Kept on a short leash through a volatile mixture of indoctrination, misinformation and fear, three grown-up siblings--two sisters and one brother--find themselves confined to their lavish, isolated villa. As a result, holed up in their beautiful, high-walled prison, the siblings rely on their cold, manipulative parents to learn about the ways of the world, taking reality-defying lessons from instructional cassette tapes. And, as the cruel patriarch and his frigid wife deliberately keep their unsuspecting, submissive children in the dark, freedom is nothing but a word. Then, a bad influence in the shape of security guard Christina enters the equation, and suddenly, sweet, baffling temptation threatens years of meticulous mind-programming. Is the grass greener on the other side of the fence? With this in mind, how can an ordinary dogtooth stand in the way of happiness?

During a secretive business trip away, Mark learns that his wife Anna is growing restless in what he believed was their happy marriage. Upon his return home, he learns from her that she wants a divorce. They both go through a series of different emotions related to their situation, Mark's which is generally obsessive about learning why Anna, who he still loves, wants the divorce, and Anna's which is generally increasingly histrionic in getting away from Mark. Caught in the middle is their infant son Bob, who Mark uses as a gage to Anna's mental state. Anna states that her want for the divorce is not because of another man, but Mark finds out that Anna has a lover named Heinrich. In the meantime, Mark also meets Bob's teacher Helen, who looks exactly like Anna, but is her polar opposite in temperament. Starting a relationship with Helen lessens his obsession with Anna. But as Mark and Anna's encounters together reach more emotional and violent levels, Mark, with help of a private investigative firm, learns that Anna's love life is not all that it appears. Anna's true obsession has a somewhat gruesome process and nothing will stop her from reaching her end goal.

French film (dir. Andrzej Żuławski; 1981)

In Paris, the shy bureaucrat Trelkovsky rents an old apartment without bathroom where the previous tenant, the Egyptologist Simone Choule, committed suicide. The unfriendly concierge (Shelley Winters) and the tough landlord Mr. Zy establish stringent rules of behavior and Trelkovsky feels ridden by his neighbors. Meanwhile he visits Simone in the hospital and befriends her girlfriend Stella. After the death of Simone, Trelkovsky feels obsessed for her and believes his landlord and neighbors are plotting a scheme to force him to also commit suicide.

An artist in crisis is haunted by nightmares from the past in Ingmar Bergman's only horror film, which takes place on a windy island. During "the hour of the wolf" - between midnight and dawn - he tells his wife about his most painful memories.

Invisible aliens in a tiny flying saucer come to Earth looking for heroin. They land on top of a New York apartment inhabited by a drug dealer and her androgynous, bisexual nymphomaniac lover, who's also a fashion model. The aliens soon find the human pheromones created in the brain during orgasm preferable to heroin, and the model's casual sex partners begin disappearing. This increasingly bizarre scenario's observed by a lonely woman in the building across the street, a German scientist who's following the aliens, and an equally androgynous, drug-addicted male model (both models are played by Anne Carlisle). Darkly funny and thoroughly weird.

In the late 1960s, just for a lark, graduate student Eddie Jessup, known for being unconventional, brilliant and slightly mad, conducts experiments with an isolation chamber, using himself as the subject. His experiences in the chamber cause him to hallucinate, much of the imagery being religious-based although he's not religious. Seven years later, he is a respected full professor in the Harvard Medical School. Believing he has lost his edge and fallen into an unwanted state of respectability, Eddie decides to resume his work with sensory deprivation, this time using hallucinogens, specifically untested ones used in mystical Mexican rituals, to enhance the isolation-take experience. After initial tests, he claims he entered an alternate physical and mental state. Although unbelieving of Eddie's claims, his colleagues Arthur Rosenberg and Mason Parrish, as well as Eddie's wife Emily, herself a respected academic, are concerned for Eddie's well being. However, if Eddie's claims are indeed true, he could do irreparable harm to himself and others around him, especially if his altered states are uncontrollable.

A young man -- starving, nearly catatonic and barely responsive -- is confined in a sanitarium. He is taken on a field trip along with other residents to the city's red-light district. There, he encounters by chance a woman from his past, triggering a series of flashbacks. We see that he was traumatized as a child, when he and his family were circus performers, and when he witnessed a murder/suicide: his father -- an American expatriate living in Mexico under suspicious circumstances -- cuts off the arms of his beloved mother, a possessive wife and religious fanatic who led a heretical church called "Santa Sangre (Holy Blood)," the members of which worshipped a martyred girl whose arms were severed by her father following her rape, and then commit suicide. Back in the present, buttressed by shock of his remembrance, he escapes the sanitarium and, in a series of hallucinations and dream-fulfillments, believes he has rejoined his armless mother. He "becomes her arms" and the "two" undertake a grisly campaign of murder and revenge.

Darryl Revok is the most powerful of all the scanners, and is the head of the underground scanner movement for world domination. Scanners have great psychic power, strong enough to control minds; they can inflict enormous pain/damage on their victims. Doctor Paul Ruth finds a scanner that Revok hasn't, and converts him to their cause - to destroy the underground movement.

1981 horror film directed by David Cronenberg

A young doctor at a hospital, Susan Wheeler (played by

When Allan becomes a quadriplegic he loses all hope for living until he meets Ella - a monkey trained to fetch and carry for him around the house, obeying him in all things. But Ella is part of another experiment, and when she starts responding to Allan's underlying rage and frustration she has the ability to carry out her master's darkest wishes.

An alien parasite with the ability to possess human bodies goes on a violent crime spree in LA, committing dozens of murders and robberies. In pursuit of the extraterrestrial criminal is an FBI agent, and the local officer investigating the rash of violence. As they close in on the vicious intruder, the city faces a brutal threat like no other it has ever encountered.

A young boy tries to cope with rural life circa 1950s and his fantasies become a way to interpret events. After his father tells him stories of vampires, he becomes convinced that the widow up the road is a vampire, and tries to find ways of discouraging his brother from seeing her. He must deal with an abusive mother, a father with a charge of molestation, a band of youths creating havoc, and an unforgiving environment in general.

When the annual fair comes to town, murder, madness and mayhem creep in its shadows. Dr. Caligari, a mysterious hypnotist, appears to control every move of his bizarre, clairvoyant sleepwalker, but does he?

John Murdoch awakens alone in a strange hotel to find that he has lost his memory and is wanted for a series of brutal and bizarre murders. While trying to piece together his past, he stumbles upon a fiendish underworld controlled by a group of beings known as The Strangers who possess the ability to put people to sleep and alter the city and its inhabitants. Now Murdoch must find a way to stop them before they take control of his mind and destroy him.

A film that defies conventional logic and storytelling, fueled by its dark nightmarish atmosphere and compellingly disturbing visuals. Henry Spencer is a hapless factory worker on his vacation when he finds out he's the father of a hideously deformed baby. Now living with his unhappy, malcontent girlfriend, the child cries day and night, driving Henry and his girlfriend to near insanity.

An eccentric scientist changes the world with his teleportation technology: when his experiment seems to be going well, Dr. Seth Brundle tests his machine on himself and he gets fused with the worst kind of pest on Planet Earth; The Fly. What is the price of a man playing God? Only Seth knows.

Movies i want to watch

More lists by Oliver Lemon

Movies I like