Horror Chick, with Melissa Lafsky: The 10 Most Terrifying Unintentional-Horror Movies (Part One)

What makes a movie horror? There are the obvious indicators: chainsaws, spurting viscera, genital smashing and other tricks in the bloody menagerie of unapologetic depravity. But some of the scariest films sneak in under the radar, infecting your thoughts and slaying your peace of mind without showing a single oozing polyp or rotting corpse. Think about it: The point of horror is that it's all metaphor—a pictorial display of the fears, anxieties, and disappointments that thrash and roil in our consciousness. Those flesh-devouring zombies and skull-munching monsters are just physical manifestations of the Inner Human Pain that can't be defined in language (except by David Foster Wallace) but still manage to crawl in our ears and tear our guts with corrosive acid-froth. It's THIS pain that's the real killer—after all, you can always bandage that severed arm or pop an antibiotic for that flesh-eating virus. Healing the ragged wound in your soul, the nameless chasm where Darkness gnaws on your psyche… well, that's a little harder. And so we have movies! Those fuzzy celluloids that take away the emptiness and lull us into complacency with their pulchritudinous stars and pat dialogue and flashy explosions. You pay your $11.50 and laugh at sweet-as-pie Kate Beckinsale or oh-so-funny-Jim-Carrey and then WHAM – without even realizing it, you're hit with a Nightmare, fed to you in the form of a bubbly romantic comedy. THESE are the real horror movies. They catch you by surprise. At least Saw is honest.

Here are numbers 10 through 6 of the most invidious Unintentional Horror movies. Look for Part Two in the near future.

10. Knocked Up

We can fetishize reproduction all we want. We can coo and slobber over babies and genuflect before the Cult of Mommyhood and spend our savings on Swarovski-rimmed diaper bags and Baby Einstein brain implants and exalt the continuation of our species (and the fact that we've created a person who is genetically programmed to like us, at least for the next 10 years or so).

But in reality, the miracle of procreation could be an awkward, antiseptic encounter that's the sexual version of gum surgery. And the purveyor of your child's other chromosome might be a porcine smartass with aggressive back hair and THC leaking from his pores. And likewise, the Gaia who bears your sperminated miracle could be a stuffy killjoy who managed to get through an '80s childhood without ever displaying a single hint of personality, or seeing Back to the Future. And then you are stuck with the genetic offspring of this person for the rest of your life.

And if you complain, you're a shitty parent.

9. Serendipity

You have no control. Control is a joke. Your life, fate, happiness are all based on luck, the freak possibility of a chance encounter. If you do ANYTHING to throw off the timing—forget your dry cleaning or spend too long on YouTube or go back upstairs to change out of those toe-crunching heels—you could miss that encounter. And then your life will be a fetid pot of rotting misery, all because you had to watch that Lady Gaga video ONE LAST TIME. In fact, if you need any more evidence that your life is random and out of control, here it is: You actually let someone convince you to watch Serendipity.

(P.S.: If you happen to be an obstacle in someone else's happiness-encounter, aka "The Boyfriend Or Fiancée That Stands Between The Lovestruck Protagonists," then prepare to be collateral damage.)

8. Remains of the Day

What is your life for? What purpose does it have? What are your options? You could get super rich—pull a fuck-everyone scheme à la Madoff, or just do it on the legal like John Thain—and spend your life yawning through $2,000 French dinners and scrubbing your Prada loafers with caviar and picking your teeth with the bone shards of the unwashed masses. Or you could earn an honest wage, join the working man's ranks, dedicate your earthly existence to the service of others and embrace the idea that your life could be part of something larger than yourself. Except then that Something Larger winds up being an ungrateful product of a stuffy colonialist empire who unwittingly aids Nazis, and then the NEXT Something Worthy is a nouveau riche dishrag who dismisses you as nothing but a doddering old coot. And then you die.

Plus it is simply horrifying that it might ever be so damn hard to get laid.

7. Mr. & Mrs. Smith

You and your significant other could be the hottest human beings on the planet. You could shoot unalloyed sex appeal from your eyeballs, liquefying every carbon life form in your path and shifting tectonic plates with your endothermic orgasmic energy. But after a while, your relationship will slide into banality. That fiery attraction that once led to coitus in elevators and bar restrooms will be lost in a black ocean of SUVs and monogrammed stemware and window treatments and Williams-Sonoma. The detritus of modern suburbia will clog up your genitals and clot your sperm and makes you want to rip out your own heart—or just shoot your partner in the head. And actual attempts to do so may be the only way to break out of this rut.

Oh, and your spouse? That person who sleeps beside you every night, whose social security number and mother's emergency contact at the nursing home you have memorized? You have no fucking clue who this person is. He/she could be a trained killer, massacring arms dealers and de-boning druglords and strangling mobsters in his/her spare time, all before you get home from yoga (though for men, this horror is mitigated by the fact that you're sleeping with Angelina Jolie).

6. Bruce Almighty

For all those centuries of piety and faith and existential quests and exquisite suffering and Deuterocanonical interpretation and ecumenical theism and dragging your ass to church and teleological scripture-reading and generations upon generations of breast-beating sin-preaching Holy Land-coveting heretic-disemboweling condom-shunning Rapture-awaiting woman-subjugating evolution-denying madness in the name of beatitude, we still don't have a God damn clue who God is. He could be Jim Carrey. Fuck if we know.

Melissa Lafsky really does like horror movies.