Film
The Nightmare
A German coming-of-age chiller in which seventeen-year-old Tina, fresh from a rave, starts being visited by a small, wordless, unmistakably wrong creature that only she can see. It's less jump-scare horror than slow psychological unravelling — heavy on mood, ambiguity and teenage dread, closer to an arthouse fever dream than a monster movie. Best for patient viewers who like their horror interior and unresolved.
If you liked this
It Follows2015
A slow-dread masterpiece where an ambiguous entity stalks a teenager as a stand-in for anxiety and consequence, told with the same hazy, sun-bleached unease this film trades in.
But The rules of the curse are deliberately vague, which can frustrate anyone wanting a tidy explanation.

The Babadook2014
Grief given a body and a knock at the door — one of the great modern examples of horror as psychological metaphor made frighteningly literal, with a lead performance that carries the whole thing.
But It's emotionally punishing rather than scary in a fun way; some find the domestic misery harder to sit through than the monster.

Raw2017
French body-horror about a young woman's appetites spiralling out of control during her first taste of freedom — visceral, unsettling, and just as interested in the body betraying the self.
But There's real gore here, more than this film ever shows, and it can turn a squeamish viewer off fast.

The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Perfect Blue1998
Same trick, different medium: an internal psychic fracture rendered as external, stalking horror, here achieved through animation instead of live-action restraint.
A Japanese animated psychological thriller about a pop idol whose grip on reality dissolves under stalking and fame — dream and waking life bleed together exactly like Tina's nights and days.
But It's anime, which some viewers rule out on sight, and the identity-collapse plotting gets deliberately disorienting.

More like this (8)
Thelma & Louise1991
A Norwegian student discovers she has terrifying, uncontrollable powers tangled up with repression and desire — cool, clinical, and quietly devastating in the same register.
But It moves at a glacial pace and rewards patience more than adrenaline.

Climax2018
A dance rehearsal curdles into a hallucinatory nightmare after the sangria gets spiked — pure sensory horror, strobing and feral, from the same nightlife-gone-wrong DNA.
But Gaspar Noé's camera is relentless and the descent into chaos is genuinely nauseating by design.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night2014no page yet
An Iranian-American vampire film shot in gorgeous monochrome, all mood and loneliness — proof that stylised, dreamlike horror about a solitary young woman can be genuinely beautiful.
But Almost nothing happens plot-wise; it's atmosphere and composition over incident.
mother!2017
A house and a marriage collapse into biblical-scale nightmare logic — unhinged, symbolic, and committed to its metaphor the way this film is committed to its creature.
But It's deliberately overwhelming and abstract; plenty of people find it insufferable rather than profound.

The Witch2016
A family unravels in isolation while something ambiguous and predatory circles a teenage girl — dread built from religious guilt and puberty rather than jump scares.
But The 17th-century dialect and deliberate pacing take real patience to sit with.

Antichrist2009
Von Trier's grief-horror, where trauma manifests as something almost supernatural in the woods — bleak, punishing, and formally audacious in ways few horror films dare.
But It's extremely graphic and emotionally brutal; not a casual watch by any measure.

Repulsion1965
Sixty years earlier, the same idea: a young woman's psyche made visible as horror, with the film refusing to explain whether what she sees is real.
Polanski's black-and-white study of a young woman's mind fracturing alone in her apartment — cracking walls, intruding hands, dread with almost no exposition. This did the interior-horror template before most horror had the vocabulary for it.
But It's slow, silent-heavy, and demands you sit with discomfort rather than being scared by anything jumping out.

The Fly1986
Where the creature here stays ambiguous and psychological, this film takes the same idea — inner wrongness made monstrous — and plays it as full, unashamed genre horror.
Cronenberg's body-horror tragedy turns inner decay into grotesque, practical-effects transformation — a lover slowly becoming a monster in front of the person who loves him.
But It's far gorier and more theatrical than anything here, closer to splatter tragedy than restrained mood piece.

People
Cast
Carolyn GenzkowTina
Arnd KlawitterFather
Julika JenkinsMother
Alexander ScheerPsychiatrist
Kim GordonTeacher
Sina TkotschBarbara- Lynn FemmeMonika
- Lucia LucianoJulia
Nura Habib OmerAshley
Moritz LeuPascal
Aram AramiRashid
Directing
- Achim BornhakDirector
Writing
- Achim BornhakWriter
Recommended by
Stir of Echoes, Room 237, It Follows, Insidious, From Beyond