Horror movies are known for creating anxiety-provoking circumstances and observing characters react to them. Most works in the genre operate with a similar structure, where the setup is the introduction of the concept or the situation which will push the characters to the brink. The second act then follows that up by ramping up the stakes, often due to circumstances, and very commonly also due to bad decisions taken by the characters. The final act relieves tension, either through triumph or tragedy, and follows the maddening chaos to a conclusion.

Many horror movies have heroes who are secretly villains, and some of them aren’t intentionally villainous. So, the movies track their descent into madness as they try to grapple with the realization of what their actions have caused. This is why some movies where the protagonist is absolutely unhinged are horror films, because there’s no better genre to explore unhinged behavior as it drives someone to madness. Some of the scariest supernatural horror movies also provide the space for this, as characters lose their sanity from being haunted by supernatural beings and occurrences.

10

Raw (2016)

Directed By Julia Ducournau

Cannibalism has always been a fascinating subject to portray someone’s descent into madness. Until Guadagnino’s Bones & All, the genre was rarely ᴀssociated with romanticism, and most commonly explored people’s maddening efforts to survive attacks from cannibals or reconcile cannibalistic instincts in themselves. Ducournau’s debut solo directorial feature, Raw, falls in the latter category of a character grappling with her.

Garance Marillier’s protagonist comes from a vegan family. She attends the same vet school as her sister and is shocked to discover her sister’s eating meat there during the introductory hazing ritual at the school. She’s forced to consume meat herself in the same ritual. The film then depicts how she starts developing instinctual hunger pangs for human meat. The character loses her grasp on reality as these instincts threaten her interpersonal relationships because she becomes dangerous to people around her. It culminates in a climax that will leave viewers gasping in shock.

9

American Psycho (2000)

Directed By Mary Harron

Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman is one of the most unintentionally hilarious movie characters of all time. Through him, the film satirizes the kind of compeтιтion and toxic masculinity that exists in the hypermasculine world of investment banking. Bateman is obsessed with his appearance and his Sєxual prowess, along with the quality of his material possessions. He starts losing his grip on reality as his obsession grows into paranoia.

Patrick Bateman is willing to do whatever it takes to maintain and improve his quality of life, including murder. His belief in his superiority also drives him into a murderous rage at times because of his jealousy. Moreover, he enjoys killing Sєx workers and homeless people as well. However, as Bateman’s crimes start catching up to him, he starts getting confused between real and imagined, even leaving audiences guessing as to which events they’ve seen actually occurred and which Bateman dreamed up.

8

Bug (2006)

Directed By William Friedkin

He’s most famous for directing The Exorcist, one of the horror movies that will always be a classic. It is one of the most influential horror movies of all time, and forever changed the way religious horror was written and filmed. While The Exorcist dealt with the themes of religious paranoia, William Friedkin’s best horror film in the 21st Century, Bug, explores people’s paranoia about government surveillance in the age of rapidly advancing technology.

Ashley Judd plays the protagonist who starts a dysfunctional relationship with a stranger played by Michael Shannon. The man complains of aphids in their bed and starts becoming erratic with every pᴀssing day, even convincing her that there are bugs in their room everywhere, planted by the government to observe them. Egged on by his paranoid behavior, the protagonist loses her grasp on the boundary between real and imagined and is driven mad by the suspicion of bugs in her room and under her skin. The powerful performances can affect viewers because of how real they make the paranoia look.

7

Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

Directed By Adrian Lyne

An auteur of erotica, director Adrian Lyne is a well-known director of rewatchable R-rated movies from the 1980s and the 1990s. Sєxual depravity and dark romance can be found in nearly all of his films, barring one. In an uncharacteristic deviation from his usual style, Lyne directed a psychological thriller about the perils of war in 1990, which has influenced the visual design of movies, TV shows, and games dealing with similar subjects.

A Vietnam War vet, Jacob, is haunted by inexplicable and confusing visions that seep into his real life, warping his vision and his perception of life. His division had come under heavy fire during a deployment in Vietnam, and he keeps getting flashbacks of that experience, which he wakes up from, seeing weird visions of monstrosities everywhere. Jacob’s descent into madness is driven by paranoia and conspiracy theories as he tries to uncover the truth behind what happened to him during his war and stop his visions from recurring.

6

The Lighthouse (2019)

Directed By Robert Eggers

2019 was one of the best years in movie history, as the modern holy trinity of modern horror directors, comprising Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, and Ari Aster, came out with new horror films. Eggers’ The Lighthouse is a character study of two men in charge of a lighthouse. Played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, the two of them come from different generations and never stop clashing.

The shore that their lighthouse is located on is haunted by inexplicable occurrences, along with the appearance of mermaids. The characters start unraveling as they get agitated from their encounters with supernatural phenomena, which leads them to lose their trust in each other. Both characters’ behavior starts to become increasingly erratic, with one of them even killing a seagull with their bare hands in one of the most disturbing scenes of the movie.

5

Black Swan (2010)

Directed By Darren Aronofsky

Aronofsky is known for depicting the psychosis of his characters in depraved situations that explore harsh realities or the nature of human conditions. Even his drama films verge on becoming horror because he uses psychedelic and fearsome visuals to depict his characters’ experiences as they lose their grip on reality. The most famous of his films, and one that is most obviously a horror movie, is Black Swan.

It follows a ballerina, played by Natalie Portman, as she tries her best to keep up with the extreme demands of her performance. She clashes with a newcomer, played by Mila Kunis, who she believes is there to replace her if she slips up even once. The elements of the dance she’s performing start manifesting in her real life – even her body starts growing feathers. The body horror is used to explore the experience of pushing one’s body and mind to their limits in pursuit of perfection. Portman’s character has completely unraveled by the end of the film.

4

The Shining (1980)

Directed By Stanley Kubrick

It is one of the greatest horror movies in recent years that changed the genre forever, as is often the case with movies directed by maestro Stanley Kubrick. Among its other forms of legacy, though, Shelley Duvall’s performance, one of the hilarious horror movie moments supposed to be scary, persists as an extreme case of method acting. Her performance, despite extreme dedication and rumored emotional abuse by Kubrick, comes across as funny because she looks nervous and stressed, but exaggeratedly so.

The fictional location of the Overlook H๏τel is one of the most iconic locations in horror movie history. Writer Jack Torrance takes up a job as the winter caretaker there and moves there with his family. He’s informed that the previous caretaker killed his family before taking his own life. The truth to these presumed rumors starts making itself apparent after Jack starts experiencing violent outbursts after living in the H๏τel for a while. Torrance loses all semblance of his reserved past self as he descends into madness over the course of The Shining.

3

Pearl (2022)

Directed By Ti West

Mia Goth broke through in Hollywood for her dual role of Maxine and Pearl in Ti West’s retro slasher film X. Both her characters got their own movies to complete a trilogy. Maxxxine, one of Kevin Bacon’s horror movies, is a sequel and follows Maxine. Pearl is set during the youth of the тιтular character, who was an old woman in X.

In 1918, a young Pearl in her twenties, lives with her German immigrant parents in Texas. Her husband is away, serving in the war, and her strict mother prevents her from having a social life. Pearl is hellbent on being a movie star, and takes it personally when she fails at an audition. Even though she shows signs of lacking empathy from the very beginning, her descent into psychopathic madness, which drives her to kill both her parents and her best friend, comes out of nowhere. Pearl starts like a sinister melodrama and ends with a highly terrifying moment that is characteristic of horror cinema.

2

In the Mouth Of Madness (1994)

Directed By John Carpenter

At 13 films, the Halloween franchise is one of the longest-running horror movie franchises featuring an iconic villain, Michael Myers. It was created by John Carpenter, one of the most influential horror filmmakers of all time. While it’s still considerably famous, in comparison to some of his more popular works, In the Mouth of Madness feels like one of Carpenter’s most underrated movies. It informally concludes the Apocalypse trilogy after The Thing in 1982 and Prince of Darkness in 1987.

A Lovecraftian horror film that derives its тιтle from a novella by H. P. Lovecraft, In the Mouth of Madness is the quintessential descent-into-madness movie. Protagonist John Trent, played by Sam Neill, famous for Jurᴀssic Park, a movie adaptation written by its source’s author, is an insurance investigator. He gets ᴀssigned to a case he believes is a hoax, but soon discovers that the writer he’s investigating has somehow managed to make his horrifying imaginations manifest in reality. Trent gradually loses his mind, becomes murderous, and ends the film with hysterical laughter.

1

Perfect Blue (1997)

Directed By Satoshi Kon

If the experiences of the protagonist of Black Swan feels like one of the best instances of a character descending into madness, that’s because of Perfect Blue. Satoshi Kon’s Magnum Opus, the film follows a woman after she leaves her J-Pop group to pursue acting. She is stalked by an obsessive fan, and soon afterward, murders start happening. She starts losing her grip on reality as she undergoes a transformation she can’t understand.

Even though Aronofsky denies that it is an adaptation or remake of Perfect Blue, he has acknowledged that Black Swan bears resemblance to the anime film. Using the unreliable narrator device, the film explores the role of voyeurism, self-perception, and performance in the lives of celebrities and performing artists. Kon’s other celebrated works, Paprika, which influenced Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a sci-fi movie with an incredible ensemble cast, and Millennium Actress, also deal with similar themes, especially in the form of psychological horror.