TEN OF THE WEIRDEST DARK FANTASY FILMS OF THE 2010s 

Holy Motors

Ever since the birth of cinema in the early Twentieth Century there has been a split between the two opposite forms of filmmaking: realism and fantasy. Whereas the Lumière brothers’ early pioneering work used real-life footage as the backdrop to their early documentary shorts, in A Trip to the Moon, the illusionist George Méliès was creating the movies’ first special effects and initiating the science fiction genre. Later, as the influence of Hollywood’s golden age began to wane, the brief New Hollywood era of the 1970s ushered in a more uncompromising style of filmmaking, drawing upon the influence of European cinema, particularly the French Nouvelle Vague and an engagement with a more extreme subject matter.  

 

The later decades of the century saw a blossoming of more provocative and twisted fantasy films with filmmakers gaining the confidence to construct weird narratives, engage with themes and employ techniques which were once the preserve of the avant-garde “arthouse” cinema. As audiences have become more receptive, these strange and unsettling fantasies have entered the mainstream, representing a cinema without borders, limited only by the imagination of the filmmakers.  

 

Fantasy, science fiction and horror have proven to be incredibly adaptable genres, capable of exploring strange new worlds- both inner and outer. Not merely escapist, these films can create a sense of wonder at the mysteries of our existence and instil anxiety at the human condition. They can explore the dark recesses of our subconscious and through their drug-induced and trippy visuals make us question our perceived reality.  

 

So, turn on, tune in and freak out to the most mind-blowing, hallucinatory and downright weird movies of the previous decade.  

 

1. Berberian Sound Studio (UK: Peter Strickland, 2012) 

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   Peter Strickland's perplexing Berberian Sound Studio

   
   
   

Peter Strickland’s second feature pays homage to the lurid blood and sex-fuelled giallo cinema made in Italy in the 1970s. The film deals with the mental disintegration of Gilderoy (Toby Jones), an introverted film sound engineer who has travelled to Italy to work on a sadistic horror film, The Equestrian Vortex. Berberian Sound Studio opens with the opening credits to the exploitational shocker and is an ingenious way of introducing its film-within-a-film concept. The remainder of The Equestrian Vortex is related through snatches of narrative and through the grisly sound production that Gilderoy recreates in the claustrophobic recording studio. 

 

Gilderoy gets to work overdubbing the dialogue and adopting a variety of effects to recreate the sound of murder and mutilation. A watermelon is hurled to the studio floor to replicate the sound of someone throwing themselves to their death and radishes are torn apart to echo the sound of a witch having her hair torn out. Most gruesome of all, sizzling oil in a saucepan becomes the aural representation of a red-hot poker being inserted into a nun’s vagina.  

 

As the narrative of The Equestrian Vortex and the plot of Berberian Sound Studio begin to overlap, reality and fiction become increasingly blurred. Desensitized by the violence on the screen, the shy and well-mannered sound engineer turns bully, tormenting one of the actresses by cranking up the volume in the headphones at one point to elicit a better performance.  The use of subjective close-ups of Gilderoy place the audience’s perceptions within his paranoid state of mind whilst outside the cramped soundstage, the film studio’s maze of whitewashed office corridors begins to resemble a mental institution with the sounds of The Equestrian Vortex’s tortured screams echoing through the walls. 

 

Is Gilderoy’s nightmare the result of a nervous breakdown or are more sinister and perhaps even supernatural forces at work? The unsettlingly ambiguous Berberian Sound Studio offers no easy answers but the film’s power lies within its dark and disturbing perplexities.  

 

2. Birdman (US: Alejandro G. Iñarritu, 2014) 

The remarkable opening shot of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Oscar winning comedy has the film’s central protagonist, Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), elevating cross-legged in his Broadway theatre dressing room. We soon discover that Thomson is a faded actor whose career has taken a nosedive after he quit starring in the lucrative Birdman movie superhero franchise. Seeking artistic recognition, he has taken up more serious roles and is making a last-gasp effort at respectability by staking everything on an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story, written, directed and starring Thomson in the leading role.  

 

The pressure of staging the production leads to Thomson doubting his ability and becoming increasingly depressed.  Imagining he has telekinetic powers, Thomson is constantly plagued by his nemesis, the foul-mouthed and cynical Birdman, who regularly appears throughout the film in his mask and costume, insulting the actor and attempting to get him to reprise his role as the superhero. The Riggan/Birdman split encapsulates the debate between realism and fantasy in the cinema. It is a dramatic comment on the supposed superiority of realism as opposed to the escapist and empty superhero fantasies, an argument which has come to the fore following the remarks made by Martin Scorsese in 2019 about how he doesn’t consider superhero movies to be “real cinema”.  

 

Michael Keaton is haunted by his nemesis in Birdman.

Boldly filmed and edited to appear as though the film consists of one continuous take, Birdman uses magic realism to explore the damaged psychology of the film’s main character. An acerbic comment upon the nature of art, Hollywood and the theatre.  

 

3. The Endless (US: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, 2013) 

The 3rd film from the low-budget filmmaking partnership of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead inhabits the same mystical terrain of their debut feature, Resolution, and can be seen as a loose sequel to that film. Benson and Moorhead play two brothers who have escaped the clutches of Camp Arcadia, a Southern Californian UFO cult on which they were raised. When the brothers receive a strange and prophetic video from the cult, they return to Arcadia aiming to seek closure on what was a traumatic period of their lives. Planning to stay for one night, their visit is lengthened as they rekindle relationships with the commune members and are drawn into the mysteries surrounding the camp. Witnessing a series of unexplainable phenomenon, the brothers begin to believe that maybe there is some supernatural force at Arcadia which is controlling their destinies. 

 

The Endless is an imaginatively constructed generic mash-up which weaves sci-fi and horror elements into its sibling drama. The fantasy elements of the film are grounded in a documentary verité style of filmmaking which complements the naturalism of the performances. The CGI effects are unobtrusive as the film relies on atmosphere and mood to invoke a genuine sense of unease. 

 

With The Endless, Benson and Moorhead prove that an original and well-executed concept can counter the restraints of a low-budget. A twist on Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return as imagined by H.P. Lovecraft and David Lynch, The Endless is a genre-bending, time-warping, head-trip of a movie that instils a palpable sense of existential dread.  

 

4. A Field in England (UK: Ben Wheatley, 2013) 

Opening during a battle in the English Civil War, A Field in England brings together four deserting soldiers who leave the front and decide to seek an alehouse to escape the horrors of the conflict. One of the deserters, Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), is an alchemist’s assistant and when they are joined by another magician, the Irishman, O’Neill (Michael Smiley), a brutal battle of wills commences. O’Neill eventually gains the upper hand in a simple but effectively harrowing sequence when he leads Whitehead into a tent. We are unaware of what horrors (Magic? Torture?) have occurred as the camera remains outside the tent, but the slow and lingering close-up shot of Whitehead’s tormented face as he exits leaves no doubt that something diabolical has occurred. With the rest of the group under his malevolent control, O Neill puts his subordinates to work attempting to locate some hidden treasure and an increasingly violent struggle ensues as they attempt to wrestle themselves free from his influence. 

 

The world turned upside down in Ben Wheatley's hallucinatory A Field in England. 

Located within a single field and shot entirely in black and white, the film is director Ben Wheatley’s stab at period drama, albeit shorn of much of its historical context. The film takes you on a “trip” to a revolutionary era of British history and its vivid depiction of the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms is more concerned with 17th century superstition and drug-use than the politics of the era.  A pagan horror film in the mould of The Wicker Man, The Witchfinder General or The Blood on Satan’s Claw, A Field in England deals with the radical period of the country’s history when the “world turned upside down” as filtered through the psychedelic vision of its director.  Alongside his wife and writing partner, Amy Jump, Wheatley creates an original and disconcerting piece of work which, like the rest of his films to date, subverts audience expectations and defies categorisation. 

 

5. Holy Motors (FRA/GER: Leos Carax, 2012) 

Leos Carax’s Holy Motors is arguably the most unrelentingly bonkers film of the 2010s. Starring Denis Lavant in a physically demanding role as Mr Oscar, whose daily work routine for the company, Holy Motors, involves him being driven around Paris in a white limousine to a number of “appointments” where he dresses-up and inhabits a number of different personalities. These roles include a beggar woman, a mischievous leprechaun-type malcontent, a father picking up his teenage daughter from a party, a gangster, a murderer and a dying old man. In one scene he wears a motion-capture suit and has a ninja battle in a virtual reality studio. In the eighth sequence he meets another Holy Motors employee, played by Kylie Minogue. The couple have not seen each other for twenty years and it is suggested that they had a relationship together. As they catch up on old times, Kylie breaks into a song, ‘Who Were We?’ before Mr Oscar leaves for his final appointment of the day which involves him going back home to his family.  

 

The series of vignettes contained within Holy Motors are never explained and the film’s ambiguity and episodic narrative could be regarded as a comment upon how we all inhabit roles, like actors in a drama, struggling to find identity and meaning in our lives. Alternatively, the episodes could be seen as a series of individual films created without a camera. The film opens with a character called “The Sleeper” in the script who opens a secret door in the wall of his bedroom at night and wanders down a dark corridor until he finds a cinema, a scene which recalls elements of David Lynch’s Lost Highway.   

 

Featuring talking cars, chimpanzees and an entirely disconnected musical interlude where Mr Oscar plays accordion with a group of musicians in a church, the surreal Holy Motors may be a little too way-out for some. Whether it is a masterful comment on the human condition or arty pretentiousness is for you to decide.  

 

6. Melancholia (DEN/SWE/FRA/GER/ITA: Lars von Trier, 2011) 

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   Provocateur Lars von Trier's Melancholia. 

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Lars von Trier could justifiably lay claim to be the most eminent provocateur working in film today and Melancholia is arguably the director’s most accessible and uplifting film of his career which, considering it forms part of his depression trilogy alongside Antichrist and Nymphomaniac and deals with the end of the world, only serves to illustrate the un-relentlessly bleak nature of the rest of the director’s oeuvre.  

 

Blending realism with sci-fi, Melancholia is split into two sections and concerns the relationship between two sisters, Justine and Claire, played by Kirsten Dunst and von Trier regular Charlotte Gainsbourg respectively. The first section deals with the marriage celebrations of Justine and her inability to go through with the marriage due to her debilitating depression. This is the more realistic section of the film, comparable to Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma ‘95 movie, Festen. The second half of the film concerns Justine’s breakdown and her convalescence which coincides with news that a newly-discovered planet named Melancholia has entered Earth’s orbit and the possibility of a collision is threatening life on our planet.  

 

Dunst received the best actress at Cannes for her performance and von Trier had been a favourite of Cannes until an ill-advised remark about Adolph Hitler made him persona non grata at the festival. There is a sense of the prankster with von Trier and his statement sums up the infuriating nature of the man and his work; a brilliant filmmaker whose films can delight, appal and exasperate in equal measure.  

 

7. Midsommar (US/SWE: Ari Aster, 2019) 

The Walker Brothers sang that “breaking up is so very hard to do” but Ari Aster throws a family tragedy, pagan sex and death rituals and psychotropic herbal hallucinations into the equation in his break-up sophomore horror film. The film’s central character, Dani, brilliantly played by Florence Pugh, together with her non-committal boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and a group of college friends travel to Hälsingland, a remote region of Sweden, to join a pagan cult’s midsummer celebrations. Fuelled by mind-altering substances, the festivities become increasingly bizarre and violent as Dani and Christian’s relationship begins to fall apart.  

 

Like Aster’s acclaimed debut, Hereditary, Midsommar deals with loss and grief but whereas his former film was a creepy tale of possession and demonic worship, set in darkness and shadows, Midsommar’s terror occurs in bright sunlight; its luminous imagery and Pawel Pogorzelski’s colour saturated cinematography adding a visual intensity to the macabre pastoral. With touches of Bergman and Tarkovsky, and heavily indebted to The Wicker Man and, in its hysterically OTT final act, owing a debt to Ken Russell’s The Devils, Midsommar is a delirious shocker which like A Field in England and Robert Eggers’ The Witch, marked a resurgence in the folk-horror sub-genre.  

   

Ari Aster's Midsommar

The film was rightly lauded by the director Jordan Peele (Get Out; Us) who praised Aster’s vision for “containing the most atrociously disturbing imagery I’ve ever seen on film.” Whether the horrors are the product of Dani’s grief is never fully resolved by the film, but Midsommar’s devastating final shot should make the issue a little clearer.  

 

8. Mother! (US: Darren Aronofsky, 2017) 

Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence are a married couple living in a ramshackle house in the heart of an idyllic rural setting. He is a poet struggling with writer’s block and she is the attentive wife, content with looking after her husband and renovating the house in an attempt to create a domestic paradise for him to work in. With the arrival of a stranger (Ed Harris) at the home, tensions begin to emerge in the couple’s relationship and these are exacerbated by the arrival of Harris’ wife, a loquacious busybody played by Michelle Pfeiffer. With Lawrence aware of a strange foetal-like organism with a beating heart which seems to dwell in the house walls, the film starts out as a combination of marital study and psychological thriller, until the generic terrain of the film seismically shifts to become a home invasion horror before going hyper-apocalyptic in its freakishly visceral and deranged final act. 

 

The apocalypse arrives once Bardem has created his poetic masterpiece and hordes of press and fans come to the house to meet the author. As the poet’s magnus-opus takes on a religious significance, becoming the source of a new-age cult, the house becomes a metaphor for humanity’s destructive impulse. Like Darren Aronofsky’s previous film, Noah, Mother! is a biblical allegory, veering spectacularly into exploitational horror. Or, it could also be seen as a comment on the director’s creative process, a discourse on the God-like imagination of the auteur. Despite its outlandish plot, there is a comic undercurrent to the mayhem, as if Aronofsky is inviting us to laugh at the sheer audacity of it all. A film with huge ambition and a bellicose scream of rage at the state of the world and the destruction of the environment, Mother! provides a pure shot of adrenaline.  

 

9. The Neon Demon (US: Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016) 

Nicolas Winding Refn’s films have a knack of dividing critics and cinema-goers. When it was screened at Cannes, The Neon Demon simultaneously received boos and cheers and Refn, like fellow provocateurs von Trier, Aronofsky and Gaspar Noé, is a director whose whole purpose seems intent to provoke extreme reactions.  

 

The Neon Demon stars Elle Fanning as Jesse, a young, ambitious model who finds work at a top Los Angeles modelling agency, soon becoming the darling of top photographer Jack McCarther (Desmond Harrington). At one point in the film the photographer declares that “Beauty isn’t everything; it’s the only thing”, highlighting the narcissism and shallowness of the industry. As Jesse’s career takes off, she is transformed from the sweet and virginal naïf we see at the film’s outset, who is intimidated by the contemptuous and jealous attitude of the other models, into an assured egotist. Jesse proves more than a match for her rivals but her success comes at the price of a damaged mental state.  

 

Referencing familiar horror themes of vampirism, cannibalism and the occult and, in its most notorious scene, a case of lesbian necrophilia, The Neon Demon is a surreal and unsettling psychological study and exposé of the fashion industry that comes across like The Devil Wears Prada with illicit sex and violence.  

 

The Neon Demon is a stylish and perverse work of art, its vivid use of colour, particularly vibrant blues and reds, recall the horror of Dario Argento and a scene with hands emerging from the walls is an obvious nod to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. For a film that deals with the theme of beauty and taking high-fashion as its central subject, there is copious amounts of blood-soaked nubile flesh on display which undoubtedly raises the issue of the male gaze in cinema. The Neon Demon’s grotesque conclusion takes the gaze, ingests it and throws it back up.  

 

10. Under the Skin (UK/SWITZ: (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) 

Scarlett Johansson plays the woman who fell to Earth, trawling the streets of Glasgow and using her sexual allure to entice male victims back to her home. Once inside the derelict building and seemingly placed under the alien’s erotic spell, they are led into a portal to the alien’s planet, an endless and otherworldly black space, where they wander helplessly into a dark and shiny black sludge. In one brilliantly created sequence, the camera takes us below the surface of the liquid and we see the how the victims are finally destroyed, their bodies hideously crumpled like tissue paper.  

 

Scarlett Johansson is the woman who fell to earth in the haunting Under the Skin

Johansson gives an extraordinary performance, superbly conveying the alien’s child-like wonder at her strange environment and the frantic bustle of Glasgow’s streets. Fascinated by the female form she inhabits, she stares in bewilderment at herself in the mirror. When she pricks her finger on a rose, she is engrossed at the sight of blood and at one point is enraptured by the discovery of an ant.  Seen through the curious eyes of a visitor from another planet, the film makes the familiar seem strange and we begin to see ourselves as alien.  

 

There is a haunting poetry at work within the Under the Skin resulting from its striking cinematography its discordant and innovative sound design (Johnnie Burn) and eerie score by Mica Levi. The covert method of filmmaking which involved sections of the film being shot by hidden cameras on the streets, shopping precincts and nightclubs of Glasgow give the film a documentary authenticity which serve to make the fantasy elements in the film even more disturbing. The imagery of Jonathan Glazer’s deeply affecting and enigmatic sci-fi lingers in the mind long after the closing credits have finished.