Scary is obviously something that’s subjective but when a drama connects us with ideas that are truly real it can be terrifying in a way that you can’t even necessarily articulate.
The feeling is incredibly powerful and it has the ability to make a movie stick with you for the rest of your life. This list will look at 18 dramas that are scarier than any horror movie, due in large part to their uncomfortably close subject matter and brilliant performances.
Updated on September 29th, 2020 by Derek Draven and Mark Birrell: Proving the frightening power and versatility of the drama movie, this list couldn’t be limited to just 10 examples so we’ve selected an additional 8 for all those out there who need their stories with a harder edge.
Enduring Love (2004)
A freak accident brings together a collection of strangers and forces them to witness a bizarrely traumatizing event. Shaken and emotionally fragile, Daniel Craig’s hesitant teacher steadily becomes acutely aware of the fact that one of the other strangers, the unnervingly peculiar Jed, has become dangerously infatuated with him.
Rhys Ifans is spellbinding as Jed in this disturbing adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name and his fearlessly creepy performance makes him one of the most terrifyingly real movie stalkers of all time.
Chernobyl (2019)
This miniseries collaboration between TV giants HBO and Sky UK brought together an incredible cast of actors for this chilling dramatization of the infamous Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in 1986.
Writer/creator Craig Mazin finds a contemporarily relevant throughline about delusional fantasizing within failing power structures, which hits close to home, but little can match the sheer apocalyptic terror of its reenactment of the disaster itself and its immediate aftermath.
I, Daniel Blake (2016)
Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winning modern masterstroke of social realism follows the titular working-class hero as he fights against the heavily contentious austerity measurements imposed on government programs in the UK that have denied him financial support in a Catch-22 situation after a recent heart attack.
His defiance in the face of near-Kafkaesque absurdity is heartwarming. But the horrifying reality of the system that he now finds himself at the mercy of is that it appears to solely exist in order to quietly kill off the most vulnerable in British society through wilful negligence.
Michael (2011)
This hauntingly gutsy drama shadows the life of a seasoned child abuser who kidnaps and imprisons a young boy within a hidden cell inside his home.
The mind of the protagonist is certainly not a place that most people would want to explore but Michael is unflinching in its examination of its horribly real predator and his methods for hiding in plain sight.
Son of Saul (2015)
Set in Auschwitz near the end of the Second World War in Europe, and shot entirely in the unbearably intimate 1.375:1 aspect ratio, László Nemes’ Oscar-winning drama follows a Sonderkommando as they attempt to give a proper Jewish funeral to a murdered boy.
Most films about the Holocaust have enough reverence to accurately portray the horror of the subject but Son of Saul is relentless in its depiction of a truly hellish situation. The human anguish of the atrocities is inescapable in its continuous portrait of Saul’s face.
1984 (1984)
George Orwell’s famous takes on authoritarian dictatorships have, unfortunately, only continued to increase in relevance over recent years.
The movie adaptation of his iconic novel 1984 was released in the eponymous year to great critical acclaim and has continued to stand the test of time.
American History X (1998)
The flawed yet important American History X traces the roots of bigotry by telling the story of a former Neo-Nazi named Derek Vineyard, whose anger lands him in prison for murder, showing how the worst ideas germinate in the minds of those who allow anger to rule against their better nature.
After befriending a black inmate and leaving prison on parole, Derek is horrified to learn that his brother Danny has gone down the same path. He commits all his energy to repairing his broken family while trying to navigate Danny away from the same Neo-Nazi group he fell in league with. It’s a scary, all-too-real look at just how vulnerable humans are to hatred and prejudice, and the sheer pointlessness of it.
Irréversible (2002)
Perhaps the scariest thing about Irréversible is how plausible its subject matter actually is. The film has gained widespread notoriety for a 10 minute long, gut-wrenching scene depicting the worst variety of assault, which sent audience members flying out of screenings.
The story runs in reverse chronological order, which makes the final few scenes all the more heartbreaking. The level of violence, brutality, and nihilism in the movie is a commentary on the state of modern life and it has the power to stay with the viewer for a lifetime.
The Hunt (2012)
Mads Mikkelsen plays a kindergarten teacher falsely accused of child abuse in Thomas Vinterberg’s drama of life in a close-knit Danish countryside community that transforms from idyllic to nightmarish under the weight of one misunderstanding.
Paranoia and hearsay are certainly factors at play in this unflinching drama but Vinterberg emphasizes the significance of both the social and psychical isolation of the accused. The Hunt is a terrifying story because it paints an all too common scenario in which the innocent are powerless and the worst in a community are able to act with total impunity.
The Normal Heart (2014)
American Horror Story and Scream Queens creator Ryan Murphy tackles terror from an entirely different perspective in this acclaimed and superbly-acted movie for HBO.
Adapted from Larry Kramer’s play of the same name, it chronicles the burgeoning of the AIDS crisis in America, specifically how it wasn’t treated as a crisis at all. The Normal Heart contains a number of interesting insights into the concepts of gay politics and identity in modern America. But the frightening truth at the heart of it is that groups of marginalized people can believe they are accepted, or at the very least tolerated, within a society that is secretly wishing them dead.
Caché (2005)
Michael Haneke’s unsettling drama follows a man plagued by mysterious videotape recordings of his life being sent to him. With no explanation and only a vague set of clues to follow, his comfortable middle-class life begins to unravel as deeply personal secrets from his past find themselves bubbling to the surface.
Brimming with post-colonial guilt, Caché puts modern Western life under a microscope and it’s enough to make anybody squirm a little.
The War Zone (1999)
Actor Tim Roth directs this family drama of a young man slowly coming to terms with the gut-wrenching truth that his father is abusing his sister.
The War Zone is a difficult film to watch in so many instances but performances from giants like Tilda Swinton and Ray Winstone, as well as relative-unknowns (including a pre-fame Colin Farrell), make it equally hard to look away.
Compliance (2012)
Craig Zobel’s dramatization of a very real – and incredibly bizarre – crime almost defies belief. But the situations of helplessness that a worker can experience in the face of gross incompetence are all too relatable and, soon enough, you come to see just how this abhorrent scheme could play out in day-to-day life.
The plot essentially details an incident caused at a fast-food restaurant by a prank caller pretending to be a police officer. The lowkey villainy of Ann Dowd’s gullible, or just plain cruel, supervisor exacerbates the bad situation to a point of no return. Compliance is a chilling examination of culpability and the Milgram experiment played out on an unsuspecting public.
Custody (2017)
Xavier Legrand’s divorce drama can leave even the most hardened horror fan shaken to their core. The movie provides no escape from Denis Ménochet’s powerful turn as a monstrously abusive man who will stop at nothing to put his ex-wife through hell.
Custody is an unwavering portrayal of the psyche of an abuser, a seemingly-inescapable force that will say anything or use anyone in its singular mission to terrorize their victims with what they insist is love.
Phantom Thread (2017)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s perfectly-pitched period drama sees Daniel Day-Lewis’ master dressmaker fall under the spell of a young German woman in post-war London as she falls under his also. But the obsessive perfection of his life begins to poison their relationship to the point where she feels no choice but to respond in kind.
Captivating performances blend perfectly with Jonny Greenwood’s beautiful, and intermittently unnerving, score in this elegant portrait of codependency.
Snowtown (2011)
Though Justin Kurzel’s true-crime drama isn’t technically classified as a horror movie by most, it’s easy to see how it could be. Jed Kurzel’s music is so pulse-poundingly effective that it was adapted and folded into the score for Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant years later.
It’s a movie that delves deep into the methodology of a gruesome serial killer, and their relationships with their accomplices, with a sickeningly convincing level of realism. Yet the scariest thing about it is its depiction of an impoverished world so apocalyptically bleak that you see how easy it is for monsters to seem charismatic.
The Vanishing (1988)
George Sluizer’s Dutch cult legend is one of those movies that you’re pretty much guaranteed to never forget. This is in no small part due to its ending but also for its frank depiction of a truly twisted mind.
The movie essentially follows a man’s all-consuming need to find out what happened to his missing girlfriend. The truth is, of course, terrible but perhaps not as terrible as the American remake which has become a byword for Hollywood butchering a foreign success, something made all the more baffling by the fact that both movies have the same director.
Simon Killer (2012)
Writer and director Antonio Campos creates a painfully real sociopath for the modern era with Brady Corbet’s performance as the titular Simon, an entitled and unstable American getting over a breakup in Paris.
With an interesting musical and visual style, Simon Killer veers towards the crime thriller genre but, truthfully, Simon is too directionless to accomplish anything much more than being an emotional, financial and psychological parasite to anyone with the misfortune to cross paths with him. He isn’t just a psycho that you could meet in real life, he’s a psycho that you most probably have met at some point in your life.
