Dreams can offer a special place to retreat from the grimness of reality, but movies like James Wan’s Malignant or Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street present them as a horror all their own. Dream-based horror films are particularly unnerving because they can offer visuals and sounds more frightening and surreal than anything encountered in everyday life.
Whether the movies take place entirely in dreams or feature prominent dream sequences, they often drive the relationships of the characters by making them question what’s real and what isn’t, and while fans are busy analyzing the psyches of the heroes battling homicidal boogeymen and monsters, they might even analyze their own.
The Babadook (2014)
Available On Prime Video
Dreams can invade a person’s reality if their mental health is fragile enough, making them think their lives are a walking nightmare. This is what happens to a young boy after he loses his father, and his mother tries to comfort him with an illustrated bedtime story.
The Babadook features the titular character making its way out of the pages of the storybook and into the boy’s dreams before finally emerging as a corporeal entity to terrorize his family. The creature is a terrifying manifestation of the boy’s subconscious, with all the ugly malevolence of the monster under the bed or in the closet, but also of his inescapable grief.
The Cell (2000)
Available On Prime Video & Vudu
The Cell isn’t a horror movie that’s watched, but a nightmare that’s experienced. Jennifer Lopez plays a child psychologist entering the mind of a serial killer, performed to eerie perfection by Vincent D’Onofrio, in order to find the location of his next victim. As he rests in a coma and she travels deeper into his psyche, the journey is a labyrinth of his darkest motivations, fantasies, and perversions.
In many ways, The Cell was actually a masterpiece because of how it depicted the human mind as a dreamscape using cutting-edge technology and visually-arresting set design to explore its psychological themes. The film understands that dreams are oscillating, often beautiful, strange, and scary all at once, thus making its somewhat preposterous premise that much more plausible.
A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
Available On Netflix & HBO Max
The boundaries that exist between what’s imaginary and what’s real are blurred in this ’80s classic, introducing one of the horror genre’s most iconic villains, Freddy Krueger, as a fiendish poltergeist that preys on teens in their sleep. The various creative ways Freddy uses dreams to kill his victims is one of the things fans love about A Nightmare on Elm Street, along with the way it toys with the audience’s perceptions of the impossible as Freddy takes on an abundance of forms.
The teens, like viewers, must uncover the truth from fantasy, distinguishing it from other, more straightforward films in the slasher genre that present obvious answers. Teens burning their arms just to stay awake demonstrates how high the stakes really are if Freddy catches them, convincing fans to sleep with the lights on for over forty years.
Hideaway (1995)
Available On Prime Video
In an understated Dean Koontz adaptation, Jeff Goldblum and two alums of the Clueless cast, Alicia Silverstone and Jeremy Sisto, appear in Hideaway, about a father (Goldblum) who begins to have premonitions of teen girls being tortured and killed. As he becomes increasingly worried for his daughter’s (Silverstone) safety, he realizes to his horror that his premonitions might be due to a psychic link with the killer.
While not always effective in its execution, the movie does explore a truly uncomfortable premise to all its possible conclusions, eventually asking what’s worse: all the blood and gore from the victim’s deaths, or experiencing what it’s like to kill them as a reluctant observer no longer in control of their own mind, body, or soul?
Malignant (2021)
Available On Hulu & HBO Max
When a woman starts having troubling visions, possibly triggered by memories of her past, every night becomes a battle between her mind and the forces of evil. There are also reports of a mysterious killer terrorizing her city — could she be connected to them, and will that bond protect her when they finally come for her?
Malignant has one of the scariest paranormal villains of recent years and uses a strong mystery template to craft its story, mixing in noir elements like ambiance and a sense of foreboding dread to separate itself from other dream-based horror movies.
Altered States (1980)
Available On YouTube
Altered States features William Hurt in one of his most memorable roles as a scientist determined to combine his sleep deprivation experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, hopeful that it will allow him to unlock parts of his consciousness and help rebuild his tarnished reputation.
The movie does its best to use practical and early CGI special effects to postulate what he’s seeing, and as the experiments begin to open more of his mind, his grip on reality slips, leading to some truly disturbing consequences.
In Dreams (1999)
Available On Prime Video & YouTube
Sometimes seeing visions of the future is more of a curse than a blessing, and dreaming of a young girl’s death leads one clairvoyant mother to make the startling discovery her daughter has drowned. When she becomes increasingly erratic, her husband hopes to get her treatment through a specialist, but the deeper her dreams take her, the more she believes she’s psychically linked to her daughter’s killer.
Featuring an all-star cast including Annette Bening, Stephen Rea, Robert Downey Jr., and Aidan Quinn, this horror movie is grounded in dramatic performances and dreams that make uncomfortable revelations about how certain bonds can be formed; is she dreaming of the killer or is he dreaming of her?
Dreamscape (1984)
Available On Prime Video & YouTube
Weaponized dreams are the real danger in Dreamscape, where a young Dennis Quaid stars as a psychic teenager recruited by the government to enter other people’s minds as they sleep. What starts as a psionic experiment to help cure nightmares becomes a nightmare itself when the boy’s abilities are used for evil.
Filled with screeching trains, two-headed hellhounds, giant snake men, and much more, the “dreamscape” he navigates becomes wilder the further into it he travels. But travel it he must, or no one’s dreams will be safe.
Last Night In Soho (2021)
Available On Apple TV
Thomasin McKenzie portrays Eloise, an aspiring fashion designer attending the London College of Fashion in the hopes of following in her mother’s footsteps. Filled with daydreams of the Swinging Sixties, Eloise tries to navigate a competitive program until unfriendly peers force her from the dorms. While living in a room off-campus, she begins having vivid dreams where she is transported to the era she loves and follows the adventures of a confident blonde named Sandie, brought to life by Anya-Taylor Joy.
As these dreams play out, she begins to alter her own fashion sense and attitude to mirror Sandie’s, and as she does so, past and present begin to blur into one. As Sandie’s glamorous club-hopping lifestyle takes a sinister turn, the movie takes a unique approach to the perils of dopplegängers, with each woman trying desperately to survive one more night in Soho.
Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
Available On Prime Video & Paramount+
Many veterans return to civilian life struggling with how to reintegrate, some of them psychologically affected by the atrocities of combat. In Jacob’s Ladder, Tim Robbins plays a soldier coming home from the Vietnam War who experiences violent hallucinations that incapacitate him, pushing friends, lovers, and even fellow veterans away.
As he grows more paranoid and afraid, he wonders if he wasn’t subjected to experiments by his own government. Political commentary and allegories are interwoven amidst the dream sequences, with Jacob’s distrust of his own reality mirroring the distrust of a nation in the Vietnam War, making it a thought-provoking film as well as a harrowing nightmare for viewers.
