50 Greatest WTF Movies

Lost Highway (1997)

Carnival of Souls (1962)

The WTF Movie: Herk Harvey's cult classic B-movie about a woman, Mary, who takes a job in a town only to find the inhabitants terrorised the pallid ghoul The Man and lured into a trance by organ music.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Mary looks towards a car window and sees the face of The Man reflected back at her.

The Happiness Of The Katakuris (2001)

The WTF Movie: To be honest, half a dozen Takashi Miike films might have made this list, but it's hard to beat this for weirdness - a musical horror about a family running a corpse-strewn B&B.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: A woman is attacked by a claymation demon who's hiding in her soup.

Phantasm (1979)

The WTF Movie: Kids discover that their local undertaker - the Tall Man - is a shape-shifting superhuman weirdo who uses homicidal flying spheres to convert the funeral home's corpses into undead dwarfs.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: A woman stabs her lover to death during sex, and then "she" transforms into the Tall Man.

The Wicker Man (1973)

The WTF Movie: Pagan horror, British style, as Edward Woodward's virginal copper realises it's not all hippy-dippy free love on Summerisle.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The first sign that all is not right with these people, as a child is cured of a sore throat by having a frog placed in its mouth.

Donnie Darko (2001)

The WTF Movie: Richard Kelly's instant cult classic about a teenager (Jake Gyllenhaal) stuck in a world-threatening 'tangent universe' when he mistaken escapes a jet engine falling on his bedroom.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Donnie meets Frank (a dead man in a Halloween rabbit costume) who tells him the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds.

Freaks (1932)

The WTF Movie: Tod Browning's drama about carny folk using real-life "freakshow" performers to achieve its disquieting, decidedly non-politically-correct atmosphere.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The armless, legless Human Torso (Prince Randian) rolls and lights his own cigarette using just his tongue.

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

The WTF Movie: Luis Bunuel's surrealist classic about a dinner party whose guests find, inexplicably, that they cannot leave the house.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Sheep break into the house; the guests pounce in order to slaughter and eat them.

The Cabin In The Woods (2012)

The WTF Movie: Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard screw with expectations by revealing exactly what's going on beneath the archetypal 'cabin in the woods' scenario.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Movie monsters, assemble.

Society (1989)

The WTF Movie: Ever thought the upper classes were a different breed? In Brian Yuzna's gory satire, it turns out those fears are not unfounded.

Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The rich introduce their favourite pastime, 'shunting' - an orgy of gross physical melding in which the gestalt flesh literally feasts on the poor.