Best Paranormal phenomena Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of paranormal phenomena cinema — measured across 779 indexed frames from 12 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Paranormal phenomena films over-index on trench coat, boy and shadow — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Lights Out (2016)
David F. SandbergDP Marc SpicerIMDb 6.3TMDB 6.4See in full on FrameThrower →
A man called Paul is working after hours and is murdered by a supernatural entity in the shadow. When his son, the boy Martin, is frightened by the same creature, he sees his mother Sophie talking to an imaginary friend called Diana in the shadow of her room. Martin does not sleep anymore during the night. His older step sister Rebecca who lives alone is summoned by the social assistant. She brings Martin home and recalls her own experience with Diana years ago when she was young. Rebecca and her boyfriend Bret investigate the connection of Sophie with Diana and come up to a scary revelation about their past.
- 2
Scanners (1981)
David CronenbergDP Mark IrwinIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →
Darryl Revok is the most powerful of all the scanners, and is the head of the underground scanner movement for world domination. Scanners have great psychic power, strong enough to control minds; they can inflict enormous pain/damage on their victims. Doctor Paul Ruth finds a scanner that Revok hasn't, and converts him to their cause - to destroy the underground movement.
- 3
The Sixth Sense (1999)
M. Night ShyamalanDP Tak FujimotoIMDb 8.2TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →
Malcom Crowe (Bruce Willis) is a child psychologist who receives an award on the same night that he is visited by a very unhappy ex-patient. After this encounter, Crowe takes on the task of curing a young boy with the same ills as the ex-patient (Donnie Wahlberg) . This boy "sees dead people". Crowe spends a lot of time with the boy much to the dismay of his wife (Olivia Williams). Cole's mom (Toni Collette) is at her wit's end with what to do about her son's increasing problems. Crowe is the boy's only hope.
- 4
Hellboy (2004)
Guillermo del ToroDP Guillermo NavarroIMDb 6.9TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →
At the end of World War II, Nazi officers Karl Ruprecht Kroenen and Ilsa Haupstein start an experiment to raise the forces of Hell trough Russian dark mystic Rasputin on a Scottish island, but it's interrupted by an allied commando guided by professor Trevor "Broom" Bruttenholm. He prevents killing the human-demonic half-blood, which was accidentally created and raises this "Hellboy", while rising to head of a secret C.I.A.-linked U.S. agency Bureau of Paranormal Research, which secretly studies and uses the occult, including supernatural freaks. As "father" Broom is aging, he hand-picks brilliant, sensitive Agent John Myers as new minder-companion, as regular "warrior" Agent Clay can't empathize and lacks flexibility mental. Hellboy is quite a handful, regularly spotted by worried civilians on unauthorized excursions, especially to pyro-telekinetic freak friend in a mental asylum. Johnny, Hellboy, and Clay team up on missions against paranormal threats with aquatic-bionic freak Abe Sapien. Their task proves to be daunting, as monster Sammael multiplies every time it "dies", while Rasputin and the Nazis reemerge, armed for revenge.
- 5
The Omen (1976)
Richard DonnerDP Gilbert TaylorIMDb 7.5TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →
Robert and Katherine Thorn seem to have it all. They are happily married and he is the US Ambassador to Great Britain, but they want nothing more than to have children. When Katharine has a stillborn child, Robert is approached by a priest at the hospital who suggests that they take a healthy newborn whose mother has just died in childbirth. Without telling his wife he agrees. After relocating to London, strange events - and the ominous warnings of a priest - lead him to believe that the child he took from that Italian hospital is evil incarnate.
- 6
The Exorcist (1973)
William FriedkinDP Owen RoizmanIMDb 8.1TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →
A visiting actress in Washington, D.C., notices dramatic and dangerous changes in the behavior and physical make-up of her 12-year-old daughter. Meanwhile, a young priest at nearby Georgetown University begins to doubt his faith while dealing with his mother's terminal sickness. And, book-ending the story, a frail, elderly priest recognizes the necessity for a show-down with an old demonic enemy.
- 7
Ghostbusters 2 (1989)
Ivan ReitmanDP Michael ChapmanIMDb 6.6TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Having lost their status and credibility five years after covering New York City with gooey roasted marshmallows in Ghostbusters (1984), the city's former heroes and once-popular spirit-hunters struggle to keep afloat, forced to work odd jobs. However, when Dana and her baby have yet another terrifying encounter with the paranormal, it is up to Peter Venkman and his fearless team of supernatural crime fighters to step up and save the day. Once more, humankind is in danger, as rivers of slimy psycho-reactive ectoplasm, paired with the dreadful manifestation of evil sixteenth-century tyrant Vigo the Carpathian, threaten to plunge the entire city into darkness. Is the world ready to believe? Can the Ghostbusters save us for the second time?
- 8
Suspiria (2018)
Luca GuadagninoDP Sayombhu MukdeepromIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →
Susie Bannion is a young American ballerina who travels to Berlin to study dancing at Madame Blanc's Markos Tanz Company, one of the world's most renowned schools. On her first day, one of the students who had been recently expelled from the school is murdered. As this appalling happening does not seem to be an isolated occurrence, the brilliant new student soon begins to suspect that the school might be involved in the homicide. Her mistrust heightens when Sarah, one of the girls at the school, tells her that before she was killed, Pat confided to her that she knew and guarded a terrifying secret.
What paranormal phenomena films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a paranormal phenomena frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — trench coat is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- trench coat3.8×
- boy2.7×
- shadow1.9×
- wall1.8×
- car1.7×
- table lamp1.7×
- glasses1.6×
How paranormal phenomena films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate paranormal phenomena from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 26%dayvs 43% baseline
- 29%naturalvs 44% baseline
- 58%low keyvs 39% baseline
- 59%nightvs 42% baseline
- 27%closeupvs 21% baseline
What breaks the pattern
Trick ‘R Treat (2007) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 779 frames from 12 films carrying the paranormal phenomena label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/paranormal-phenomena
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