This article is part of a directory: Game Rant's Ultimate Guide To Horror Movies
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Horror movies are meant to be uncomfortable. They are designed to make audiences squirm in their seats, linger and leave nightmares behind all in the name of fun and a quick adrenaline rush. The great thing about horror movies is that they are temporary, they all end, and nine times out of ten the heroes win out against the evil and get to go back to their lives.

What happens when the outcome isn't quite so clear? Sometimes there is no clear resolution, no definitive vanquishing of evil or return to the status quo. Sometimes, it's up to the audience to imagine the outcome and there's nothing more terrifying than what the human imagination can dream up. With that being said, this list looks at 5 of the most underappreciated horror films that left audiences guessing.

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The Babadook

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The directorial debut from Jennifer Kent, The Babadook is on the surface a run-of-the-mill monster movie, albeit one that's done exceptionally well. Dig a little deeper, and it's clear that the film is also an allegory for battling mental illness, grief, and stress. Widow Amelia is struggling to raise her son Sam as she deals with his ever-worsening behavioral problems and tries to maintain a job to pay the bills. As Sam's behavior spirals even further out of control, Amelia finds a storybook called The Babadook which describes the story of a man-like monster, dressed all in black with a top hat and sharp-clawed fingers. The story only serves to create more tension in the house when Sam becomes obsessed with The Babadook and Amelia begins to think she sees it out of the corner of her eye.

As the movie comes to a crescendo, Amelia has to face the monster to save her son and herself. The ending leaves things open. Amelia and Sam are seen feeding the monster but is the monster real? Was it ever real, or was it a shared delusion of a family on the verge of fracture?

Halloween III: Season Of The Witch

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1982's much-maligned third film in the Halloween franchise doesn't feature Michael Myers. Instead, the film focuses on a strange cult/coven that is trying to harness the power from Stonehenge by performing ritualistic sacrifices of children. The coven is doing this in the most sensible way possible by using the company Silver Shamrock as a front and implanting pieces of a stolen Stonehenge stone into microchips placed onto the back of Halloween masks. Once the microchips are activated by a commercial on t.v, the wearer is turned into a writhing mass of snakes and bugs.

Dr. Daniel Challis (Tom Atkins) is drawn into the plot by circumstance and races against time to stop the plot before the commercial can be aired. At the end of the movie, Atkins is screaming into a phone, begging for the television signal to be cut from the source as the Silver Shamrock jingle plays in the background.

It Follows

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It Follows brought something new to the horror genre with the idea of a sexually transmitted haunting of sorts. Once infected, an entity begins following the person affected, and can only be seen by them. As time goes on The Entity comes closer and closer, able to change form into different people, making it harder to detect. Once it catches up, a grisly end swiftly follows. The only way to stop the curse is to pass it on to someone else and hope it never catches them because once the entity snuffs out its prey it renews its focus on the previous host. Protagonist Jay must keep moving as she tries to figure out how to stop The Entity once and for all.

At the end of the movie, Jay and her new boyfriend walk down the street hand in hand, finally feeling safe. As they walk, unbeknownst to them, a person is seen stumbling along behind them. Is this just a person going about their day, or is The Entity still following?

Jacob's Ladder

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Jacob Singer, a veteran of the Vietnam War (Tim Robbins) has returned home, now working as a postal clerk and trying to maintain his fragile grip on normality. Jacob is grieving for his son Gabe and is plagued by hallucinations and visions, horrible, vibrating figures haunt him wherever he goes. As the film goes on, the line between reality and nightmare blurs further. Flashbacks of Jacob at war are shown, sometimes he appears to be being experimented on, others he is with his family including his dead son Gabe.

Steeped in paranoia, Jacob's Ladder is deeply unsettling for every second of runtime. Towards the end of the film we see Jacob back in Vietnam, mortally wounded and being worked on by medics. The flashbacks and timeline shifts make it hard to know what is real and what is a result of his increasingly fractured state of mind. Was it all the hallucination of a dying man or was something more sinister happening to Jacob?

In The Mouth Of Madness

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Part of John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, In The Mouth Of Madness is an homage to Lovecraft. Freelance insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) is hired to track down missing horror author Sutter Cane for his publisher. Accompanied by Cane's editor Linda Style (Julie Carmen), Trent pieces together that Cane has found his way to the fictional town of Hobb's End. The town is full of friendly inhabitants who also happen to be horrible nightmare fuel, all in service of Sutter Cane who has taken up residence in the local church. As nightmares from another dimension bleed through into reality, fueled by the public believing in the horrors that Cane writes about, Trent finds himself fighting to destroy Cane's newest manuscript before the public can get their hands on it.

Trent finds himself back in New York, the publisher denying the existence of Linda and explaining that the book has been out for months and the film adaptation is upcoming. Now in an asylum, with a world being overrun by monsters, what is the reality for John Trent? Is he crazy? Is the world truly ending or is he merely a character in Sutter Cane's latest book?

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