Lake Mungo

The most upsetting film on this site, and there is no violence in it at all.

It is presented as an Australian television documentary about the Palmer family after their sixteen-year-old daughter drowns on a day trip. Talking heads, home video, a psychic, local news footage. For an hour it is a grief documentary with a few strange photographs in it, and the strangeness keeps getting explained away, which is not something horror films normally do.

Then there is a phone. That sequence is about fifteen seconds long and people report thinking about it years later.

What makes it work is that the film is not really about a ghost. It is about a family finding out they did not know their daughter, and discovering it too late to do anything with. Joel Anderson made this and then made nothing else, which has only added to its reputation.

Watch it at night, alone, and do not read anything about it first.