone you can’t trust.
The film feels like a terrible hallucination thanks to the Academy-Award-nominated cinematography by Jarin Blaschke and veteran horror movie actors Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, who take turns having Shakespearean meltdowns.
Watch The Lighthouse Online
7. The House That Jack Built (2018)
Director Lars von Trier is one-half auteur, one-half internet troll, who seems to enjoy getting under your skin. Particularly if you’re American and believe cinema should be enjoyable.
His films are simulated trauma, with Dogville being his most accessible and Anti-Christ being his most unhinged. But The House That Jack Built is Lars at his nihilistic worst. Perhaps it’s no coincidence he released this film in the same decade as our true crime podcast obsessions began.
He unromanticizes America’s love affair with violence and antisocial behavior by exploring the mind of a serial killer who considers his crimes works of art. But rather than emphasizing gore or chase sequences, he fills the two-hour film with philosophical discussions and some dark comedy.
It’s the type of film that’s even more disturbing than Terrifier (which has gone strangely mainstream lately) because it has no rules, no comfort zones, and no comfortable formula to stick to.
Watch The House That Jack Built Online
6. Late Night with the Devil (2024)
Though Late Night with the Devil is set in the 1970s and staged as one of those “Lost Media” YouTube urban legends, its manic energy is distinctively 1990s.
Talk show host Jack Delroy, your basic Ed Sullivan or Jay Leno clone (played by creepy-looking David Dastmalchian), decides to toy with evil in a shameless ratings stunt for his show Night Owls.
He invites psychics, conjurers, and a cult survivor on his show, all the while Jack tells Carson-esque jokes, lightening the mood.
As the night proceeds from strange to downright horrifying, we see Jack slowly become unraveled by the chaos he has unleashed.
What’s most satisfying about this psychological horror parody is how they use the character Carmichael Haig, aka Carmichael the Conjurer, as a “paranormal foil.” Carmichael is a skeptic who pokes holes in all the supposedly paranormal events, reminding the audience that everything has an explanation.
The foil character allows the movie to increase and decrease tension throughout the two hours, keeping things unpredictable and with terror on a slow boil. Inevitably, Carmichael sees more than he bargained for, but by then, it’s too late.
Talk show host Jack Delroy has one more unexpected guest to entertain before the night ends — and it’s too “hot” for primetime.
Watch Late Night With the Devil Online
5. Possession (1981)
Possession is probably the worst horror movie to watch if you enjoy movies like The Exorcist, The Omen, The Conjuring, or other thrillers about demonic possession.
It’s not about that. In fact, you may scratch your head, wondering exactly what it was about by the time the credits mercifully roll. On the surface, the film begins with a man who notices his wife is acting strangely right after asking for a divorce.
But Possession, directed by Andrzej Żuławski and starring a young Sam Neil, is a tour-de-force madhouse exploring themes of insanity and irrationality. This gonzo meditation on personal congruity makes director David O. Russell seem slow-paced in comparison.
Watching this movie will make you feel insane or as if you’ve been locked in a trance for two hours and are just now waking up to a world that makes sense again.
Watch Possession Online
4. V/H/S Series (2012-2024)
It may seem unfair to choose the V/H/S series — a mainstream horror film franchise — to single out among so many other B-flicks.
But what I’ve always found fascinating about V/H/S is that it follows no real blueprint on how to make a monster movie. It’s an anthology series within a movie that doesn’t explore characters or even familiar plots.
Its premise is intentionally abstract and usually inexplicable. Using the “found footage” style of filmmaking, the viewer is forced to watch atrocities and horrific vignettes that defy explanation.
No narrator is needed, and no story is ever resolved beyond the big “snuff” finale you’re unfortunate enough to see.
Over the years, the series has explored a variety of psychological terror scenarios, from alien kidnappings to Greek Gods in the flesh to crazy cults performing supernatural feats.
With V/H/S Beyond (2024), we get more mad shenanigans, continuing the series’ grotesque sense of humor, from skydiving mishaps with UFOs to giant birds attacking police officers.
No one is safe here, and the more nonsensical the plot, the more we shriek. See this one on Shudder right away and binge-watch more found footage scares than you can handle.
Watch V/H/S Beyond Online
3. X, Pearl, and Maxxxine (2024)
Ti West’s multi-generational horror trilogy is a bizarre experiment, following actor Mia Goth playing multiple roles and, in some cases, the same character as different ages. It’s remarkable how easily each film leads into the next one, whether by flashback or jumping forward.
However, the real terror is watching Mia Goth’s performance as an unhinged woman who is so desperate for love that she becomes a menace to everyone she encounters.
Her performance peaks in the second installment, “Pearl” (which is actually the first storyline in the trilogy), where she progresses from naive Texas farm girl to full-blown psychopath with hardly a change in tone.
Her performance as Pearl has transcended the slasher genre by presenting an unconventional and disarming villain. She’s not just mad in the sense that she could kill you. She took the time to make out with a scarecrow first because she’s utterly delusional, and her violent psychosis is just a symptom.
It takes some effort to watch the trilogy since no service has all three movies. But it’s worth the investment to see one of the modern era’s best psychological horror movies.
Watch X Online
2. Girly (1970)
Girly (sometimes known as Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly) is a 1970 psychological horror and dark comedy that very few moviegoers have heard of — probably because the film is just plain nuts.
Based on a two-act play called “Happy Family,” Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly tell the story of an insane family who lives in a secluded manor house in England. What better way to amuse themselves than by forcing visitors to play a violent role-playing game that inevitably ends in death?
This is one of the best examples of psychological horror in that the audience is held hostage along with the protagonist character, who can’t seem to talk his way out of danger. The family takes on the antagonist role and torments the protagonist slowly, getting inside his mind before finishing him off.
The movie may well have started the genre of “dangerous families” terrorizing unsuspecting visitors.
What’s even more strange, however, is the rumor that Girly (as it’s known in the United States) influenced Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. There is a parallel axe-swinging scene that ends with the character hacking through the door panel and exposing his face to the victim.
Stanley had over ten years to take inspiration from this disturbing film and create his own “Here’s Johnny!” interpretation.
I’m glad you brought up Kubrick, by the way, because we do have to talk about Kubrick…
Watch Girly Online
1. The Shining (1980)
Before Stanley Kubrick began work on The Shining, he decided he wanted to make a Stanley Kubrick film that happened to be in the horror genre. After Barry Lyndon’s disappointment, he wanted to make a commercial movie that just happened to be artistic and avant-garde…
If you work through the layers, of course.
He auditioned numerous horror books, most of which he hated, until finally settling on a Stephen King novel about spousal abuse and going insane in a haunted hotel.
Of all the plausible conspiracy theories about The Shining that we’ve heard, here’s the most interesting one.
Kubrick suckered a young Stephen King into lending him his idea so that, as he always did, Kubrick could paint over it with his own literary allusions, Freudian terrors, and historical context.
Kubrick also made sure he had full rights to change the source material and that he could hire a screenwriter to pervert the original story.
Novelist Diane Johnson, who wasn’t excessively fond of King as a writer (“It’s not part of great literature…one has less scruples when destroying it: one is aware that a great work of art is not being destroyed”) rewrote the film to appease Kubrick’s violent minotaur sensibility.
The result is a film that alludes to everything while confirming nothing. It’s a movie made to provoke discussion with purposely chosen symbology and yet with a stubbornly literal plotline.
What can’t be denied is Kubrick’s love affair with haunted cinematography.
He was a metaphysical Spielberg, a technician behind the camera but one who also knew how to unnerve his audience with sight gags, strange sound fluctuations, and erratic storyboarding.
The Shining wasn’t focused enough to be a true horror thriller, but it was an exercise in bringing an abstract feeling of dread to life. He wanted his audience to feel what it was like to see a ghost in real life or to have a premonition of something terrible happening and see it come true.
Perhaps he understood that in psychological horror, the scariest part is what you don’t see and what is not explained. Our confusion adds to the feeling of terror because we’re not familiar with the threat – only that it’s no longer safe.
So, he filled this labyrinthine world with hundreds of riddles, superstitions, and links to the past.
He never explained it because he wanted our paranoia about the film to grow over time. What was unsaid was the creepiest part — what you felt was more important than the psychoanalysis.
The opposite of psychological horror is relief — waking up from a bad dream. Kubrick’s films are about staying in a dream that never ends and seeing horrific things in the dark that may not even be there.
Kubrick didn’t say much about the explanation of his films, but he did speak about The Shining’s themes and what he imagined psychological horror to be.
“There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality. There’s an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.”
Watch The Shining Online
What do you think? What are the best psychological horror films you’ve ever seen?