Film

Visitors

Name: Visitors
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Released: 2003
Cast: Radha Mitchell, Susannah York, Ray Barrett, Dominic Purcell, Tottie Goldsmith

Action

A 2003 Australian horror-thriller that uses the real story of Georgia Perry, the first woman to sail solo around the world, as a springboard into something much stranger—a film about family trauma, haunting, and the ghosts that follow us home. It's unsettling and strange rather than jump-scare scary, with a dreamlike quality that lingers.

TMDb rating

2.6

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The Orphanage2007

Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona crafts genuine dread from family tragedy and unresolved grief. Emotionally devastating in a way that respects its characters, with a twist that reshapes everything that came before.

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Mulholland Drive2001

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But Deliberately obtuse. If you need plot clarity and narrative resolution, this will infuriate you. It's a puzzle with no answer key.

The Innocents1961

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Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Visitors

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Dead Ringers1988

Both films use genre as a framework for exploring psychological fracture and family systems that trap their characters. The haunting in Visitors is internal; in Dead Ringers it's biological. Same engine, different flesh.

Cronenberg's twin-doctor nightmare is about obsession, identity, and the collapse of two men who are essentially one. Disturbing body horror wrapped around a story about people who know each other too well to ever escape.

But Gynaecological body horror that's genuinely grotesque. Bleak in ways that offer no redemption. The 2023 TV remake exists, but this is the real thing.

Picnic at Hanging Rock1975

Aussie classic about schoolgirls vanishing into the bush. Hypnotic, dreamlike, with a mystery that's never solved. Peter Weir crafts an almost spiritual sense of dread from landscape and atmosphere.

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Under the Skin2014

Scarlett Johansson drives through Scottish landscapes in this sci-fi horror hybrid that dismantles everything you expect from a narrative. Alien, hypnotic, and deeply unsettling without ever explaining itself.

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The Babadook2014

An Australian psychological horror that uses a children's book as a gateway into grief and maternal terror. Visually inventive, genuinely frightening, and psychologically intelligent about loss.

But The metaphor-as-monster approach won't work if you prefer straightforward scares. Some find the ending too neat after so much ambiguity.

Hereditary2018

Ari Aster's debut is a family horror film that feels inevitable and unstoppable, built on grief, generational trauma, and the weight of inherited darkness. Genuinely, devastatingly frightening.

But Relentlessly bleak and disturbing. Contains imagery some viewers find unwatchable. The third act abandons realism in ways that polarize audiences.

The Wailing2016

South Korean director Na Hong-jin's masterwork about a murder, a stranger, a mystery, and faith. Structurally brilliant, morally ambiguous, and the kind of film that rewires your brain as it unfolds.

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Dark Water2002

Hideo Nakata's Japanese horror about a woman and her daughter in a haunted apartment. Slower and sadder than you'd expect, with a mother's love becoming the actual subject matter beneath the supernatural framing.

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Pulse2001

Both treat haunting as spiritual and familial rather than mechanical. Both films suggest that what follows us home is really the part of us we can't leave behind. Isolation is the real horror.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's haunted-internet film from before the internet was even fully real. Two storylines that slowly converge into an apocalypse of loneliness and disconnection. Profoundly lonely and visually devastating.

But Japanese, subtitled, from 2001 so aesthetically dated. The premise sounds silly on paper. Aggressively, deliberately paced.

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