Decades ago, most horror movies were intended for grown-ups. Movies like 1973’s The Exorcist and 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby considered far too terrifying and too sophisticated for younger audiences. The Exorcist was not a gory exploitation movie by any stretch, but a terrifying look into what frightens an adult woman (seeing her child decay in the hands of Heaven-knows-what), and the despair that flagging faith can bring. Rosemary’s Baby is about the fear a not-all-that-young couple goes through when trying to conceive a child. These are films that are about fear, loss, family, faith, and other concerns that your average teenager may not be able to relate to.
Thanks to a solid 15 years or so of slasher movies, however, horror movies soon moved widely into the purview of teen audiences. Slasher movies – a genre which has its own crown jewels as well as its turkeys – were more about the immediate, visceral fear of being stalked by a killer with a knife. These were not earnest examinations of adult fears like loss of family, loss of a job, the crumbling of a friendship, losing one’s identity. They were playful death fantasies.
Check Out: The 50 Scariest Movies of All Time
The most powerful horror movies are, one might agree, the ones that deal with sophisticated adult fears. It’s actually easy to shake off the fright one encounters in slasher movies, because we so rarely find ourselves in a position where we have to outrun a zombie with a machete. This is a simple, sensual fear masked in fantasy. The horror movies that really seek to rattle, to unnerve, to unravel the psyche, are the ones that look at adult life, look at what’s valuable to adults, and then proceed to destroy it. Horror movies for adults are not about blood or gore, they are about unmasking anxiety. And not necessarily exorcizing it.
CraveOnline has delved through the pits of despair and produced the following list of excellent – and emotionally harrowing – horror movies for adults.
A note to teens: You’ll understand these fears someday.
Slideshow: 15 Horror Movies for Adults
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
Horror Movies for Adults
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Caché (2005)
Michael Haneke is not interested in what comforts us. He is interested in he slow, inexorable creep we go make being “normal” people in a “normal” society to being emotionally domineering, fascistic, and often violent creatures. His slow-moving 2005 film Caché is a horror movie about being watched. A wealthy man finds someone is filming him, and he must figure out why. In the process, however, we're given a dark essay about our own sense of privacy. If we've lived long enough, we've no doubt accumulated skeletons in our closets. The fear comes from not necessarily exposure of said skeletons, but that someone could merely know that you might have them.
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Changing Lanes (2002)
An underrated film to be sure, Roger Michell's Changing Lanes banks on fears that seem banal when you are young: the fear of being late for an important court appearance, the fear of losing your job, and the fear of being poor, and the fear of being able to control the red tape you're going to be wrapped in. Ben Affleck plays a lawyer who accidentally strands Samuel L. Jackson on the road following a car tussle. Jackson tracks down Affleck partly for revenge, but partly to make him understand that being late can have consequences.
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Pretty Much all of Ingmar Bergman's Career (1946 – 2003)
Between the existentialist miasma of Persona, the inter-family hatred of Cries & Whispers, the silence of God in Winter Light, the madness of Hour of the Wolf, the wartime despair of Shame, the crumbling marriage of Scenes from a Marriage, the bleak revenge of The Virgin Spring, and the famed games played with Death in The Seventh Seal, no one filmmaker could delve into the perhaps-futile existentialist search for structure, meaning, and love in a world that seems not to care better than filmmaking grandmaster Ingmar Bergman. Almost a full half of his cinematic body is devoted to the emotional entropy one may discover once youthful optimism slips unnoticed out of your life.
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Husbands and Wives (1992)
It's been said that marriage is hard to make into a movie. Love stories tend to have a single dramatic incident; the beginning of a marriage, leading to “happily ever after.” Actual marraige, however, is constant, and does not have a dramatic climax. Woody Allen's 1992 film looks at two married couples that are in various stages of unhappiness. One is “amicably” separating, and the other, seeing that, begins to realize they may be living in a bubble of complacency. Keeping a marriage alert and alive is a full time job for grown-ups, and facing how tiring that job may be can be terrifying.
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Antichrist (2009)
No filmmaker appears to be more cynical about the human condition than Denmark's Lars Von Trier. Bitter and confrontational, Von Trier has made a career of depicting the failings and the foolishness of human decency and compassion. His most harrowing film is 2009's Antichrist, a film about a couple who loses a child, and attempts to use modern psychology to cure themselves of their mounting despair. This is not a film about their dissipating relationship, though. This is a film about how psychiatry cannot undo centuries of female abuse, how couples can torture one another, and a form of sexual violence that cannot be shaken off.
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American Psycho (2000)
Although Mary Harron's American Psycho contains visual similarities to slasher movies – on-screen kills, chainsaws, blood, gleeful death – one can easily see that this is a film more about business and the male mind than it is about mayhem. Moving into the world of high-powered business is, according to this wicked satire, the most morally bankrupt thing a person can do. Also that mere vanity – male vanity in particular – robs from your character. American Psycho is about how easily the moral disintegration of the male mind can occur, merely through ego and appetite.
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Suspicion (1941)
Is a good marriage really too good to be true? In Alfred Hitchcock's cynical film Suspicion, it certainly is. The shy Joan Fontaine marries a charming and rich Cary Grant, only to learn that she has made one of the biggest mistakes of her life: she married the wrong man. Not only that, he may be trying to harm her. This is a film of a previous era, so it taps into a somewhat old fear, but one that I think we all face as adults: what does it say about our judgment if we admit that we hitched ourselves to someone who doesn't love us? Who may even want to kill us? It's a potboiler plot that looks at the dangers of marriage.
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Irreversible (2002)
Gaspar Noé inverts the famous axiom “time heals all wounds” with his gut-wrenching revenge tale Irreversible. Time destroys everything. The story is simple. A happy couple goes out to a party looking for a good time. She is then brutally raped. As revenge, he murders the wrong man. The end. Only the film is told in reverse order, so we know that there will be no redemption. This is a film about how the mere passage of time can end the things dearest to you. Not necessarily through death, but just because they cannot stay in the present. Irreversible is, like many films on this list, about emotional decay. And that's something only grown-ups can fully appreciate.
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Revolutionary Road (2008)
Here's a tip: Don't watch Revolutionary Road within one year of getting married in either direction. The placid happily-ever-after of 1950s American marriage gives way to a seething pit of suburban resentment and outright hate in Sam Mendes' oily, hopeless movie. No other movie makes marriage look more like a prison than in Revolutionary Road, eventually giving way to sexual domination, emotional destruction, and slaughter. Family is a cuss word, and stability a damnation.
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Hard Candy (2005)
Hard Candy is ostensibly a two-person morality play about the relationship between a feisty young girl (Ellen Page) and a would-be sexual predator (Patrick Wilson) who might easily be on the prowl. The set-up might have you instantly sympathetic with the girl being targeted, but Hard Candy manages to subvert expectations, turning her into such a monster that the pedophile becomes a sympathetic character. This is a film, then, with a sympathetic pedophile at its center, is about the fear of being found out. Of having your extensive, adult crimes ripped open for the world to see. Fitting, then, that it came out the same year as Caché.
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Your Friends & Neighbors (1998)
Love becomes indifference, indifference becomes resentment, resentment becomes hate, hate become cruelty. Also love and sex are kind of the same thing. And the cycle is complete. Filmmaker Neil LaBute has been exploding placid relationships for years, and his most damning film is Your Friends & Neighbors, a film that treats infidelity like vengeful combat, rape like romance, and romance like rape. Only couples that live together as long as the ones in this movie can hate each other that much. Only in this film, they are not content to merely hate. They have to damn, humiliate, and damage.
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5x2 (2004)
Five years from beginning to end. Like Irreversible, François Ozon's 5x2 is told in reverse order. Only this time we get to see the end of a relationship creep back to its more romantic – but perhaps misguided – beginning. Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi plays the wife and Stéphane Freiss plays the husband. At the film's outset we see hate sex, cheating, and indifference. Where did it come from? It turns out their relationship was borne of infidelity and resentment. The instability of a second marriage.
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Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
In the late 1970s, divorce rates in America began to skyrocket. In 1979, filmmaker Robert Benton put one case on film. Kramer vs. Kramer is about the dull, legal logistics of divorce, from child custody to what forms need to be signed. It's all very dry, and yet it's all emotionally harrowing. A divorce, we see, is more than just a “splitting up.” It's actually a massive undertaking that takes hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, and large chunks of patience. Life goes to being unstable, fearful, unsure.
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Don't talk about our son, Martha. Mike Nichols' acidic, booze-soaked film is yet another one about inter-couple anguish, and was most certainly the forebear to Your Friends & Neighbors. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton play a married couple for whom the notion of love is risible and ancient. They openly use another, younger, more optimistic couple to make digs at one another, and to tempt into misery (“Want to play 'Hump the Hostess?'”). We eventually learn why these two hate one another so much, and it's an adult film so deep and real, it would make anyone who had gone through the same thing wince.
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Rabbit Hole (2010)
Little kids can mourn, of course, but kids don't know what it's like to lose a child. John Cameron Mitchell's 2010 drama is about what happens to Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart when they lose their son in a car accident. The former begins to establish a bizarre relationship with the driver who accidentally ran the kid down, and the latter retreats emotionally. This is a film about being adrift. About loss. Pain. Tragedy. And, yes, fear. It's all fear in this world.
