50 Greatest WTF Movies
Weird wonders to warp your mind
The Wizard Of Oz (1939)
The WTF Movie: Blunted by familiarity, maybe, but consider that this is a film about a tornado whisking a girl to a world populated by witches and Munchkins, where her best friends are a scarecrow, a tin man and a talking lion. At the very least, it's a 'What The Heck?' movie.
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The Wicked Witch of the West sends her army after Dorothy. An army of FLYING MONKEYS.
Inception (2010)
The WTF Movie: What do you need to raid a man's dreams? According to Christopher Nolan's blockbuster mind-fuck, you need an architect, a chemist, a forger and, of course, a dreamer.
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) shows budding architect Ariadne (Ellen Page) the power of dreams by folding a city skyline in on itself.
Spirited Away (2001)
The WTF Movie: Hayao Miyazaki's fantasy goes through the looking glass into a world where parents are turned into pigs and a witch runs a bathhouse for the spirit world.
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The bathhouse is invaded by a gigantic stink spirit.
The Thing (1982)
The WTF Movie: Studios hoping for a hit were as freaked out as audiences when John Carpenter pushed the limits of SFX to reveal what 'alien' truly meant.
Sign up for the Total Film Newsletter
Bringing all the latest movie news, features, and reviews to your inbox
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: An attempted defibrillation goes awry when the patient's stomach bites the doctor's hands off and its head sprouts legs and scuttles away.
Primer (2004)
The WTF Movie: Shane Carruth's brain-teaser depicts time travel the way it probably would be in real-life: discovered by accident, boring to actually do and absolutely mind-boggling.
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: At whatever point you need to hands to scratch your head in incomprehension.
Being John Malkovich (1999)
The WTF Movie: A puppeteer (John Cusack) gets a job on the seventh-and-a-half floor of a skyscraper, where he discovers a portal into the head of actor John Malkovich. Honestly, we're not making this up.
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Malkovich enters his own head and discovers that everybody, regardless of race, age or gender, is John Malkovich.
Videodrome (1982)
The WTF Movie: David Cronenberg tackles the thorny issue of video nasties as porn-merchant James Woods discovers there's more to his latest acquisition - S&M channel Videodrome - than meets the eye.
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Woods develops a vaginal-like wound in his stomach, through which his enemies insert videotapes to brainwash him.
Un Chien Andalou (1929)
The WTF Movie: Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali lay the framework for all future WTF movies in twenty minutes of freeform, taboo-trashing surrealism.
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: The eye slicing, of course. Even knowing that it's really a dead calf's eyeball doesn't make it any easier to watch.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The WTF Movie: History according to Stanley Kubrick - black monoliths teach apes to kill, computers to go mad and humans to turn into giant space babies.
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: Astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) goes 'beyond the infinite' into a kaleidoscopic tunnel of light and otherworldly noise.
Eraserhead (1977)
The WTF Movie: A man, his monster baby and the lady in the radiator - while Hollywood messes around with horses' heads, David Lynch perfects the art of messing with our heads.
Drop Your Popcorn Moment: A taste of things to come as Henry (Jack Nance) tries to carve a roast chicken and it writhes and bleeds on the plate.