The Weirdest Horror Movies You'll Ever Watch

Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) are romantically involved genetic engineers trying to splice human and animal genes together, but when their experiment is successful, they’re left with a strange, yet sentient creature growing up in their lab.

Elsa forms a bond with Dren, who they name after the lab where they work—the lab where their bosses have no idea about what they’ve created—and ultimately, they decide to take her to their shared home to raise her. You can imagine how that goes. 

What makes this movie stranger than ever is the psychosexual component of the plot. Dren matures at a rapid rate and discovers her sexuality while under the care of Elsa and Clive.

And because of the genetic material used to create her, she also can spontaneously change sex. It’s one of those movies with one of those scenes you’ll never, ever forget.

In this Norwegian film, twenty-something Sigrid finds the perfect man in Christian. He’s handsome, kind, smart, and wealthy. Really freaking wealthy.

Everything is a dream until she meets his dog, Frank. See, Frank isn’t your normal dog.

Frank is Christian’s best friend who chooses to live his life as a dog, under Christian’s care, in a big old, fluffy Dalmatian suit. Christian takes great care of Frank, and Frank seems happy.

It’s a different way of life, but it’s just the type of variety Sigrid has been craving. That is until one day when Frank takes off his mask. 

This is one of those movies where you see exactly what’s coming and it still manages to hit you like a freight train. 

An oldie, but a goodie, The Cell is a psychological horror that follows Dr. Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) into the mind of a serial murderer via a new virtual reality technology designed to communicate with coma patients. Our killer, Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio) injures himself mid-murder and falls into a coma, leaving a young woman waiting to be found and her life hanging in the balance. The only way to save her is to subject him to the cutting-edge treatment in which Dr. Deane will enter the virtual reality generated by his brain to search for clues. 

It’s a cool premise, but what really sets this one off is the surrealist visuals inside Carl Stargher’s dreamscape. There is no other movie out there that is equivalently strange on a visual level while still managing to have a compelling murder investigation at its core. 

This French body horror film is a wild ride—pun intended. Directed by Julia Ducournau, the force behind the iconic college cannibal movie Raw (2016), Titane tells the story of Alexia, a young woman who had a titanium plate installed in her skull after a car accident in her youth as she falls pregnant after having sex with a car. Oh yeah, you heard that right.

It turns out Alexia is attracted to vehicles ever since her accident and is also a murderer on the run from the law. To avoid capture, she tapes down her chest and growing belly and assumes the identity of a local boy who went missing a decade ago just to be taken in by his unsuspecting father. 

I promise—just trust me on this one. 

Grieving the loss of their child, when Maria (Noomi Rapace) and her husband find a pregnant sheep on their Icelandic farm has given birth to a human-sheep hybrid, they decide to take the baby from her mother and raise her as their own.

This one is similar to Splice in some ways, but consider it the folkish, Midsommar-vibes version, and what sets it apart is that the sheep-child also has sheep-parents that Maria and her husband must contend with. 

And let’s just say their theft doesn’t come without consequence.

Hatching follows Tinja, a young Finnish gymnast who is eager to please her overbearing influencer mother, when she finds a strange egg in the woods near her house and decides to bring it home.

Tinja incubates the egg until it hatches, and what she finds inside is shocking—a bird-like creature that morphs closer and closer to something like her doppelganger with each day. 

With an approaching gymnastics competition and the doppelganger, which Tinja names Alli, growing stronger and bolder by the minute, Tinja begins to falter under all the pressure in her life, most of which is caused by her mother.

And in the end, her mother learns a hard lesson: once the egg has cracked, external appearances are futile. 

Okay, this one breaks the rules a little bit because it’s goddamn bloody in addition to absurd. A movie like a dream, Mandy tells the story of Mandy and Red Miller when their idyllic and quiet life is turned upside down by a religious cult with the help of a cannibalistic biker gang that runs on LSD.

During their attempt to kidnap Mandy, she ends up murdered instead, which triggers Red to go on one of the bloodiest and most insane revenge campaigns you’ll ever see. Of course, this, too, is also fueled by LSD.

Mandy watches like a two-parter with distinctly different first and second halves. However, if you want weird and you’re up for the gore, this one is for you.

Written and Directed by Brandon Cronenberg, the mind behind Infinity Pool and the son of weird body horror icon David Cronenberg, Possessor tells the story of a corporate assassin, Tasya Vos, who possesses the bodies of her victims to carry out her hits.

But the technology that allows Tasya to do this unfortunately cleaves her away from her true personality which causes tension in her relationships with her husband and child back home, relationships her employers wish she didn’t have since they distract her from her job. 

A mind-bending journey, Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor pays homage to his father’s trailblazing work while still managing to stand firmly on its own. If you liked Infinity Pool, give it a watch.

No matter where you start on this list, these are movies that will leave you moving through the world a little differently after you watch them, and sometimes, that’s just as scary as watching someone get sawed in half.