7 Beautifully Unsettling Films to Watch This Halloween

Suspiria (1977)

Haunted country houses, sinister ballet schools and picnics that go terribly wrong. Seven films for an evening of exquisite unease.

There is a particular pleasure in watching a film that frightens you while making you want to live inside it. You admire the staircase. You notice the curtains. You briefly consider whether you could tolerate a malevolent presence in exchange for those windows.

Halloween is an excellent excuse to revisit this kind of cinema. Films in which the setting gets under your skin, beauty makes you careless and something in the background demands a second look. Some are bloody; others barely need to raise their voices.

From candlelit ghost stories to a sun-drenched Australian mystery, these are seven films worth drawing the curtains for.

1. The Others (2001)

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar

Nicole Kidman plays Grace, a mother living with her two light-sensitive children in an isolated mansion, where keeping the daylight out governs every domestic routine. The arrival of three servants unsettles an already fragile household. Soon, there are reasons to wonder who else might be at home.

Kidman is superbly controlled: even her smallest gestures suggest the effort of holding everything together. Around her, closed doors and heavy curtains turn the house into a place where you can never quite see enough. The muted palette makes every scrap of light feel precious.

Go in knowing as little as possible. Afterwards, you may find yourself turning on considerably more lamps than usual.

2. Suspiria (1977)

Directed by Dario Argento

An American ballet student arrives at a prestigious European dance academy and discovers that its peculiar atmosphere extends well beyond the usual professional competitiveness. Jessica Harper stars in Argento’s extravagantly sinister fairy tale, where the plot follows the alarming logic of a nightmare.

Everything seems to glow with its own dangerous electricity. Reds flood the frame, blues turn corridors otherworldly, and the elaborate interiors offer nowhere comfortable for the eye to rest. You keep looking because it is beautiful, even when looking feels like a terrible idea.

This is one of the bloodier choices on the list. Its beauty offers very little reassurance.

3. The Innocents (1961)

Directed by Jack Clayton

Deborah Kerr stars in this adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, with Freddie Francis’s black-and-white cinematography giving candlelight, distant figures and apparently peaceful grounds an extraordinary capacity to disturb. Some of its most unnerving images arrive in broad daylight.

The pleasure lies in watching the frame. Your eyes begin searching its edges, trying to distinguish a threat from an ordinary shadow. A garden becomes somewhere you would rather not walk alone; a window becomes something you would rather not look towards.

Kerr brings an anxious intensity that makes certainty feel increasingly out of reach. It is a film to watch with your phone firmly elsewhere. You will want to pay attention to what is behind her.

4. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Directed by Peter Weir

On Valentine’s Day in 1900, a party from an Australian girls’ school visits Hanging Rock. By the end of the outing, several members of the group have disappeared. Peter Weir’s adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel builds its mystery around the terrible absence they leave behind.

White dresses, hazy light and the immense presence of the landscape give the film a dreamy, suspended quality. There is something unnerving about how lovely it all remains. The scenery offers no explanation, and certainly no comfort.

More mysterious than conventionally frightening, this is the choice for anyone who enjoys leaving a film with something unresolved. It makes a sunny afternoon feel as ominous as any midnight corridor.

5. Crimson Peak (2015)

Directed by Guillermo del Toro

Mia Wasikowska plays a young American woman who marries a British baronet and moves into his crumbling ancestral home. Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain complete a household whose hospitality leaves considerable room for improvement. Expect ghosts, strong violence and very poor reasons to stay another night.

Del Toro gives the house an almost bodily presence: its decay feels active, its grandeur inseparable from something rotten. The costumes and interiors are so sumptuous that you understand, briefly, how someone might overlook several obvious warning signs.

It is gloriously excessive, with the emotional temperature of a Gothic novel read during a fever. For anyone whose ideal Halloween involves elaborate sleeves, doomed romance and a property requiring more than a structural survey.

6. Let the Right One In (2008)

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

In a wintry Swedish suburb, lonely twelve-year-old Oskar befriends his mysterious new neighbour, Eli. As their attachment develops, a series of gruesome deaths suggests that this friendship comes with complications rather beyond the ordinary difficulties of growing up.

The snowy setting gives the film a remarkable stillness. Ordinary spaces feel emptied out, leaving room for small gestures of affection to register alongside sudden, shocking violence.

What stays with you is the tenderness, and the discomfort of wondering what that tenderness allows you to accept. It is an unusually intimate vampire film: sad, strange and capable of making an apparently comforting moment feel deeply troubling.

7. The Haunting (1963)

Directed by Robert Wise

A small group gathers at Hill House to investigate its reputation for supernatural activity. Julie Harris and Claire Bloom star in Robert Wise’s black-and-white ghost story, set inside a mansion whose confusing spaces make it difficult to feel securely oriented.

Here, listening can be worse than looking. A noise beyond a door gives the imagination far too much to work with, while the rooms themselves seem to exert an unpleasant pressure on their occupants.

Harris gives the fear an emotional vulnerability that makes the house’s hold especially disturbing. By the time it is over, the familiar sounds of your own home may have acquired an entirely unwelcome significance.

Perhaps leave the hallway light on.