Top 15 Non-Horror Films for the Horror Fan

The properties of horror: revulsion, suspense, unease--these feelings are sometimes created in unique ways by films not of the horror genre, but are created so successfully and often influentially that the horror buff will do well to have seen the films in which they reside. Here are the ones I think most worth seeing. I also include recommendations of similar movies that didn't quite make it to the top 15 or are actual horror films.

15. Lisztomania - If this were meant to be taken as a serious biopic, it'd be downright libelous. Russell depicts Liszt as a sex-crazed rocker who battles the Nazi vampire-Frankenstein's monster Wagner in a spaceship of love. A lot of other things happen.
More obvious Ken Russell choices are: Gothic, Altered States, and Lair of the White Worm.

14. The Shooting - Monte Hellman's existential Western. A child is killed by accident and the men flee, save one. That one and a simpleton who works with them are suddenly asked by a mysterious woman to escort her on a journey that becomes an increasingly surreal and sinister depiction of destiny.
Other westerns worth watching: High Plains Drifter, Django Kill

13. Wax, or the Discovery of Television Amongst the Bees - Presented as a documentary, with constant narrator, the content suddenly switches gears into Gothic, apocalyptic terror: something about bees, television signals, and the dead.

12. La Grand Bouffe - Four successful, rich men, each from different professions, gather in a countryhouse to feast and feast and feast--in fact, to feast themselves to death. And that they do.
Others: Themroc

11. Sweet Movie - Makavejev's follow-up to WR: Mysteries of the Organism topped its predecessor in wildness, but ended up losing the comedy to the truly shocking content, not unlike some moments in a Pynchon novel. This includes lovers being joined together in a candied mess.
Others: Naked Lunch

10. Confessions of an Opium Eater - A starring role for Vincent Price as the hero of Confessions of an [English] Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey. Ah, but if you were expecting de Quincey, that's not what you get. Instead, you get a Chinatown adventure film involving slavetrade and, of course, opium. Moments of surrealism, especially one opium-induced slow-motion segment, are particularly fascinating.
Others: Dragonwyck

9. The Exterminating Angel - Luis Bunuel's surrealist film about a group of bourgeois diners who find they can't leave the dinner party.
Others: Simon of the Desert

8. Juliet of the Spirits - More surrealism, this time from Fellini. Fellini's wife stars as a patient housewife who gradually discovers her husband is having an affair with a younger woman. At the same time she meets her neighbour, who appears to be a rather unique madame of a whorehouse. This reality and the odd events it produces collide with her powerful imagination to produce bizarre hallucinations of--spirits.
Others: Satyricon, Casanova

7. Lot in Sodom - One of only two films by Watson and Webber. While The Fall of the House of Usher gets most of the attention, Watson himself claimed Fall was toying around, whereas Lot in Sodom was the work of serious filmmakers. Using all the avant-garde techniques their optical printer allowed, they give us a phantasmagoric depiction of the final days of Sodom and Lot's flight therefrom.
Others: The Fall of the House of Usher, Tscherkassky's Dream Work.

6. La Belle et la Bete - The Jean Cocteau depiction of The Beauty and the Beast is far from Disney. The innocence and charm is all there, and the magic is beyond Disney. But so is the revulsion at the Beast, the terror at his powers.
Others: The Orpheus Trilogy

5. A Zed and Two Naughts - Peter Greenaway's tale of two brothers who lose their wives in a crash become obsessed with the process of decay, moving from the lowest organisms to the highest (humans); meanwhile they form an odd relationship with the survivor of the crash, who is being unnecessarily subjected to amputations by a Vermeer-obsessed surgeon.
Others: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover; The Baby of Macon

4. Faster Pussycat... Kill! Kill! - Russ Meyer's film about three tough women who kill a guy and take refuge at a farmhouse, where an old man and his two odd sons live. It won't take long before they're trying to kill each other. It's girl power vs. man power. There would be no Tarantino or any of the American fanboys without this film. Except Russ did it better.
Others: Motorpsycho, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

3. Blue Velvet - This had to be here. It's not really a horror movie, but no horror buff is complete without having seen most of David Lynch's films--and Blue Velvet is probably the most important, if not the best. Kyle McLachlan is Jeffrey, a young man obsessed with the mystery of Dorothy Vallens. Vallens, it turns out, is a forced sex slave of the psychopath Frank Booth.
Others: Mulholland Dr., INLAND EMPIRE

2. Celine et Julie vont en bateau - A witch librarian and a cabaret magician stumble upon a cursed house where a bizarre soap opera plays out daily to those who enter. If only they can infiltrate it and rescue the young girl inside.
Others: Scorsese's After Hours

1. Aguirre: The Wrath of God - The pinnacle of a nightmare without any overt horror, Aguirre concerns nothing more than a doomed expedition of Conquistadors floating down a river on a raft and gradually all dying off. Klaus Kinski is the mad Aguirre who dominates the expedition with inhuman ferocity.
Others: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Even Dwarfs Started Small