Five great movies you should never watch before bed
As Halloween approaches, now is the perfect time to watch those movies you’ve always been too scared to watch. With the nights drawing in before you’ve even had a chance to decide what you want to eat for tea, the autumn season is perfect for purposefully scaring yourself, even if you do end up convinced that the coat on the back of your door is the ghost of a monk from the Middle Ages.
There are some films that are perfectly fine to watch in the daytime when there’s no chance of tricking yourself into thinking that you saw a face at the window. Yet, watch them as night falls, all tucked up in the dark, whether that be on the sofa or in your bed, and you’ll wish you hadn’t had the delusional confidence to think you were above a scary movie.
While the things we find scariest differ from person to person, there are certain films that are practically designed to make you feel uncomfortable in your own home, like those that deal with ghosts and intruders. So, for this list, we’ve included films that explore these themes, as well as ones that depict the uneasy world of dreams and hallucinations.
From classic slashers like Halloween to experimental nightmares such as Inland Empire, here are five great movies you should avoid watching before bed.
Five great movies not to watch before bed:
Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)
If there’s one thing you probably shouldn’t watch before bed, it’s a home invasion horror. Many slashers focus on killers who break into people’s homes when they are least expecting it, brandishing a knife and hiding their faces behind a creepy mask. In John Carpenter’s Halloween, we witness a murder from the POV of the killer in the opening scene, with the camera peeking through the window and winding up the staircase to the room of the unfortunate victim.
As darkness falls on Halloween night, the terrifying serial killer Michael Myers stalks the neighbourhood where Laurie Strode is babysitting, appearing at the window and entering the house with a weapon in his hand, ruthlessly killing anyone that he sees. The film aimed to disrupt the idea of suburbia as a safe place, and if you watch Halloween before bed, you’re not going to sleep comfortably unless you know that every door is locked and all the curtains are firmly closed.
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012)
British filmmaker Peter Strickland explored one man’s descent into madness in his film Berberian Sound Studio, which featured Toby Jones as a sound engineer, Gilderoy, who begins working on an Italian film which he assumes is about horses. Once he arrives at the studio, he realises that he is actually working on a giallo film and must assist the recordings of women screaming and fruit being sliced to resemble the sound of a knife slicing through flesh.
The film takes a rather surreal turn as he loses his grip on reality and begins to see strange things while trying to sleep. There are hallucinatory moments as the boundaries between the events of the film begin to blur with the fictional film within it, making for some intense and confusing scenes. Once you finish the movie, you’ll be left praying that your dreams don’t turn into nightmares in the same vein as Gilderoy’s.
The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
Now for a classic supernatural story – The Innocents, directed by Jack Clayton. Based on the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, the movie uses haunting black-and-white imagery to explore one woman’s fear that ghosts actually surround her. Working as a governess, she becomes convinced that spirits actually possess the children she is looking after. Made in 1961, it emerged at a time when horror looked very different to how it does today, but it still managed to – and continues to – scare viewers.
The imagery used is often dimly lit, relying on candle light and shadowy set-ups. While the film might offer possible explanations for the ghostly goings on, it doesn’t stop the movie from being any less creepy. It’s one that you won’t want to watch in the dark, although you’ll have the best viewing experience if you do.
Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
Catherine Deneuve starred as Carol in 1965’s Repulsion, which devolves into a cinematic interpretation of extreme paranoia, psychosis, and repression as the character’s fear of men hits fever pitch. She is shy and frightened by the opposite sex and rejects the advances of a man who shows interest in her. Every item belonging to her sister’s lover, Michael, makes her angry, and once she is left alone in the apartment, things take a turn for the worse.
Carol begins to see things, including horrific hallucinations of sexual violence. Her fears manifest in various tragic ways, and as hands burst out of the walls and brutality seems like the only option, Repulsion becomes a claustrophobic experience that will make you feel like a prisoner in your own bedroom.
Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
“A woman in trouble,” reads the tagline of David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire. It is his most Lynchian project of all, consisting of over three hours of pure madness. Some scenes are shot on a cheap handheld camera, taking us onto the nighttime streets of Hollywood, where Laura Dern gives her most deranged performance of her career. The movie is hard to explain; it’s like one giant fever dream that you can’t quite wrap your head around, with several jump scares thrown in along the way.
Inland Empire is the kind of film that you’ll likely dream about once you’ve seen it. That’s not to say you’re going to have a nightmare, but you might end up dreaming such bizarre sequences of images that you’ll wonder if you’ve just viewed some discarded cuts from the film in your sleep.
