The Must-See Auteur Fantasy Films

Introduction: Cartographies of the Hidden Imaginary

Fantasy cinema, in its most widespread and commercially visible incarnation, often presents itself as a colossus with feet of clay. The grand productions of Hollywood studios, despite their undeniable ability to generate wonder through pyrotechnic spectacles and gargantuan budgets, tend to tread well-worn paths. They rely on proven formulas, familiar genres, and a form of mass escapism that, while creating shared cultural experiences, risks sacrificing thematic complexity and artistic audacity on the altar of commercial success. This mainstream universe, made of stainless heroes, Manichaean worlds, and conflicts resolved by pitched battles, represents only one side of the coin—the most illuminated and accessible one. However, another cartography of the fantastic exists, a submerged and pulsating territory that moves on the fringes of the industry: an independent and underground cinema that uses the language of myth and magic not to escape reality, but to probe it with a sometimes brutal lucidity. This guide is an invitation to explore that territory, a journey in twenty stages through a personal, subversive, and profoundly visionary fantasy.

The beacon that illuminates this path is the Auteur Theory, that critical principle which elevates the director to the true “author” of the filmic work. According to this vision, an auteur is not a mere executor but an artist who imprints their unmistakable stylistic signature, their thematic obsessions, and total control over the elements of production onto every frame. In independent fantasy cinema, this figure assumes the role of a modern mythographer. The archetypes of the genre—magic, supernatural events, folklore, exotic worlds—cease to be mere background elements and become a symbolic alphabet, a visual vocabulary through which the author articulates philosophical, psychological, and deeply personal questions. The fantastic thus becomes the vehicle for exploring the unexplored, not of distant lands, but of the human condition.

This expressive freedom is intrinsically linked to the material conditions of independent production. Limited budgets, unconventional distribution through festival circuits, and the near-total absence of studio interference are not mere constraints but powerful catalysts for creativity. A director deprived of the resources to orchestrate a sweeping spectacle is forced to innovate, to make their vision and style the film’s main asset. A symbiotic relationship is thus created: the independent system, by its nature, needs strong authorial voices to emerge, and the authors, in turn, thrive in the freedom this system guarantees. It is in this fertile ground that “cult movies” are born and grow—works that, ignored by the general public upon their release, find over time their own devoted community of followers, capable of recognizing their subversive value and enduring originality. In this context, fantasy undergoes a radical metamorphosis. If mainstream cinema tends to externalize conflict in epic battles between Good and Evil, auteur fantasy internalizes it. Imaginary worlds are no longer objective settings but become projections of the characters’ psyches and, by extension, of the director’s own. The surreal, dreamlike, and often grotesque imagery that characterizes many of these works is not a stylistic whim but a direct language for visualizing trauma, identity crises, repressed desires, and unconscious fears. The fantastic ceases to be escapism and transforms into a form of confrontation, a dark mirror in which reality is reflected in new, unsettling, and revealing forms.

The Twenty Pillars of Auteur Fantasy

The Holy Mountain (1973)

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s work is an assault on the senses and reason, a cinematic ritual that transcends narrative to become a mystical experience. The Holy Mountain represents the apex of his vision, a psychedelic fantasy that perfectly embodies the ideal of auteur cinema as an act of total creation. Financed in part by John Lennon and Allen Klein, who were seduced by the underground success of his previous film El Topo, the film is an artifact of the 1970s counterculture, steeped in alchemy, tarot, astrology, and esoteric philosophies. Jodorowsky, who plays the role of the Alchemist in the film, subjected himself and the cast to rigorous spiritual training, which included the use of psychedelics, to break down the barriers of the ego and achieve an altered state of consciousness. The result is an unprecedented visual odyssey, a collage of grotesque, sacrilegious, and stunningly beautiful images. The narrative follows a Thief, a Christ-like figure, and seven powerful individuals representing the planets and the vices of society, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain to obtain immortality. But the plot is merely a pretext for a fierce satire against consumerism, organized religion, and political violence, expressed through living pictures of unheard-of symbolic power: the conquest of Mexico reenacted by toads and chameleons, a weapons factory that produces designer objects, excrement transformed into gold. The vibrant cinematography of Rafael Corkidi and the baroque production design create a universe saturated with color and detail, a visual labyrinth that culminates in the famous meta-cinematic ending, in which Jodorowsky breaks the fourth wall, orders the camera to zoom out to reveal the set and crew, and declares the end of the illusion. A radical gesture that transforms the film from a simple story into a tool of enlightenment, an invitation to seek the true Holy Mountain not on the screen, but in real life.

Eraserhead (1977)

Defined by its own creator as “a dream of dark and troubling things,” Eraserhead is the black-and-white nightmare that revealed the genius of David Lynch to the world. Born as a thesis short film for the American Film Institute (AFI), the project expanded immensely, turning into a production odyssey that lasted over five years. Lynch literally lived inside the sets, built in abandoned stables, financing the film with odd jobs and the support of friends and family. This tormented and almost artisanal gestation is palpable in every frame. The film is a total immersion into a desolate industrial landscape, a non-place of smoking chimneys, muddy alleys, and claustrophobic apartments, whose silence is broken only by an incessant and oppressive hum. The sound design, curated by Lynch himself along with Alan Splet, is a fundamental element: a soundscape of whistles, mechanical noises, and hisses that does not accompany the image but defines it, generating an atmosphere of tangible anguish. The plot, if it can be called that, follows Henry Spencer, a meek man with an iconic vertical hairstyle, as he navigates the anxieties of fatherhood after the birth of a monstrous child, a reptile-like creature that never stops crying. The film has been interpreted as a powerful allegory of the fear of responsibility and urban decay, themes deeply rooted in Lynch’s personal experiences, from his move to violent Philadelphia to the birth of his daughter Jennifer. Eraserhead rejects conventional narrative logic in favor of a sequence of surreal and disturbing visions, like the Lady in the Radiator singing “In Heaven (Everything Is Fine)” while crushing sperm-like creatures. It is a work that acts directly on the subconscious, a visceral experience that codified the adjective “Lynchian” and laid the foundation for one of the most singular and influential careers in contemporary cinema.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

A masterpiece of the Nová Vlna, the Czechoslovak New Wave, Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie a týden divů is one of the purest and most enchanting expressions of fantasy as a surreal adult fairy tale. Based on the avant-garde novel of the same name by Vítězslav Nezval from 1935, the film abandons all pretense of realism to embrace a exquisitely dreamlike logic, where events flow into one another with the coherence of a hallucination. The story follows thirteen-year-old Valerie (a luminous Jaroslava Schallerová) during the week of her first menstrual period, an event that acts as a catalyst for an explosion of gothic visions and forbidden desires. Her small village transforms into a stage of dangers and seductions, populated by archetypal figures: a vampiric grandmother obsessed with youth, a lustful priest with the face of a ferret-demon, sinister missionaries, and a young thief who could be her brother or her lover. Jireš uses the language of folklore and gothic horror—vampirism, witchcraft, religious persecution—not to frighten, but as a powerful allegorical tool to explore the awakening of female sexuality. Valerie navigates this world of patriarchal threats with a mix of innocence and curiosity, protected by a pair of magic earrings that symbolize her nascent power. The cinematography by Jan Čuřík is a lyrical triumph, with its soft light, pastel colors, and pictorial compositions that turn every frame into an illustration from a lost and perverse storybook. The film is a poetic and at times unsettling exploration of the transition from childhood to adulthood, a world where desire and fear are two sides of the same coin and reality is just one of many possible dreams.

Hausu (1977)

Few cinematic experiences can compare to the mad and joyous anarchy of Hausu. The debut feature by commercial director Nobuhiko Ōbayashi, the film is a total anomaly, a cult movie that defies any attempt at categorization. Born from an idea by the director’s pre-teen daughter, who imagined a house that devours its occupants, the script was initially rejected by Toho executives, who were bewildered by its anti-narrative and delirious nature. It was only through Ōbayashi’s insistence that the project got the green light, on the condition that it include a cast of newcomer actresses. The result is an explosion of unbridled creativity, a film that frontally attacks the conventions of the horror genre with an arsenal of experimental visual techniques. Seven schoolgirls, each with a name that defines their main characteristic (Gorgeous, Prof, Melody, Kung Fu), decide to spend their summer vacation at Gorgeous’s aunt’s country villa. The house soon reveals itself to be a malevolent and ravenous entity, eliminating the girls one by one in the most absurd and imaginative ways: a piano devours the musician, a mattress suffocates the sleepyhead, a lamp transforms into a dancing demon. Ōbayashi uses a visual language that deliberately mixes animation, collage, painted backdrops, and blatantly artificial special effects. His style does not seek realism but emotional and sensory impact, creating an atmosphere of a cartoon on acid. Beneath the surface of psychedelic horror-comedy, however, lies a touching and melancholic reflection on the unresolved trauma of post-war Japan. The aunt, a ghost trapped in the house, is a victim of the atomic bomb, who died waiting for her fiancé to return from the front. Her insatiable hunger for unmarried girls is a metaphor for the pain of a lost generation. Hausu is a unique work, a triumph of imagination that celebrates the power of cinema to be playful, terrifying, and profoundly human, all in the same, insane, breath.

Fantastic Planet (1973)

A masterpiece of auteur animation, La Planète Sauvage is a work of philosophical science fiction that uses its allegorical premise to conduct a profound reflection on the nature of power, knowledge, and rights. The result of a Franco-Czechoslovak co-production, the film bears the marks of its troubled production history. Director René Laloux, due to lower costs, chose to work with the animators of the Prague studio, but production, which began in 1968, was abruptly interrupted by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. This real experience of oppression inevitably poured into the soul of the film, giving its narrative an even more powerful political resonance. Based on the novel “Oms en série” by Stefan Wul, the film transports us to the planet Ygam, dominated by the Draags, gigantic blue humanoids with highly advanced technology and spirituality, who consider the small human beings, the Oms, as pets or pests to be exterminated. The story follows the journey of Terr, an Om adopted by a young Draag, who manages to access the knowledge of his masters and lead a rebellion for the freedom of his people. The film’s most iconic element is its visual style, curated by surrealist artist Roland Topor. Made with the technique of cutout animation on paper, the world of Ygam is a dreamlike and bizarre landscape, populated by flora and fauna that seem to have come out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. This unique aesthetic, combined with the psychedelic and jazz-funk soundtrack by Alain Goraguer, creates a hypnotic and alienating atmosphere. Beyond its visual beauty, Fantastic Planet is a layered allegory that can be read on multiple levels: a critique of racism and colonialism, a manifesto for animal rights, a reflection on the liberating power of knowledge, and a warning against the dehumanization of the other. A timeless work, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, that continues to question the viewer about their own humanity.

On the Silver Globe (1988)

To call it a film is almost an understatement; Na srebrnym globie is a fragment, a mutilated work, an interrupted cry that, precisely in its incompleteness, achieves an almost unbearable expressive power. It is the cursed masterpiece of Andrzej Żuławski, a project of immense ambition that was meant to be the largest Polish film production of its time. Based on the “Lunar Trilogy” written by his great-uncle Jerzy Żuławski at the beginning of the 20th century, the film tells the story of a group of astronauts who, shipwrecked on a planet similar to Earth, give rise to a new civilization. Generations later, another terrestrial explorer arrives on the planet and is hailed as the Messiah, destined to free humanity from the tyranny of the Szern, indigenous bird-like creatures. Filming, which began in 1976, took place in exotic and harsh locations, from the Gobi Desert to the Caucasus Mountains. Żuławski and his director of photography, Andrzej Jaroszewicz, developed a feverish visual style, with a constantly moving camera, distorting wide-angle lenses, and a desaturated, sickly color palette. The actors, pushed to the limits of physical and emotional performance, scream, writhe, and declaim philosophical dialogues in a perpetual state of trance. In 1977, with 80% of the film shot, the Polish Ministry of Culture, suspicious of possible anti-totalitarian subtexts and the blasphemous nature of the work, ordered the immediate halt of production and the destruction of all materials. Miraculously, much of the footage was saved. A decade later, with the fall of the communist regime, Żuławski was finally able to edit what remained. To fill the narrative gaps, he chose a radical solution: to insert images of contemporary Poland (busy streets, urban landscapes) commented on by his own voice-over, explaining the missing scenes. The effect is alienating and powerful. The intrusion of reality into the science-fiction world does not break the spell but amplifies it, transforming the film into a reflection on creation, destruction, and memory. On the Silver Globe is an extreme cinematic experience, a philosophical epic on the birth of myths, the violence of religion, and the infinite cycle of human history.

The Fall (2006)

In an era dominated by computer-generated imagery, Tarsem Singh’s The Fall stands as a monument to the tangible power of the cinematic image. It is a work of stunning visual beauty, an almost insane act of faith in cinema’s ability to create fantastic worlds without resorting (or almost without) to digital artifice. Its production is as legendary as the film itself: a four-year endeavor, shot in over twenty countries, from India to Namibia, from Turkey to Argentina, and largely self-financed by the director, who was frustrated by the studios’ lack of interest. Tarsem, coming from the world of music videos and advertising, poured all his passion for aesthetics into this project, composing each frame like a Renaissance painting. The story, based on the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, is a meta-narrative about the healing power of storytelling. In a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s, Roy Walker, a stuntman paralyzed after a fall, befriends Alexandria, a young Romanian immigrant with a broken arm. To convince her to steal morphine for him to commit suicide, Roy begins to tell her an epic story. This fantastic tale, which comes to life on screen, is populated by a group of unlikely heroes—a masked bandit, an escaped slave, an explosives expert, a naturalist, and an Indian mystic—united in their thirst for revenge against the evil Governor Odious. The film’s genius lies in the way the real and fantastic worlds influence each other. The characters in Roy’s story are played by the people who populate the hospital, seen through Alexandria’s naive eyes. As Roy’s desperation intensifies, his narrative becomes darker and more violent, and little Alexandria intervenes, trying to save her heroes. The Fall is a hymn to imagination as a form of resistance and salvation. Its visual opulence, which utilizes breathtaking architecture, surreal landscapes, and the flamboyant costumes of Oscar winner Eiko Ishioka, is never an end in itself but serves to celebrate the human capacity to create beauty even in the heart of pain. A total work of art, a sensory experience that reaffirms the primordial magic of cinema.

The City of Lost Children (1995)

After the cult success of Delicatessen, the French duo Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro pushed even further in developing their unique visual universe with La Cité des enfants perdus. The result is a dark and wonderfully grotesque steampunk fairy tale, a work that solidifies their status as visionaries of European cinema. The film transports us to a timeless port city, a labyrinth of damp alleys, rusty architecture, and greenish canals, shrouded in perpetual twilight. The aesthetic is a triumph of design: Darius Khondji’s cinematography, with its dominant red-green color scheme, creates a nightmarish fairy-tale atmosphere; Jean-Paul Gaultier’s retro-futuristic costumes define unforgettable characters; and the melancholic score by Angelo Badalamenti, a long-time collaborator of David Lynch, envelops everything in an aura of mystery. In this surreal world, a brilliant and unhappy scientist named Krank, unable to dream, ages prematurely. Convinced that children’s dreams can save him, he kidnaps them with the help of a cult of blind men (the Cyclops) and his clones, to steal their fantasies through an infernal machine. When the little brother of Miette, a cunning orphan, is kidnapped, the girl teams up with One, a circus strongman with a heart of gold (played by a memorable Ron Perlman), to save him. The narrative is a picaresque adventure that mixes elements of Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, and German Expressionist cinema. Jeunet and Caro populate their world with bizarre and unforgettable characters: two conjoined twins, a talking brain in an aquarium, a tamer of killer fleas. Their visual style, characterized by wide-angle lenses that distort faces and spaces, accentuates the sense of alienation and wonder. Beneath the surface of baroque fantasy, the film explores profound themes such as lost innocence, the exploitation of the weak, and the creation of unconventional families as an act of resistance. A visually sumptuous and thematically rich work, which remains one of the pinnacles of 1990s fantasy cinema.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

Panos Cosmatos’s debut feature, Beyond the Black Rainbow, is a hypnotic and almost impenetrable cinematic experience, a hallucinatory journey into the aesthetics and paranoia of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Set in 1983, the film is a “Reagan-era fever dream,” a work that seems to have been exhumed from a forgotten videotape, with its thick grain, saturated colors, and deliberately slow pace. The plot is intentionally sparse and cryptic. Inside the mysterious Arboria Institute, a New Age research center that promises to achieve happiness through science and spirituality, the young Elena is held captive. Endowed with powerful psychic abilities, the girl is subjected to continuous experiments by Dr. Barry Nyle, a sinister and controlling therapist. Cosmatos builds an atmosphere of clinical oppression and psychological terror, blending the glacial coldness of Stanley Kubrick’s cinema (particularly 2001: A Space Odyssey and THX 1138) with the chromatic and sensory excess of Dario Argento’s thrillers. The narrative proceeds through static shots and long, almost silent sequences, where tension is generated by the geometric composition of the frame, the unsettling sound design, and the pounding soundtrack by Sinoia Caves, made entirely with vintage analog synthesizers. The film is a thematic exploration of control, the failed counter-cultural utopia, and the search for a transcendence that proves to be monstrous. The Arboria Institute, with its minimalist aesthetic and promises of enlightenment, becomes a psychological prison. The “black rainbow” of the title suggests a perversion of the hippie ideal, a psychedelic journey that leads not to liberation but to madness and violence. Beyond the Black Rainbow is a difficult work, requiring patience and surrender from the viewer, but it rewards with a visual and sonic experience of rare power, a film that laid the groundwork for the unique aesthetic that Cosmatos would later bring to full maturity in his subsequent film Mandy.

Angel’s Egg (1985)

Tenshi no Tamago is a work of desolate beauty and almost unfathomable depth, a visual poem that ranks among the pinnacles of Japanese auteur animation. Born from the collaboration between two giants, director Mamoru Oshii (future creator of Ghost in the Shell) and artist Yoshitaka Amano (famous for his work on the Final Fantasy saga), this 1985 Original Anime Video (OVA) is a contemplative and almost entirely dialogue-free experience, entrusting its evocative power solely to images and sounds. The film introduces us to a post-apocalyptic world, dark and gothic, a city of dilapidated architecture and elongated shadows. Here, a white-haired girl jealously guards a large egg, protecting it under her dress. Her solitary routine is interrupted by the arrival of a man, a soldier carrying a cross-shaped weapon on his shoulder. The two travel together in silence through this desolate landscape, populated by fishermen who cast their lines in vain against the shadows of fossilized fish projected on the city walls. The film’s interpretation is notoriously open, but it is widely considered a complex allegory of Oshii’s personal crisis of faith, who in his youth had studied to become a Christian priest. The egg can represent faith, innocence, or an unborn soul; the girl, its devoted guardian; the man, the doubt or reason that questions its essence. The narrative is woven with a dense Christian symbolism, re-elaborated in a pessimistic key: the story of Noah’s Ark is told as a tragedy of abandonment, where the dove never returned, and living beings turned to stone. Amano’s visual style is breathtaking, with his ethereal characters and detailed settings that blend medieval aesthetics with a decadent surrealism. Angel’s Egg is a film that offers no answers but asks profound questions about the nature of faith, hope, and the search for meaning in a world seemingly abandoned by God. A work of pure, demanding, and unforgettable art.

Tale of Tales (2015)

With Il racconto dei racconti, Matteo Garrone, acclaimed director of the raw neorealism of Gomorrah, takes a surprising and courageous turn, immersing himself in the world of baroque and grotesque fantasy. Instead of turning to the sanitized versions of the Brothers Grimm or Disney, Garrone draws directly from the source, adapting three stories from “Lo cunto de li cunti” by Giambattista Basile, a collection of Neapolitan fairy tales from the 17th century. The result is a film that rediscovers the original nature of the fairy tale: a dark, violent, erotic, and morally ambiguous territory. Shot in English with an international cast (Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones), the film intertwines three stories set in three neighboring kingdoms. The Queen of Longtrellis, obsessed with the desire for a son, eats the heart of a sea monster to become pregnant. The King of Highhills lovingly raises a flea until it becomes gigantic, then offers his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who can guess the nature of its skin. The King of Strongcliff, an unrepentant lecher, becomes infatuated with the singing of a woman he believes to be beautiful, not knowing she is one of two elderly sisters. Garrone abandons social realism for a sumptuous and pictorial aesthetic. Working with cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (a collaborator of Cronenberg), he harnesses the magnificence of real castles, gardens, and landscapes of southern Italy (such as the Donnafugata Castle in Sicily and Castel del Monte in Puglia) to create a fantasy world that appears incredibly tangible. The use of practical and prosthetic special effects, preferred over CGI, helps to give a physical and visceral weight to the creatures and transformations. The film is a powerful and timeless reflection on the insatiable nature of desire: the desire for motherhood, for love, for youth, for power. Each character is consumed by an obsession that will lead them to ruin or a monstrous transformation. Tale of Tales is a visually opulent and thematically cruel work that restores to fantasy its most adult and unsettling dimension.

A Dark Song (2016)

The debut film of Irishman Liam Gavin, A Dark Song stands out in the independent horror landscape for its almost documentary-like and procedural approach to the supernatural. More than a film of jump scares, it is a claustrophobic psychological drama that explores the darkest recesses of grief and faith, using occultism as a powerful metaphor for the process of mourning. The plot is essential and takes place almost entirely within a remote and dilapidated mansion in Wales. Sophia, a woman consumed by grief over the death of her young son, rents the house for a year and hires Joseph Solomon, a gruff and disillusioned occultist, to guide her through a complex and dangerous black magic ritual. Her goal, she claims, is to contact her guardian angel to speak with her son one last time. The film describes with almost unprecedented meticulousness the preparation and execution of the ritual, based on the teachings of the Book of Abramelin. There is nothing glamorous or easy about it: the process is exhausting, repetitive, and psychologically brutal. Sophia and Solomon must undergo fasting, sexual deprivation, incessant prayers, and complex drawings of sigils, sealing the house from the outside world with a circle of salt. The film’s strength lies in the growing tension between the two protagonists. Their forced cohabitation turns into a battle of wills, in which their respective traumas, lies, and true motivations emerge. Sophia, in fact, is not just seeking solace, but revenge against her son’s murderers. This impurity of intent corrupts the ritual, opening the doors not only to angels but also to demonic entities that begin to torment them. A Dark Song is a work that takes its subject matter seriously, treating magic not as a trick, but as a belief system with strict rules and terrible consequences. It is a terrifying journey into the heart of grief, a powerful allegory about the need to confront one’s inner demons to finally find a form of forgiveness and light.

The Green Knight (2021)

Produced by A24, a guarantee of a certain kind of contemporary auteur cinema, The Green Knight is the most ambitious and radical film adaptation of the Middle English chivalric poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Director David Lowery does not merely transpose the story but reinterprets it in a modern key, transforming the chivalric adventure into a psychological and existential journey about the nature of honor, mortality, and greatness. The film follows Sir Gawain (an intense Dev Patel), the dissolute nephew of King Arthur, who, eager to prove his worth, accepts a challenge issued by a mysterious arboreal creature, the Green Knight. The game is simple and deadly: Gawain can strike a blow against the Knight, provided that a year and a day later he travels to the Green Chapel to receive an identical one in return. After beheading the creature, who rises and leaves with his own head in hand, Gawain begins his long and perilous journey to his appointment with destiny. Lowery abandons the traditional epic structure for a slow, contemplative, and dreamlike pace. Gawain’s journey is not a sequence of heroic battles but a surreal odyssey through Irish landscapes of poignant and desolate beauty, captured by the magnificent cinematography of Andrew Droz Palermo, who uses large-format cameras to create wide and pictorial compositions. The film is imbued with a rich color symbolism, where green is not only the color of nature but also of decomposition, pagan magic, and a life force that transcends human morality. Gawain encounters ghosts, giants, thieves, and a pair of seductive nobles, trials that question not so much his physical courage as his moral integrity. The Green Knight is an anti-spectacular fantasy, a visually sumptuous work of art that deconstructs the Arthurian myth to question what it means to be a hero in a world where glory is ephemeral and nature, indifferent, is destined to reclaim everything.

Mandy (2018)

After the cerebral debut of Beyond the Black Rainbow, Panos Cosmatos returns to explore the aesthetics of the 80s with Mandy, a film that elevates his vision to a level of almost absolute perfection, creating a work destined to become an instant cult classic. The film is a modern “acid western,” a tale of revenge that blends the imagery of heavy metal, fantasy novel covers, and psychedelic horror into a unique and overwhelming sensory experience. The narrative structure is sharply divided into two parts. The first half is a dreamy and melancholic idyll. In the forests of the Shadow Mountains in 1983, lumberjack Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) and his partner Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough), an artist who loves fantasy and metal, live a quiet and isolated existence. Cosmatos paints their love with a palette of warm colors, slow camera movements, and an almost ethereal atmosphere, punctuated by animated sequences that visualize the fantastic worlds drawn by Mandy. This peace is brutally shattered when Mandy attracts the attention of Jeremiah Sand, the leader of a cult of failed hippies called “The Children of the New Dawn.” Obsessed with her beauty, Jeremiah summons a gang of demonic bikers to kidnap her. From this moment, the film descends into a nightmare. The second part is an explosion of cathartic and hallucinatory violence. After helplessly witnessing Mandy’s death, Red, consumed by grief and rage, embarks on a mission of revenge. His journey is a total immersion into madness, fueled by drugs and a primordial pain. Cosmatos unleashes a visual orgy of strobe lights, red and blue color filters, and graphic violence that borders on the Grand Guignol. Nicolas Cage delivers one of the most iconic performances of his career, a totally free and over-the-top interpretation that perfectly channels his character’s descent into hell. Mandy is a total work of art, a visual and sonic trip (accompanied by the magnificent score of the late Jóhann Jóhannsson) that celebrates the cathartic power of rage and transforms the simplest of plots into a modern mythological epic.

Ink (2009)

Ink is a shining example of how creative ambition and passion can triumph over budget limitations, a small miracle of independent cinema that found its audience through unconventional paths. Made for just $250,000 by the filmmaking couple Jamin and Kiowa Winans, who filled almost every key role in the production (directing, writing, editing, music, production design), the film was initially ignored by traditional distribution. Its fortune was paradoxically born from piracy: after being illegally uploaded to file-sharing sites, a viral word-of-mouth campaign made it a cult success, prompting the creators themselves to “embrace piracy” and ask for voluntary donations. The strength of Ink lies in its complex and original mythology, which intertwines two narrative planes. In the real world, we follow the story of John, an arrogant, work-obsessed businessman who has lost custody of his daughter Emma after his wife’s death. In the dream world, we witness an invisible war between two factions of spirits: the Storytellers, luminous beings who bring happy dreams, and the Incubi, dark entities that sow despair. When little Emma falls into a coma, her soul is kidnapped by Ink, a deformed and grotesque creature who intends to offer her to the Incubi to become one of them. The Storytellers set off in pursuit to save the child. The film skillfully alternates between the harsh reality of John’s family drama and the fantastic universe of the dream battle. Jamin Winans demonstrates incredible inventiveness in creating effective visual effects with limited means, such as the fight sequences where time rewinds, or the use of lenses and lights to distinguish the two worlds. Beyond its low-cost aesthetic, the heart of the film is a powerful tale of redemption. The struggle for Emma’s soul is a metaphor for John’s struggle to reconnect with his daughter and overcome his own selfishness. Ink is a sincere and moving work, a testament to the power of independent cinema to tell complex and spiritually resonant stories without the need for million-dollar budgets.

City of Pirates (1983)

To enter the cinema of Raúl Ruiz is to abandon all narrative certainty and allow oneself to be transported into a labyrinth of dreams, mirrors, and doubles. La Ville des Pirates is perhaps the work that best embodies his surreal and baroque poetics, a film that is not watched, but experienced. Made during his exile in France, the film was written by Ruiz day by day, using automatic writing techniques to draw directly from the subconscious. The result is a hypnotic odyssey devoid of a linear plot, a visual stream of consciousness that evokes the spirit of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and literary surrealism. The “city” of the title does not exist; the action takes place on a desolate island, dominated by a spectral castle. Here, the fates of enigmatic characters intersect: Isidore, a young sleepwalking woman tormented by visions; Malo, a ten-year-old boy (played by a very young and extraordinary Melvil Poupaud) who claims to have raped and killed his entire family; and Toby, the sole inhabitant of the castle, a man who shares his body with an imaginary sister. These characters move in a mental rather than physical landscape, a world governed by a dreamlike logic where meaning is constantly deferred and identities are fluid and interchangeable. Ruiz constructs a cinematic experience that disorients and fascinates, using complex shots with foreground objects that distort perspective, sudden shifts from color to black and white, and poetic, absurd dialogues. The film explores Freudian themes such as incest, parricide, and the search for a fragmented identity, but it does so without any psychological or moralistic intent. It is a pure immersion into the imaginary, a game of formal seduction in which desire and narrative chase each other endlessly without ever reaching a resolution. City of Pirates is a masterpiece of experimental cinema, a radical work that challenges the viewer to renounce rational understanding in order to embrace the mystery and unsettling beauty of the unconscious.

MirrorMask (2005)

Born from a request by The Jim Henson Company to create a new family fantasy film in the vein of classics like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, MirrorMask is the fruit of a collaboration between two exceptional creative minds: writer Neil Gaiman and visual artist Dave McKean. The result is a work that, while aimed at a young audience, does not shy away from thematic complexity and a sophisticated, at times unsettling, visual aesthetic typical of the two authors’ work. The film tells the story of Helena, a fifteen-year-old girl who works in her family’s circus but dreams of a normal life. After an argument with her mother, who is shortly thereafter hospitalized with a serious illness, Helena, consumed by guilt, finds herself catapulted into a dream world. This parallel dimension, composed of a City of Light and a Kingdom of Shadows, is populated by bizarre creatures and ruled by two conflicting queens. Helena discovers that the Queen of Shadows has stolen an amulet, the “Mirror Mask,” causing the illness of the Queen of Light and, by extension, her mother in the real world. To save both worlds, Helena must find the amulet. The film’s true strength lies in its extraordinary visual aesthetic. Dave McKean, in his directorial debut, translates his unmistakable style as an illustrator and cover artist (famous for his work on Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book series) into a cinematic universe. Made on a modest budget, the film skillfully blends live-action, CGI animation, puppets, and digital collages to bring to life a world that is a direct emanation of the protagonist’s drawings and subconscious. The creatures are floating masks, books become means of transport, giants are made of rock, and sphinxes speak in riddles. MirrorMask is a post-modern re-reading of classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, a coming-of-age journey in which the protagonist must navigate her own artistic creations to confront her fears, her guilt, and her complex relationship with her mother. A visually rich and imaginative work that celebrates the power of art as a tool to understand and reorder the chaos of the inner world.

Border (2018)

Based on a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, the author of Let the Right One In, Gräns (Border) is a unique and unclassifiable work, a film that masterfully blends Nordic noir, body horror, romantic drama, and Scandinavian folklore. Iranian-Swedish director Ali Abbasi creates a powerful and disturbing modern fairy tale that uses the fantastic element to explore with depth and sensitivity universal themes such as identity, marginalization, and the very nature of humanity. The protagonist is Tina, a Swedish customs officer with an unusual, almost feral physical appearance, and an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell so developed that she can literally “sniff out” human emotions like fear, shame, and guilt. This ability makes her infallible in her work but condemns her to a life of solitude, on the fringes of a society that views her with suspicion. Her existence is turned upside down by the encounter with Vore, a traveler who strikingly resembles her and whom, for the first time, she cannot “read.” The attraction between the two is immediate and visceral. Vore reveals her true nature to her, and consequently her own: they are not humans with a “chromosomal anomaly,” as she has always been told, but trolls, creatures of Norse mythology forced to live hidden among humans. This revelation is both a liberation and a crisis for Tina. She discovers a primordial connection with nature, a free and wild sexuality, but also the dark side of her species, represented by Vore’s resentment towards humanity. The film is a triumph of performance and technique. Eva Melander and Eero Milonoff, unrecognizable under Oscar-winning prosthetic makeup, deliver performances of moving vulnerability and strength. Abbasi directs with a sober and realistic style, which makes the irruption of the fantastic into the everyday stand out even more. Border is a powerful allegory about the condition of the outsider, whether due to ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation. It is a film that questions the boundaries we draw between ourselves and “others,” between nature and civilization, between human and beast, and shows us how accepting one’s true identity can be both an act of joy and a source of profound pain.

Possum (2018)

Possum is a slow and inexorable dive into psychological horror, a film that demonstrates how the fantastic can be the most effective tool for giving shape to the unspeakable. The debut feature of Matthew Holness (known in the UK for his cult comedy series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace), the film is the antithesis of his previous work: a dark, almost silent piece permeated by an atmosphere of desolation and decay. The story follows Philip, a disgraced children’s puppeteer, who returns to his dilapidated childhood home after an unspecified scandal. He carries with him a leather suitcase containing his only and terrifying companion: Possum, a grotesque puppet with the body of a giant spider and a pale, expressionless human head. Philip is obsessed with the need to get rid of the puppet, but every attempt fails: he throws it in a canal, buries it in a forest, but Possum always comes back to him, like a resurfacing trauma. Holness builds an oppressive, almost suffocating atmosphere. The film, shot in a desaturated and spectral Norfolk, functions as a “modern silent film.” Dialogue is reduced to a minimum, and the horror is conveyed entirely through images, the physical performance of Sean Harris (who plays a tormented and fragile Philip), and the jarring soundtrack by the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. The puppet, Possum, is a perfect embodiment of the Freudian concept of the “uncanny” (unheimlich): a familiar object (a toy) made terrifying and alien. It is the physical and tangible manifestation of the repressed childhood abuse Philip suffered at the hands of his slimy and manipulative uncle Maurice, with whom he is forced to live. The film is a heartbreaking allegory of the cycle of trauma. Shame, guilt, and the inability to communicate his pain trap Philip in a waking nightmare, a mental landscape of fear and loneliness. Possum is not an easy film, but it is a work of rare power, a masterful example of how horror cinema can address the deepest wounds of the human psyche with intelligence and a devastating sensitivity.