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Movies like Darkness, Light, Darkness

Key Features:
Existentialism, Body horror, Reconstruction, Transformation, Experimental, Abstract, Philosophical, Surreal
Tone:
restrained, serious
Target Audience:
Film students, Experimental film enthusiasts, Art house aficionados
Emotional Arc:
Intrigue → Confusion

Darkness, Light, Darkness

1989-01-01
Darkness, Light, Darkness Poster - Find Similar Movies

A human body gradually reconstructs itself as its various component parts crowd themselves into a small room and eventually, after much experimentation, sort out which part goes where.

Genres
Animation, Comedy
Crew
Jan Švankmajer, Jan Švankmajer, Jan Švankmajer
Rating
7.546(151 votes)
Darkness, Light, DarknessDarkness, Light, Darkness
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Dimensions of Dialogue

Three surreal depictions of failures of communication that occur on all levels of human society.



Little Otik
7

When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife's pain, the man finds a piece of root in the backyard and chops it and varnishes it into the shape of a child. However the woman takes the root as her baby and starts to pretend that it is real.



Homunculus
6.039

A homeless man meets a medical school student who pays him to volunteer for a surgical procedure known as trepanation, drilling a hole in his skull, which ends up giving him the ability to communicate with the dark side of people’s subconscious minds.



Meat Love
Meat Love(1989)
6.685

Two pieces of meat fall in love.



Puparia
Puparia(2021)
8

Something is about to change drastically, and the only thing to do is to witness it.



Arnulf Rainer
4.5

An experimental film, the last in Peter Kubelka's trilogy of “metric films”. Each frame of Arnulf Rainer is composed of darkness or light and silence or sound.



Rabbits
Rabbits(2002)
6.8

A story of a group of humanoid rabbits and their depressive, daily life. The plot includes Suzie ironing, Jane sitting on a couch, Jack walking in and out of the apartment, and the occasional solo singing number by Suzie or Jane. At one point the rabbits also make contact with their “leader”.



Replace
Replace(2017)
4.912

Kira's skin starts to age rapidly, dry out and crumble away. But then she discovers that she can replace her own skin with somebody else's.



RETURN
RETURN(1985)
6.8

8mm work directed by Norihiko Morinaga.



Playing the Victim
6.4

A young man drops out of university and goes to the police. He's done nothing wrong he just wants a job. A particular job. Playing the victim in murder reconstructions. Maybe by getting close to death he can manage to cheat on his own.



Lights Out
7.277

A woman prepares for bed, but realizes that something may be lurking in the shadows.



A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.



Mothlight
Mothlight(1963)
5.7

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matisse. Green objects occasionally appear. Most wings are translucent. The technique makes them appear to be stuck directly to the film.



Tango
Tango(1985)
7.4

A static camera observes a room as it slowly fills with thirty-six characters from different stages of life, looping further through an absurd dance of social disconnection as each character moves in.



Stopmotion
6.182

Ella Blake, a stop-motion animator struggling to control her demons after the loss of her overbearing mother, embarks upon the creation of a film that becomes the battleground for her sanity. As Ella’s mind starts to fracture, the characters in her project take on a life of their own.



Genesis
Genesis(1998)
6.1

A sculptor is traumatized by the death of his wife in a car accident. He builds a sculpture in her memory. As the lifelike sculpture begins to bleed through the cracks of clay, the sculptor's flesh mutates and crumbles away...



Anomalisa
Anomalisa(2015)
7.105

An inspirational speaker becomes reinvigorated after meeting a lively woman who shakes up his mundane existence.



Skinamarink
5.404

Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.



Talking Heads
7.8

People of different age, profession and social status answer two simple questions: who they are and what they want from life.



Reflections of a Blender

After receiving a patch, a blender suddenly gains consciousness. As it grapples with existential questions, it becomes the sole companion to the grieving wife of a missing man.



Amer
Amer(2009)
6.207

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.



Thanatomorphose
5.847

Bruised from a night of rough sex, a young woman is shocked to find that her body, rather than healing itself, has inexplicably begun to rot. Swept up in the strange sensual experiences brought on by her slowly decaying form, she tries desperately to cling to her new existence — even as the putrid meat sack that was once her young body begins to literally fall off her bones...



Fear(s) of the Dark

Several scary black-and-white animated segments in different styles appeal to our fear(s) of the dark.



Body Parts
5.8

A criminal psychologist loses his arm in a car crash, and becomes one of three patients to have their missing limbs replaced by those belonging to an executed serial killer. One of them dies violently, and disturbing occurrences start happening to the surviving two.



Lou
Lou(2017)
7.524

A Pixar short about a lost-and-found box and the unseen monster within.



Nothing
Nothing(2003)
5.806

The film tells the story of two good friends who live together, Andrew, an agoraphobic travel agent who works from his home, and Dave, a loser who works in an office where he is treated with contempt. Just when it seems things can't get any worse for the two, the entire world outside of their house disappears and is replaced with an endless white void.



On Body and Soul
7.236

Two introverted people find out by pure chance that they share the same dream every night. They are puzzled, incredulous, a bit frightened. As they hesitantly accept this strange coincidence, they try to recreate in broad daylight what happens in their dream.



Dual
Dual(2022)
6

A terminally ill woman opts for a cloning procedure to ease her loss on her friends and family. When she makes a miraculous recovery, her attempts to have her clone decommissioned fail and lead to a court-mandated duel to the death.



The Wolf House
7.5

After escaping from a religious colony in Chile, Maria seeks shelter in a mansion where she’s taken in by two pigs, its only inhabitants. Like in a stop-motion dream, the universe of the house reacts to her feelings. The animals slowly morph into humans and the house into a dark, menacing world.



Alice
Alice(1988)
7.4

A quiet young English girl named Alice finds herself in an alternate version of her own reality after chasing a white rabbit. She becomes surrounded by living inanimate objects and stuffed dead animals, and must find a way out of this nightmare - no matter how twisted or odd that way must be. A memorably bizarre screen version of Lewis Carroll’s novel "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland".



Everything Will Be OK

A series of dark and troubling events forces Bill to reckon with the meaning of his life… or lack thereof.



Cat Soup
Cat Soup(2001)
7.05

The surreal black comedy follows Nyatta, an anthropomorphic kitten, on his travel to the land of the dead and back in an effort to save his sister's soul.



Scissors
Scissors(1991)
4.975

A woman trying to recover from a sexual attack is locked in a posh apartment with a corpse of the very man she's been dreaming would murder her. She tries to hang on to reality when objects around her seem to come to life.



Birth/Rebirth
6.333

A single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead.



Eye Myth
Eye Myth(1967)
5.4

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, coming into focus, then disappearing behind the bursts and patterns of color, then reappearing; the second figure appears later, in the right foreground. This figure suggests someone older, someone of substance. The myth? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.



Conspirators of Pleasure

Six outwardly average individuals have elaborate fetishes they indulge with surreptitious care. A mousy letter carrier makes dough balls she grotesquely ingests before bed. A shop clerk fixates on a TV news reader while he builds a machine to massage and masturbate him. One of his customers makes an elaborate chicken costume for a voodoo-like scene with a doll resembling his plump neighbor. She, in turn, has a doll that resembles him, which she whips and dominates in an abandoned church. The TV news reader has her own fantasy involving carp. Her husband, who is indifferent to her, steals materials to fashion elaborate artifacts that he rubs, scrapes and rolls across his body.



Grace
Grace(2014)
4.938

A unique horror film told from the first-person perspective of Grace - a naive, virginal college freshman trying to deal with campus culture and her outgoing roommate as an evil entity takes over her body and unleashes chaos.



Film, Film, Film
7.6

The trials and tribulations of putting a feature film together.



Return
Return(2015)
6.434

A young couple purchase their new home to start a life together, only to find out the elderly couple next door have other plans for them.



Happy End
Happy End(1967)
7.481

A dark comedy about a murder and its consequences presented in a backwards manner, where death is actually a rebirth. The film starts with an "execution" of the main protagonist and goes back to explore his previous actions and motivations.



Yummy
Yummy(2019)
6.3

A young couple travels to a shabby Eastern European hospital for plastic surgery. The young woman wants a breast reduction. Her mother comes along for yet another face-lift. Wandering through an abandoned ward the boyfriend stumbles upon a young woman, gagged and strapped to an operating table; she is the result of an experimental rejuvenation treatment. He frees her, but does not realize he just caused the outbreak of a virus that will change doctors, patients and his mother-in-law into bloodthirsty zombies.



A Different Man
6.9

Aspiring actor Edward undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance. But his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare, as he loses out on the role he was born to play and becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost.



The Amputee
5.1

A double amputee attempts to write a letter while her nurse gets in the way. (Note: The Amputee was produced in order to test two different black and white video stocks for the American Film Institute. There are therefore two different versions of the film, each using the same script but shot on different stocks and differing in other incidental ways in terms of performance, sound design and duration. This is Version 1.)



Electroma
Electroma(2006)
6.7

Two robots embark on a quest to become human.



They Look Like People
6.257

Suspecting that people are transforming into malevolent shape-shifters, Wyatt flees to New York City to seek out his estranged childhood friend Christian.



Titane
Titane(2021)
6.3

A woman with a metal plate in her head from a childhood car accident embarks on a bizarre journey, bringing her into contact with a firefighter who's reunited with his missing son after 10 years.



Re-Animator
7.048

Conducting clandestine experiments within the morgue at Miskatonic University, scientist Herbert West reveals to a fellow graduate student his groundbreaking work concerning the re-animation of fresh corpses.



Garden Party
7.122

In a deserted rich house, a couple of amphibians explore their surroundings and follow their primal instincts.



The Incident
6.889

Two parallel stories about people trapped in illogical endless spaces: two brothers and a detective locked on an infinite staircase, and a family locked on an infinite road... for over 35 years.



Food
Food(1996)
7.793

Examines the human relationship with food by showing breakfast, lunch, and dinner.



Evolution
Evolution(2016)
6

11-year-old Nicolas lives with his mother in a seaside housing estate. The only place that ever sees any activity is the hospital. It is there that all the boys from the village are forced to undergo strange medical trials that attempt to disrupt the phases of evolution.



Womb
Womb(2010)
6

A woman's consuming love forces her to bear the clone of her dead beloved. From his infancy to manhood, she faces the unavoidable complexities of her controversial decision.



Black Mirror
7.652

A nameless drifter navigates a barren landscape punctuated by satellite dishes, radio towers and droning airplanes. Stopping periodically in anonymous hotel rooms, she makes attempts to connect to an unidentified second party.



Family Swap
5.9

Husband does not understand his wife? Conflict with children? Do you want to be heard and stood in your place? Be afraid of your desires. In this family, everything changed places, including grandmother.



Illumination
6.963

Film chronicles a decade in the life of a young physics student whose absolute faith in the primacy of rationality and science is shaken by tragedy and affairs of the heart.



Stellar
Stellar(1993)
6.4

This is a hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to achieve various effects of brief fades and fluidity-of-motion, and makes partial use of painted frames in repetition (for "close-up" of textures). The tone of the film is primarily dark blue, and the paint is composed (and rephotographed microscopically) to suggest galactic forms in a space of stars.



Crimes of the Future

With his partner, a celebrity performance artist publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. An investigator from the National Organ Registry obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed... Their mission — to use the artist's notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.



Lunacy
Lunacy(2005)
6.754

A man takes up residence with a mysterious marquis and is soon persuaded to enter into an asylum for preventative therapy. Things are not what they seem, and the marquis may be even more sinister than what the young man might have predicted.



The Fly
The Fly(1980)
7.2

A fine day in the life of a fly presented completely from the fly's point of view. A fine day until something dreary happens, that is.



Exte: Hair Extensions
5.882

An aspiring hair dresser becomes the infatuation of a tricophilic man who sells hair extensions to nearby hair salons. The source of the hair is the corpse of a girl whose dead body continues to grow beautiful, voluminous, black hair that comes alive, driving those who use the extensions insane or killing them.



The Shape of Things
6.129

Quiet, unassuming Adam is changing in a major way, thanks to his new girlfriend, art student Evelyn. Adam's friends are a little freaked by the transformation.



Ugly Nasty People
5.8

A group of physically disabled lowlifes plots the the perfect heist, but things go south as each reveals an agenda of their own.



He Took His Skin Off for Me

A simple, domestic love story about a man who takes his skin off for his girlfriend, and why it probably wasn't the best idea...



Coma
Coma(2020)
6.42

A young and talented architect comes to his senses after a horrific accident only to find himself in the odd dystopian world. A world that is filled with the memories of all current coma patients. Just like a human memory this world is fragmental, chaotic and unstable. This is COMA: icecaps, rivers and cities can all exist in a space of a single room and laws of physics are no longer laws as they can be bent.



Underground
7.7

A group of Serbian socialists prepares for the war in a surreal underground filled by parties, tragedies, love and hate.



Not Very Normal Activities

An isolated house, a young couple, a perverted videographer, a mute. All of which leads to normal activities... but not quite! A parody of Paranormal Activity.



Vital
Vital(2004)
6.8

A young man awakens in the hospital after an accident wipes his memory. Fascinated by a textbook full of drawings of dissections, Hiroshi is drawn to medical school. There he catches the eye of a fellow student, but it's another who becomes his obsession: the dead woman on the cadaver table.



Away
Away(2019)
6.4

After suffering a plane crash on a mysterious island, a young man embarks on an epic journey through forests, deserts and mountains trying to escape the shadow of a huge dark spirit.



Shelley
Shelley(2016)
5.542

Louise and Kasper want to become parents, but Louise cannot have children. She seals a pact with her Romanian maid, Elena, to bear her child, but things don't turn out quite as planned...



Patchwork
Patchwork(2015)
5.466

A delightfully dark, Frankenstein-themed horror comedy about a re-animated corpse, made from the stitched together body parts of three murdered young women, that decides to go on a bloody quest to find their killer and avenge their deaths!



Lisa Frankenstein
6.299

In 1989, a misunderstood teenager has a high school crush — who just happens to be a handsome corpse! After a set of playfully horrific circumstances bring him back to life, the two embark on a murderous journey to find love, happiness…and a few missing body parts along the way.



Koko-di Koko-da
5.8

As a couple goes on a trip to find their way back to each other, a sideshow artist and his shady entourage emerge from the woods, terrorizing them, luring them deeper into a maelstrom of psychological terror and humiliating slapstick.



Bunny
Bunny(1998)
6.6

Bunny, an elderly rabbit who uses a walker, is in her kitchen one night baking a cake. A photograph from her wedding day is on her wall. A pesky and persistent moth bangs about the kitchen. She shoos it outside, turns off the porch light, and returns to her baking. The moth finds its way back into the kitchen, she bats it with a wooden spoon, and it falls into the mix. She stirs it up, pours the batter into a pan, and pops it into the oven. But the moth isn't done: it has a different mission, turning the oven into a portal, and inviting Bunny on a voyage of reunion.



Sexmission
7.236

Two scientists are chosen as guinea pigs for a time experiment: they are placed in hibernation and should be brought back to life after three years. In the meantime, however, World War III breaks out and life has been wiped off the surface of Earth. When they wake up, it turns out that not only 50 years have passed but also that they are the only living specimens of the male sex in a new, underground society composed exclusively of women.



Aftermath
Aftermath(1994)
5.439

When the others leave for the night, the last mortician begins to fondle the corpses. He quickly moves to the corpse of a young woman who died in a car crash.



Meatball Machine
5.358

Capable of making bio-mechanical weapons out of human flesh, alien parasites grotesquely invade the Earth, turning their hosts into maniacal killers who seek and destroy each other to the bloody death! And yes, it s also a human love story, even though the budding romantics are infested with slimy, tumor-like globules.



Darkness
Darkness(2002)
5.635

A teenage girl moves into a remote country home with her family, only to discover that the gloomy old house has a horrifying past that threatens to destroy them.



Darkened Room
5.4

Two young women find themselves in a dark room where there is a distinctly strange feeling.



Prelude: Dog Star Man

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time. Part of the Dog Star Man series of experimental films.



Goké, Body Snatcher from Hell

The survivors of a plane crash in a remote area are attacked by blob-like alien creatures that turn their victims into blood-thirsty vampires.



Subconscious Cruelty
4.721

A surrealistic anthology of horror films; four segments structured as an intense fever dream...



Bad Biology
4.5

Driven by biological excess, a young man and woman search for sexual fulfillment, unaware of each other's existence. Unfortunately, they eventually meet, and the bonding of these two very unusual human beings ends in an explosive and ultimately over-the-top sexual experience, resulting in a truly god awful love story....



Matrix
Matrix(1998)
7.1

The film is composed of receding planes in a landscape: a back garden and the houses beyond. The wooden lattice fence, visible in the image, marks the border between enclosed and open, private and public space, and forms both a fulcrum for the work and a formal grid by which the shots are framed and organised.



Two
Two(2021)
5.4

Two people, a man and a woman, wake up naked and with their abdomens attached to each other.



Found Footage 3D
5.291

A group of filmmakers sets out to make the first 3D found footage horror movie, but find themselves IN the first 3D found footage horror movie when the evil entity from their film escapes into their behind-the-scenes footage.



Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

A disturbing puppet short exploring the concept of creativity.



Open Grave
5.977

A man awakes-- without memory -- in a pit full of bodies and must figure out if the people who rescued him are the killers, or if he is the murderer.



Geometry
Geometry(1987)
6.1

A boy is tired of failing geometry, so he summons a demon.



Six Men Getting Sick
5.528

Lynch's first film project consists of a loop of six people vomiting projected on to a special sculptured screen featuring twisted three-dimensional faces.



Reconstruction
6.8

Late one evening Alex suddenly abandons his girlfriend, Simone, to pursue the beautiful Aimee. In his encounter with Aimee time and place dissolve for him and he becomes a stranger to Simone, to whom he cannot return.



The Bunker
6.114

A student moves in with a family that lives in an underground house in the middle of the forest, far from civilization. His hopes of peace and quiet are soon shattered, when it becomes apparent that both the parents and their son have a screw loose.



Escape
Escape(2024)
5.4

A young man becomes convinced that the solution to all his problems is to live in jail, and he will do whatever it takes to get it.



About Endlessness
6.541

A reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendor and banality, guided by a Scheherazade-esque narrator. Inconsequential moments have the same significance as historical events. Simultaneously an ode and a lament, presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.



Beauty Water
5.657

Beauty Water looks like a common skin cosmetic. But unlike other cosmetics, people can sculpt their skin with it like molding clay and change their appearance. An ordinary girl, Yaeji, comes across the 'Beauty Water' by chance, and her endless desire to be the most beautiful woman brings her unimaginable disaster.



After.Life
6.327

Following a terrible car crash, a woman awakes to find an enigmatic mortician preparing her for burial.



Mad God
Mad God(2021)
6.876

A figure known as "The Assassin" descends from the heavens into a nightmarish pit full of monsters, titans, and cruelty.



Doodlebug
Doodlebug(1997)
6.5

There's something in his apartment. A man looking for an insect-like thing devolves into a bout of insanity as his subconscious mind begins to strangle his waking one.



Hal
Hal(2013)
6.983

Kurumi’s heart was broken by the sudden death of her boyfriend in a tragic airplane accident. By melding futuristic technology with the binary equivalent of human emotion, a brilliant scientist created an ultra-lifelike robotic surrogate to take Hal’s place – and lure Kurumi from her shroud of solitude.



Prelude to a Kiss
5.613

A couple fall in love despite the girl's pessimistic outlook. As they struggle to come to terms with their relationship, something supernatural happens that tests it.

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