The mind can stumble over simple things. At times, a biological glitch is responsible. Then we see the wrong colors, cannot stop eating, or struggle to look honest during a conversation.

Other triggers have no explanation for why they mess with the mind—like being offered a hat or a cookie. Then people float out of chairs and give away dangerous information. Indeed, the hiccups of the brain remain a fascinating world.

10 Bizarre Ways Your Sense Of Touch Changes How You Think

10 The Food Variety Effect

Christmas is full of cheer, tinsel, and weight gain. The festive season is notorious for leaving extra padding. Even though people eat more during this time, they are often surprised by the amount of weight that greets them in January. This is largely due to a phenomenon known as the “variety effect.” The more food is on offer, the more people eat without realizing it.

Nature has a way of curbing the appetite. The longer the tongue deals with the same texture or flavor, the more one’s appetite diminishes. Presto, the meal ends without gorging oneself.

However, this mechanism fails when people graze at buffets, Thanksgiving dinners, or Christmas lunches. Switching between different foods delays the desire to stop eating because the flavors and textures keep changing. This is why something as simple as a meal with several courses can fool guests about how much they consume in one sitting.^[1]

9 Eye Contact Freaks Out The Brain

According to body language books, people who don’t maintain eye contact might just be untrustworthy characters. However, there is now evidence that the weasel factor is not the entire story.

Those who cannot stare at another person while holding a sparkling conversation are experiencing an unusual effect. Our brains use the same regions for talking, thinking, and keeping eye contact. Sometimes, this causes a mental traffic jam.

This conclusion came from a small Japanese study. But the outcome suggested that the brain struggles with the combination of focusing on a face and thinking of words to say. The effect worsens when the conversation uses new or difficult phrases.

To cope, the befuddled brain tries to single-task by making the person feel that he has to avert his eyes.^[2]

8 Crossed Arms Can Bring Pain Relief

There are plenty of ways to stop the pain. But pills and potions aside, the future of pain relief could include physiotherapists demonstrating poses to confuse the brain.

A small study in 2011 showed that the idea might not be as ludicrous as it sounds. Twenty people agreed to be zapped by a laser. After being burned on their hands, they crossed their arms to see if this simple act could reduce the pain.

The participants reported that their hands felt better and their EEG caps, which measured the brain’s electrical mood, said the same thing. Apparently, the noggin is used to the left hand touching the left side of the world. The same with the right hand and side.

Crossing the arms places the injured hand on the wrong side and tricks the brain into a weaker pain awareness. That is the theory anyway. But for a new pain therapy still in its infancy, the scientific evidence is looking good.^[3]

7 Left And Right

Turn left? Go right? Left-right confusion is surprisingly common. Sometimes, it leads to terrifying mistakes—like the pair of surgeons who once removed the wrong kidney and the patient died. Even more disturbing, when more medical professionals were tested, too many identified the incorrect eye booked for surgery.

The problem grows when there is pressure to pick a side. A passenger giving directions to a speeding driver is also more likely to say “turn that way” and end up in the wrong place.^[4]

Two directions. A simple confusion. Yet despite countless attempts, scientists still do not know why this happens. They have a suspicion, though, that the brain’s way of processing the different sides is more complicated than just looking one way or the other.

Telling somebody else to go a certain way or trying to see their left or right when it’s the opposite of our own can mess with the mind. Especially when there is no time to consider things at a slower pace.

6 The Good Looks Bias

Nobody likes to think that something as superficial as looks can sway their opinion. But the statistics are there. Attractive people get more votes and shorter criminal sentences. They are also viewed as more honest, trustworthy, kind, and intelligent.

This does not mean that everybody is a shallow idiot. Once again, science suggests that the brain is making a multitasking blooper.

The same brain region rates beautiful faces and good behavior in others. So, when the brain thinks about hot eyebrows, it also assumes things about the person’s character that might not be so positive in reality.

The same channel also works in reverse. When that happens, people who are not conventionally attractive are seen as beautiful because they have gracious personalities.^[5]

10 Fascinating Ways Our Brains Can Be Manipulated

5 Kids Think Birthday Parties Cause Aging

They know that it’s time for presents and cake and that today is all about them. That is not the confusing part. In a cute way, some children believe that the birthday party itself makes them older.

After researchers spoke to children aged four to nine years old, some kids said that they would never grow older without a birthday party. When asked if the elderly could regain their youth by celebrating their birthdays in reverse (an 80-year-old celebrating his 79th birthday, for example), a couple of kids believed that this was possible.^[6]

Like adults, children look for meaning in personal events. Turning older is a big deal, but the only obvious thing happening is the party. Therefore, the younger the child, the likelier they are to mistake the celebration as the reason they just aged.

4 Motion Sickness Is Mistaken For Poison

Scientists believe that the brain has a fear of being poisoned. When signals do not add up, the brain uses an old faithful to rid the body of toxins—the barf. Unfortunately, the brain sometimes imagines things. Motion sickness is a classic example.

Evolution cannot keep up with technology. In this case, the human body never adapted to moving transport. The main problem is that vehicles make it hard for the brain to decide whether the body is on the move or is stationary.

There is little muscle action, so the brain knows that the person is sitting still. However, the ears carry a special fluid capable of sensing movements. During a drive, the sloshing sends a clear message. This body is hurtling forward.^[7]

The mixed signals wreak havoc with the brain’s hypochondria. Convinced that the body ingested something bad, the brain triggers nausea. Some people get it so bad that they are forced to pull over to throw up. Interestingly, it remains a mystery as to why motion sickness only affects certain individuals and not others.

3 Color Changes When The Brain Bumbles Light

When that happens, things can get nasty online. Take a Tumblr post in 2015, for example. It showed a dress, which was simple enough. But two factions were soon at each other’s throats. The one side insisted that the garment was blue and black. The rest called them idiots because the dress was clearly white and gold.

Nobody lied. Things just went a bit haywire in the brain department.^[8]

When we look at something, wavelengths of light hit the retina and stimulate the brain’s visual areas. This makes us see an image. Normally, the brain filters out the source of light and tries to extract more light frequencies from the object itself.

In this case, when the brain succeeded in sponging the object’s light, people saw the real dress—the one that was blue and black. But the white-and-gold crowd fell foul to a simple switch. Instead of focusing on the material’s wavelengths, their brains gave more love to the source of light around it (probably the daylight).

2 Trading Personal Information For A Cookie

Most people want their private information to stay private. They go to great lengths to keep the details away from the devils out there. But something odd happened in 2014. A stranger offered cookies, and people gladly handed over their sensitive information.

Parents warn their kids against sweetie people like this. But apparently, the adults themselves cannot resist the right lure. Visitors to an arts festival in Brooklyn found this out the hard way. Luckily for them, it was an experiment and not an identity racket.

Artist Risa Puno offered cookies decorated with the Instagram logo. The trendy treats were a hit. They could be “bought” with personal details. To get a cookie, people had to give Puno their phone numbers, driver’s license details, maiden names, fingerprints, or the last few digits of their social security numbers.

Even though these nuggets are gold to criminals, the cookies sweetened 380 people into parting with their personal details.^[9]

Maybe it was the cookie’s innocence. Maybe it was the smile of an artist standing at an official-looking space at an art festival. Whatever witchcraft was responsible even made people ignore a notice saying that Puno could share their details with third parties.

In the end, the experiment was done to test a theory. The latter suggested that people want their information to stay safe but do not grasp the dangers of trading tidbits about their privacy. This makes it easy to sway them with something as simple as a frosted cookie.

1 The God Helmet

In 2018, researchers played with people’s heads. More specifically, they made people wear skateboarding helmets and told these individuals that the wires hanging from the headgear were going to influence their brains.

The researchers also said that each helmet’s electrical current could give the participants a spiritual experience. Even the hat’s name was enough to invoke awe in the more religious-minded. It was called the “God Helmet.”

The helmet was just a helmet. The wires were connected to a device with lights, but that was just for show. There was no electrical current. The scientists aimed to see if alcohol could make people believe that they were having a spiritual encounter. For this reason, the team reaped 193 participants from a music festival in the Netherlands where tipsy and drugged volunteers were guaranteed.^[10]

Each person wore the helmet for 15 minutes. During that time, their hearing and sight were blocked with white noise and a blindfold, respectively. In the end, drugs and alcohol did not give anyone an edge.

Both sober and sozzled festivalgoers experienced bizarre things. Most felt some kind of space or time distortion, hallucinations, or unusual physical sensations. Some heard voices or floated out of their chairs.

Interestingly, those who reacted the strongest to the placebo hat were the self-reported believers in spirituality—but not necessarily God. If anything, their faith could have made them more susceptible to suggestion than the rest.

10 Mysterious Soundscapes That Rocked The Ancient World

We all know not to put up a middle finger at a polar bear. We all know not to tell a black widow that it’s got no friends. Would you hang around if you spilled your beer on a gorilla?

There are many animals we instinctively know not to mess with. Here’s list of some animals you may not know are dangerous, gross or generally hostile to us two-legged pig-monkeys. Mess with them at your own peril!

10 Animals That Use Bizarre Methods To Kill Their Prey

10 Hairy Frogs

Perhaps the most metal animal ever, the hairy frog doesn’t just look like the type of amphibian that’d be first into the mosh pit at a Slayer gig, but it has a very interesting defence mechanism when it feels threatened. It breaks its own legs.

Whenever these little mad-lads are being attacked or picked up by uncaring biologists seeking to study them in their native Central African forests, they push a bony spur through the skin of their feet by breaking the nodule that sheaths it. Like a non-healing Wolverine from X-men. So why would humans not mess with them, they aren’t dangerous? Well, would you want to be responsible for letting a harmless little frog break their own feet in fear? Please say no…^[1]

9 Capercaillies

If you were fancying pilfering a little egg or two for your supper, you’d probably pick a bird like the capercaille to steal from. They’re a sort of grouse, so not that bright, plus they’re heads point upwards, making it look as though they’re doing a spot of stargazing. But don’t be fooled by these fat little beasties comical visage, they’ll kick your ass up and down the forest!

Male Western Capercaillies display heightened territoriality and aggression during mating season, often willing to fight all comers, including unlucky bird-watchers who get to close. It seems that this behaviour isn’t all male capercaillies, however. A study that tracked behaviour in the more ‘deviant’ birds (males known to attack humans), conducted in Southern Finland, found that these males showed testosterone levels five times higher than the baseline. It could be the effect of ‘negative sexual imprinting’, ‘abnormal sex hormone distribution’ or ‘underground capercaillie steroid use in the locker rooms of Finland’s avian gyms’… Ok, the last reason was fake.^[2]

8 Moray Eels

Going toe-to-toe with the angler fish for the title of ‘the ocean’s scariest looking denizen’, moray eels are pretty horrifying animals. They hang around near reefs and rocky parts of shallow waters, ready to snatch any passing prey. Sometimes, a diver’s hand looks like an unwitting crustacean to a moray eel. You can see where I’m going here.

With many of the 200 different species possessing some incredibly awful-looking, needle-like teeth, one can imagine that a bite from one of these dead-eyed monsters would be quite unpleasant. Given that they’re teeth are arranged in a backwards-facing fashion, causing a ‘rip’ like bite, and given that their mucous contains two sorts of nasty venom that causes red blood cells to both clump and eventually get destroyed, maybe calling their bite ‘unpleasant’ was a bit of an understatement.

Plus, look at their face! Ugh.^[3]

7 Tiger Centipede

Swelling, redness, itching, possible anaphylaxis and tissue necrosis – all standard fare for a nip from a creepy crawler. So what makes a bite from the giant desert centipede (also known as the tiger centipede) any different from, say, a bumblebee sting?

The pain. Sweet mother of mercy. The pain!

Naturalist Coyote Peterson (great name), has become a bit of a legend in the world of ‘people doing dangerous things in the name of progress’ by working his way through the list of ‘Insect Sting Pain Index’, AKA ‘The Schmidt Pain Index’, named after entomologist Justin Schmidt. Why is it named after him? Because he did the same thing Coyote did – wilfully subject himself to a series of bug stings in the name of science.

People will often think of the bullet ant or tarantula hawk wasp as the worst pain-givers in the insect world. Not according to Coyote Peterson: “This just absolutely eclipses all the insect stings I’ve taken “. Frankly, I believe him.^[4]

6 Australian Magpies

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but where I’m from, magpies are intelligent, beautiful birds that’ll pinch any shiny objects it finds to fly back to their nests. Not down under. There, they are a dangerous menace.

Australian magpies seem to have developed a pathological hatred of humans who walk within a few feet of their nest. As a result, these black & white blighters have resolved to dive bomb anybody who wanders within their proximal zone of protection. Especially cyclists. This year alone there have been over 3000 attacks on humans by magpies in Australia, with 399 people receiving injuries (not just a jump scare as they commute to work through the park).^[5]

Top 10 Surreal Animals That Really Exist

5 Camel Spiders

These Middle Eastern monstrosities are so completely nightmarish that they have inspired urban legends! Ok, so they may not inject unwitting victims with a local anaesthetic to use their huge mandibles to cut coin-sized holes in your torso to burrow inside and eat your guts from within – but they are creepy little arachnids that could give you one hell of a bite and a hell of a fright.

Whilst looking like a cross between a giant scorpion and a spider may be enough to send most people screaming for their mother, they do possess one unusual property that make them well placed on this list. They’re horrifyingly fast! Maybe not quick enough to catch a reasonably fit and healthy person sprinting at full tilt, but clocking in at an impressive 10 MPH, you better hope your ankle remains un-strained.^[6]

4 Alligator Snapping Turtle

Due to a seemingly perpetual exotic animal trade, human beings are often found in possession of some pretty dangerous animals. When we consider that this large turtle is one of them, you may think ‘What? It’s a turtle. Minus some ninja weapons and a rat sensei, they’re slow and cute!’ Wrong. According to Thomas Coy of ‘Austins Turtle Page’ (a website for turtle enthusiasts and keepers), these gigantic beasts aren’t even suited for many experienced handlers.

The alligator snapping turtle has one of the most powerful bites in the animal kingdom, measuring in at a whopping 1000 psi (pounds per square inch), they’re not to be underestimated – the great white shark has a bite force of 625 psi. They may not be in the same league as the jaguar (1350 psi), gorilla (1300 psi) or a crocodile (3700 psi), but nobody would ever try to give one of these animals a cuddle. A friendly little turtle though? If you want to give it a go, prepare to say bye-bye to your thumbs.^[][7]

3 Giant Anteaters

Aww!

These guys are even cuter than the turtles. Until you look at those claws. And especially if you know how they fight when threatened. Giant anteaters rear up, lift their claws and swipe, leaving anybody unlucky enough to face off with these Central/South American animals thinking ‘so THAT’S what my guts look like’.

In 2010 and 2012 respectively, two Brazilian hunters were killed by anteaters. Both instances prompted alarm as to the loss of the creatures habitat, possibly indicating that an increase in such encounters may be on the cards. In 2009, an Argentine zookeeper was mauled to death whilst she was inside the enclosure with a particularly aggressive anteater. The ancient Aztecs considered the animal a comical, trickster-like figure whilst surrealists like Dali and animator Max Fleischer also pointed to the animal’s strange look. Never forget the claws…^[8]

2 Assassin Bugs

The clue is in the name. These bugs are often listed as one of the top animals that cause human deaths. But they’re mostly just an annoyance – they’re bite is irritating and itchy. Some species display the macabre behaviour of wearing the corpses of their vanquished foe, attaching the body of the murdered bug to their back which is covered in a sticky substance. So how do they kill people?

Whilst most assassin bugs don’t kill people, the inappropriately-named ‘Kissing Bug’ (rhodnius prolixus) is a species that lives in South America that carries the parasitic protozoan that cases Chagas disease. The illness affects around 7 million people, mostly in South America, and can lead to serious heart problems, neurological disorders and early death.^[9]

1 Sloths

We’ve had a look at some really awful-looking animals and some cuties. The sloths of the world tend to split people in terms of how they are perceived – some people find them utterly adorable, others find them creepy and weird-looking. Whatever you may think of them, you don’t want to mess with a wild specimen. Is it that, despite their languid movements, every sloth is hiding a switchblade under their fur? Of course not, but there is something else hidden in their fur.

A whole lot of bugs and larvae and mites and a ton of ungodly stank.

Moths, mites, a stinking green algae and, on one specimen, around 980 scarab beetles all make their home on the body of this slow-moving tree-hanger. If you add this to the fact that whenever a sloth poops it evacuates a third of its own body weight in faecal matter, sloths may be the grossest animal in the world. On the plus side, that gross algae may harbour a type of fungus that will end up curing cancer. We need to start raising money to provide sloth biologists with clothes pegs for their noses…^[10]

10 Times Wild Animals Saved Humans

Optical illusions often go viral on the internet. Is the dress beige or blue? Are the shoes turquoise or pink? These types of illusions are mostly attributed to how a person perceives color. Some illusions, however, depend on just the right conditions to freak people out.

Here are 10 optical illusions that are sure to mess with your head (and you don’t have to blame the alcohol this time!).

Related: Top 10 Unbelievable Types Of Illusions And Hallucinations

10 The Size of the Moon

Have you noticed how the moon grows smaller as it rises? It actually doesn’t. That’s just your average, run-of-the-mill optical illusion. The moon is exactly the same size on the horizon as it is when it’s high up in the night sky. Hard to believe, right? It is said that you can prove this by taking a photo of the moon in both stages and then comparing the outcome.

But what about those photographs of the moon that make it look huge? That is simply a zoomed-in view. What isn’t an illusion, though, is the yellowish, orangey hue the moon has when it’s near the horizon. This happens because the light from the moon travels a longer distance through the atmosphere, scattering away the shorter blue wavelengths and leaving more of the longer and redder lengths.^[1]

9 Go Home, Carpet. You’re Drunk!

Ege Carpets took their TBBT obsession to the next level by designing a space-time continuum carpet that would impress even Sheldon Cooper.

A Twitter user noticed the carpet in a store, and after he posted a picture of it, it was retweeted nearly 100,000 times in one day. The rug seems to dip in certain places, which would definitely make it difficult to navigate over, especially if you’re on the other side of tipsy. And yet, the “potholes” are just a trick of the mind as the carpet is just as level as any other.

If you need something a little quirky for your own home, you could invest in a 3D Bottomless Hole Optical Illusion Area Rug. You’ll always feel like you’re about to fall headfirst into a portal. but it will probably never stop being the center of conversation at your house parties.^[2]

8 An Unseen World

Sometimes nature can be really weird. Scientists doing research in the depths of the Pacific Ocean in 2019 found something oddly magical 2,000 meters (6,561 feet) beneath the surface.

With the use of a remotely operated vehicle, lead scientist Mandy Joye and her team were exploring a hydrothermal vent in the Guyamas depression when they saw the underside of a rock overhang that was so perfectly level that the sea life before it appeared in a perfect reflection. When the ROV’s angle shifted, the “vision” shattered, and a vast space opened up that glittered like diamonds.

The illusion was caused by the hot water seeping from the vent, which rises when it mixes with the colder ocean water. As it rises, it comes into contact with the rock formation and becomes trapped, filling the overhang. The temperature difference between the hot water and cool seawater causes light to slow, creating the mirror-like illusion.

As for the shiny minerals, the scientists didn’t know exactly what they were looking at but we’re almost certain that it would have been pyrite.^[3]

7 Look, Ma, the Giraffe’s Eating the Plane!

The entries for the Comedy Wildlife Photos contest in 2017 delivered quite a few hilarious snapshots.

It also delivered a funny optical illusion of a giraffe that appears to be eating or at least taking a peek into one of the windows of a small aircraft. The angle of the photograph, taken in Masai Mara, Kenya, is perfect, and it has been a source of entertainment on the internet ever since.

Another mindboggling illusion featuring an animal is the well-known photograph of a cat on a staircase, going either up or down depending on whom you ask. Is it possible that it’s Schrodinger’s Cat, and it’s going up and down at the same time?^[4]

6 UFO or Fata Morgana?

So, if you could choose, would you want the illusion you’re seeing to turn out to be the real deal or just a variation of the Fata Morgana phenomenon?

In 2021, a UFO appeared over the ocean in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. Well, the illusion of a UFO, at least. It was soon determined that it was merely a Fata Morgana mirage that occurred because air of different densities met, leading the Earth’s atmosphere to act as a refracting lens, which in turn created the illusion.

This is also what leads to “ghost ship” or “floating ship” sightings. Fata Morgana has even been suggested as a possible reason for the myriad of Flying Dutchman sightings throughout history.^[5]

5 Floating Ghost Ships

Speaking of floating ships, there have been quite a few eerie sightings around the world. One of the most notable images of a floating ship was snapped in the UK in 2021. David Morris was enjoying a day out on the beach when he saw a massive tanker in the distance, seemingly hovering in the air above the ocean. The photo he took of the ship seemed to show blue sky above and below the ship, where it eventually met the sea.

Morris agreed with the Fata Morgana explanation and said he didn’t believe anything supernatural had occurred, even though it most certainly looked like the ship was floating in the air. Two weeks after Morris’s sighting, another mirage was sighted off the Dorset coast when the cruise ship, the Jewel of the Seas, appeared to be floating in the grey sky.^[6]

4 Is That a Painting?

Near the famous Sossusvlei salt pan lies the Deadvlei white clay pan in the Namib-Naukluft Park in Namibia. The camel thorn trees that still stand in Deadvlei died around 700 years ago and are black because of the intense sun burning down on them every day. At an ordinary angle, Deadvlei looks like just another desert backdrop.

However, shot at a low angle while the sunshine glides over the sand dunes in the distance, the trees and their surroundings become the optical illusion of a surrealist painting. The difference between the angles is quite disconcerting, and comparing the two photographs will have you believing that it’s not even the same landscape.^[7]

3 Stairway to Heaven

In 2016 a statue, designed by South African artist Strijdom Van Der Merwe, was unveiled in the Western Cape province. The statue, which is the shape of a stairway and made from mild steel tubing, was created for the Hermanus Fine Arts Festival and is currently housed at Creation Farm in the Hemel and Aarde Valley.

The stairway makes for a mind-bending optical illusion when viewed from the right angle, as it looks exactly like drawn stairs reaching up to heaven. The statue attracted worldwide attention, and a version of it went on display in Taiwan in 2021.^[8]

2 Three Suns

If you’re not a fan of hot weather, the thought of three suns beaming down on you will likely make you run for the hills…or Antarctica.

Fortunately, if you ever do see three suns in the sky, know that you’re either very drunk or seeing the sundog phenomenon. In Northern Russia, truck drivers and early birds were treated to this spectacular sight in 2019. It is believed that sundogs are caused by ice crystals refracting light into the sky. The three suns made for great photographs, and many people took the opportunity to spice up their Instagram pages.

Russia is apparently also the place to be if you want to experience the light pillars optical illusion. These pillars sometimes resemble the beam from a UFO but appear when artificial light reflects off millions of floating ice crystals.^[9]

1 Negative to Color

The negative lady illusion is a somewhat creepy-looking photo negative of a woman that is turned into a color image for a split second if you stare at it long enough. In this instance, the negative image of the woman comes with a tiny dot on her nose that you have to stare at for 15 seconds. Then, when you glance at the blank space next to her, you will see her briefly pop up in color.

The illusion works because what you see is a negative afterimage, which means the color you see is inverted from the original image. The same thing happens when you stare at a red image, followed by seeing a green afterimage.^[10]

Sometimes, it’s satisfying to take a break from formulaic movies. Don’t misunderstand, no film fan worth your time is above the pleasures of a kinetic action scene or a shameless romance. The appeal still remains for the novelty of a movie experience that makes you try to ponder its symbols, technique, and intricacies, and perhaps provide a memorable new perspective for a viewer to take with them.

Now, let’s also make it clear: This isn’t a list about arbitrary nonsense either. No art is needed for that. A computer algorithm can write a script where superficially artistic things happen. As it happened at least one was said to have written a commercial by now (although that turned out to likely not be true.) This is about movies that have structure and when the creators break film-making rules, it’s with a purpose in mind.

You can find all kinds of movies that mess with your mind on CHILI.com. Wait, you never heard of CHILI? Well, CHILI is a fully pay per view platform which provides a wide range of titles thanks to the agreements with the most important producers, local and independent distributors. CHILI is available on Smart TVs, Blu-ray players, PCs, tablets and smartphones.

10. Eraserhead

The most popular interpretation of David Lynch’s 1978 debut film is that it’s about a printing factory worker in a bleak town named Henry Spencer who accidentally impregnates his girlfriend Mary, and they have an inhumanly deformed baby. The reason that’s only the most popular interpretation is because Lynch has explicitly said in interviews that in the following decades no one came close to accurately interpreting his grim debut (he has said the true intended meaning has something to do with the Holy Bible, but that’s as revealing as he’s gotten.)

So what keeps compelling people to try? Because Lynch’s movie not only has the loose structure of a comprehensible if grim story, it also has teases for the audience that seem to play off how abstract certain surreal scenes are. For example, during a scene where Henry meets his girlfriend’s mother, there’s a loud, off-putting squeaking noise through much of the scene, leaving the viewer anxious about what that noise is and what it could mean… then revealing it’s a benign litter of puppies. Later, when Mary leaves Henry, there’s an extended scene where she’s messing with the end of the bed while Henry’s lying on it. It’s framed from Henry’s POV so we can’t see what she’s doing, and we’ve seen enough surreal imagery with ominous sounds that it could be anything. It goes on for a deliberately extended period of time. Then with a pop, she pulls her suitcase out from under the bed. In short, Lynch’s trick was to know that just showing harrowing tableaus would be off-putting, and that including some comedy and pleasant surprises would make the movie less predictable, one of the keys to its intrigue lasting for decades.

9. Van Diemen’s Land

This 2009 movie is based on true events and tries very hard to treat them with due respect. It follows a band of eight convicts sent to a penal colony on the island of Tasmania, the de facto leader Alexander Pearce having been sent from Ireland for stealing six pairs of shoes. In 1822 the group broke out for the settlements on the Eastern side of the island. In the harsh Tasmanian Wilderness, in desperation they had to resort to cannibalism. Despite the nightmarish situation, director Jonathan Auf Der Heide made sure to restrain the violence and gore to avoid making an exploitative movie. Yet during its premiere multiple audience members vomited and others fainted at the film. These were presumably people that by 2009 had seen far more graphic footage. How was Auf Der Heide’s film having such an extreme effect accidentally?

According to the director, the trick he sort of backed into was downplaying the violence. The lack of graphic, heightened imagery and special effects took away some of the distancing effect that some cinematic technique inevitably has. As he put it, “… when it becomes a reality, murder can be mundane and clumsy and ugly.” Not that directorial restraint in and of itself is the magic bullet for a movie to reach an audience on a visceral level, but it worked unintentional wonders here.

8. A Ghost Story

This 2017 movie written and directed by David Lowery may be the most polarizing film featured on this list, with a large gap between the critical and audience consensus on sites like Rotten Tomatoes for instance. The story is that Casey Affleck’s character known only as “C” dies, his ghost (which is literally rendered as the actor under a sheet) haunts the home of his significant other “M” played by Rooney Mara. “M” doesn’t know that “C” is there, tries to endure the grieving process, and eventually leaves their home, but “C” can not leave with her. Trapped at the home, it eventually crumbles around him. Then time loops around, and “C” finds himself not only haunting “M” for a time but himself.

The most memorable aspect of the movie is how it plays around with the passage of time. The movie will play events that are meant to carry particular emotional weight in real time, and moments where the characters feel numb or disconnected flow by much faster. By far the most noted example of this is a scene where M eats most of a whole pie. For four minutes in a single, darkly lit take where Mara is sitting on the floor. Instead of just showing a few seconds of binging to get the point across, Lowery lingers so that it by turns it becomes depressing, uncomfortable, then disgusting and harrowing. It turns the sadness of grief from something that can have some kind of aesthetic into essentially torture for everyone involved, including the audience. Seeing the actress eat the pie in real time lets the audience know that the actress actually did it instead of using editing to make the scene go down easier. No blaming audiences if they’d rather do just about anything with their time than watch that, but the creative choice clearly struck a chord with many.

7. Enter the Void

The plot for this film is essentially simplicity itself. A low-level drug dealer named Oscar is living in the wake of a severe childhood trauma. He goes to make a sale, the police raid the site of the transaction, he tries to scare them off by saying through a closed door that he has a gun, and consequently gets gunned down. The lives of his sister and colleagues spiral out of control as a result.

But what will make an impact on a viewer is very likely not its story or characters. It’s how Gaspar Noe tells his 2009 story so immersively from the perspective of Oscar, complete with showing what Oscar sees what he trips on DMT and his death visions. Almost all from literal first person POV, even as he drifts from his body into the neon-drenched Tokyo skyline. He drifts above scenes of his sister hooking up with a club manager (which results in an unwanted pregnancy) and one of his associates becoming a dumpster scrounging homeless person. He also travels into the past and sees the automobile accident that shaped his life as it ended his idyllic family life. There are several scenes that are simply flashing strobe lights in the audience’s eyes, as if to simulate the “light at the end of the tunnel” effect as the cerebral cortex shuts down. Noe himself unusually tried to take all ambiguity out of the ending, saying in an interview that all the events in the film after Oscar gets shot are hallucinations and that while he wrote the movie he was completely areligious. But whatever an audience member’s view of life, it provides a very convincing vision of entering the afterlife and reincarnation.

6. Blue

There are very, very few movies that are more minimalist than Derek Jarman’s 1993 film. That’s not to say nothing happens in it. The soundtrack is full of narration by the director, Nigel Terry, and Tilda Swinton where the protagonist speculates about the things to see, his life experiences, his medical treatment, rejecting all acts of shallow charity and pity that have been extended to him. But all there is to see throughout the entire movie is an unbroken blue screen. That’s because when he was making it, Derek Jarman was dying of AIDS and his vision would intermittently have flashes of blue light as he went blind from retinal damage.

The Washington Post said that the effect of watching it was “an unyielding bout of suffocation.” It also described how the effect was at time “nauseating,” and considering that at the time he was making it Jarman described himself as a “walking lab” from all the pills he was taking, including experimental ones, then that means he certainly got some viewers to relate. The Independentmentioned while watching it the “eyes play tricks on you,” indicating that it also imparted at least a little of his own hallucinatory headspace.

5. Sátántangó

Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s 1994 film sounds like the setup for a novel John Steinbeck would write. A farming community (a former collectivist farm, as it’s based on a 1985 novel written in the Soviet Union) has received a government subsidy. From hardened criminals to abusive older children, we see the various ways that the cunning take the shares of the cash from the unsuspecting. The movie stretches seven and a half hours with a much smaller cast than a film like that would usually involve (unless you count the cows in it as cast members) but since it’s conveniently divided into twelve parts watching it is more akin to watching a miniseries.

The time commitment isn’t the most daunting sounding aspect of Sátántangó to the uninitiated. This movie shows its various subplots mostly in very long takes that often amount to traveling from place to place on foot, or even walking around buildings. Additionally, certain scenes are replayed from different points of view. Sound boring? For many it will be. But it also has the effect of removing any sense of quaintness to the rundown rural setting. Even though the images are filmed in crisp black and white, they feature muddy, sloshing paths. The effect is that being inside the village can seem so oppressive and uncomfortable for the viewer that they become numb to the wickedness of the many thieves. Even such severe crimes as a girl who learns her peers tricked her into burying her money and responds by going home to abuse her cat become much more, if not exactly sympathetic, then at least more understandable. Viewers will likely come away from it completely disabused of any notions they had of pastoral rural life.

4. The Matrix

Oh, were you expecting this list to only include arthouse/cult movies? No way, commercial success is no barrier to effective technique. While surely many others have commented to death on its use of Hero’s Journey structure, color, etc. in 2017 vlogger Patrick Willems shared with the internet a novel observation. It was a simple but highly effective method that the Wachowskis used for keeping the audience unsure: Sound mixing during scene transitions.

For example, during the scene where protagonist Neo is interrogated by the villainous Agent Smith and a cybernetic tracking device modelled after a crayfish is put in his navel as Neo screams, the same sort of scream Neo makes as he wakes up in bed. This match of edit and sound mixing mimics an earlier scene where Trinity introduces Neo to the idea of entering a new world at a club, and immediately after he wakes up. But on the sound mix the musical score shifts in rhythm and pitch to resemble the buzzing of an alarm clock before transitioning in bed to the next scene, helping to sell the notion that the previous scene was a dream through connected sound and establishing a pattern in the movie. It’s a perfect illustration of how movies need to set up rules and frameworks if change in the flow of events is going to have an mean something to audiences and how even the subtlest filmmaking methods can be important.

3. The Shining

Since 1980 the mystique of Stanley Kubrick’s loose film adaptation of Stephen King’s horror story in the Overlook Hotel has only increased. Its trademark scenes of overt horror (the eerie twins, the door being axed open, the blood from the elevator, etc.) have been discussed at length and by this point parodied or patisched even more often, such as in the 2018 blockbuster Ready Player One. Lately, though, a belief has emerged that give credit for the movie’s effectiveness for something seemingly trivial. It’s the presence of continuity errors.

In the wake of Rodney Ascher’s 2013 documentary Room 237, these errors have become a relatively hot topic in film circles. One of the main errors is the physical impossibility of the Overlook Hotel as pointed out in videos by Rob Ager (who noticed because his friend was trying to create a fan level in the video game Duke Nukem to resemble the Overlook Hotel.) For example, for the interview at the beginning of the film, the office it takes place in has a window to the outside. Yet in the movie, when comparing the location of that office to the hallways protagonist Jack Torrance later walks through, it becomes clear that the office is completely enclosed by the building. The window is “impossible” as Ager put it. Another significant error is that Grady, the previous caretaker who killed his family in a murder suicide before the events of the film, is named Charles Grady at the beginning but is named Delbert Grady later on, which is a pretty bizarre mistake for everyone involved in the production to miss. It adds to a theme suggested by the final shot of the movie that somehow these characters have been reincarnated and will visit this hotel again and again over the years.

If all this was intentional, it wouldn’t have been the first time for Kubrick. In A Clockwork Orange, during the scene where protagonist Alex DeLarge is drugged, Kubrick intentionally futzed with the portions of the meal laid out in front of him to disorient the audience. To expand that notion out from a scene to a feature film would be pretty ambitious even by his standards.

2. Picnic at Hanging Rock

This 1975 film not only launched the career of future The Truman Show and Master and Commander director Peter Weir. It’s been credited with revolutionizing Australian cinema and effectively making films from down under an international force to be reckoned with. Little wonder that it was sufficiently beloved to be remade in 2018 as a TV series.

What helps hook Picnic at Hanging Rock is its seeming normalcy. It begins with the class of a finishing school in Adelaide of 1900 going on a day out. While they’re there, four of the girls vanish. Subsequent search parties can’t find a trace. One man tries going it alone, and goes blind. Hanging Rock refuses to even hint what caused the women to vanish or what made the subsequent investigation have such odd occurrences. Then one of the women returns, but she can’t remember anything that happened to her around Hanging Rock. Aside from the hypnotic score by pan flutist Zamfir, it’s also so mundanely, meticulously told that many believed the wholy fabricated story was based on a real unexplained mystery. Little wonder that when it was initially released, despite containing barely any onscreen violence, it was treated as a horror movie.

1. The Battery

No one would call this 2012 movie an art film and its makers didn’t aspire for it to be one. It’s a buddy zombie film, The Battery of the title refers to a duo in cricket who pitch and are at bat. One such battery is traveling through countryside with a few mates trying to find shelter. It was not a massive hit or a critical darling. Its budget was a paltry $6000. So what’s it doing in the #1 position on this list?

Because creators Jeremy Gardner and Adam Cronheim hit upon a brilliantly simple and cheap way to add a subconscious effect to their movie through infrasounds. Infrasounds are a type of white noise that’s usually outside the range of conscious human hearing. Such machines as air conditioners, generators, and anything else that produces a 19 hz or lower sound. Because they register subconsciously, they provide stimulus that often puts humans on edge without being aware why, which was exploited considerably for the sound mix of this movie. It just goes to show that for all the artistry and cleverness that many directors try to put into their movies. People are still people, and susceptible to the most basic tricks.