Before I go on, I'll address what a mindfuck movie is, for those that have never heard the term. I don't want to get too bogged down in the definition, but generally speaking, a mindfuck movie is a movie that toys with or challenged the audience's understanding of reality, or has a strange mind-bending twist, or challenged our common perceptions. It's not like a twist in a mystery movie, where we discovered it was the butler who killed the wealthy heiress, it's the kind of twist that might cause you an existential crisis. They are movies that engage you and go places you don't expect and leave you thinking about the metaphysical implications of what you've seen. Common themes include dreams, the nature of the universe and reality, insanity, the self, and the reliability of our senses and memories. Again, I don't want to get hung up on the definition, because mindfuck movies should make you question definitions.
Well, I saw a few top ten lists and few unranked lists, but nothing like what I was initially thinking. I thought that the best way to go about devising such a ranked list would be by public rating, like IMDb movies or YouTube videos. I would ask peple to vote one movies they've seen based solely on the criteria of how mindfucking it was, not how good a movie it was on its other merits. My idea is that I would have a list of movie (which I would attempt to amend over time) each with the rating star system next, similar to the ones on YouTube and IMDb:
People could rate them (again, only according to the "how mindfucking was it" criteria), and they would be ranked according to that public's rating. Then, I would review some of the films in blog entries, and turn the movie as it appears on the list into a hyperlink to that review, where people could post their own reviews and discussion in teh comment sections.So that's my concept. I still don't know how to do this so it works exactly how I would like it to, so I'm open to getting help. I want the complete list to appear on one page, and I want the blog to remember which movies a user has already voted for.
Here's the list I've compiled so far. Remember, it's intended to be a list to which I regularly amend more titles, and I'm happy to take suggestions. Also, since I haven't seen them all myself, I don't know if perhaps some of them don't belong on the list.
- Spellbound (1945)
- Rashômon (1950)
- La Jetée (The Pier) (1962)
- Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Saragossa Manuscript) (1965)
- Persona (1966)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- El Topo (The Mole) (1970)
- Solyaris (1972)
- La Montaña Sagrada (The Sacred Mountain) (1973)
- Sanatorium pod klepsydra (The Hour-Glass Sanatorium) (1973)
- Die Welt am Draht (World On Wires) (1973)
- Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
- Stalker (1975)
- Eraserhead (1977)
- Altered States (1980)
- Blade Runner (1982)
- Liquid Sky (1982)
- Pink Floyd The Wall (1982)
- Videodrome (1983)
- Brazil (1985)
- The Quiet Earth (1985)
- Neco z Alenky (Alice) (1988)
- They Live (1988)
- Santa sangre (Holy Blood) (1989)
- Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
- Total Recall (1990)
- Begotten (1991)
- Naked Lunch (1991)
- Braindead (1992)
- The Crying Game (1992)
- Map of the Human Heart (1993)
- Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) (1994)
- Faust (1994)
- La Cite Des Enfants Perdus (The City of Lost Children) (1995)
- The Usual Suspects (1995)
- Twelve Monkeys (1995)
- The Game (1997)
- Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) (1997)
- Cube (1997)
- The Game (1997)
- Lost Highway (1997)
- Dark City (1998)
- Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
- Pi (1998)
- Being John Malkovich (1999)
- eXistenZ (1999)
- Fight Club (1999)
- The Matrix (1999)
- Ôdishon (Audition) (1999)
- The Sixth Sense (1999)
- The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
- Memento (2000)
- Avalon (2001)
- Das Experiment (The Experiment) (2001)
- Donnie Darko (2001)
- Mulholland Dr. (2001)
- The Others (2001)
- Session 9 (2001)
- Vanilla Sky (2001)
- Waking Life (2001)
- Cube 2: Hypercube (2002)
- Cypher (2002)
- Spider (2002)
- 11:14 (2003)
- Oldeuboi (Oldboy) (2003)
- The Big Empty (2003)
- Casshern (2004)
- Cube Zero (2004)
- Dead Man's Shoes (2004)
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
- Izo (2004)
- The Machinist (El Maquinista) (2004)
- November (2004)
- One Point O (Paranoia 1.0) (2004)
- Primer (2004)
- The Dark Hours (2005)
- Deepwater (2005)
- The Jacket (2005)
- MirrorMask (2005)
- Stay (2005)
- The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005)
- A Scanner Darkly (2006)
- Paprika (2006)
- The Prestige (2006)
Class Real
Mindfuck Movies on The Morning News
Top Ten Mindfuck Movies on Freakin' Awesome
The Mindfuck Movies Database by Matthias Endler
Mindfuck Movies by detective yeti
*As long as I'm dedicating a blog about how much of a mindfuck a film is, I need to coin an superlative adjective. Initially, "most/more/less/least mindfucking" sounds the most natural, as opposed to saying "most/more/less/least of a mindfuck" but I'm open to suggestion.
