History Main / ThroughTheEyesOfMadness

* ''Paprika'' is another example.

* The music video of "''Asylum''" by {{Disturbed}} has the patient/protagonist attempts throughout to escape from the titular asylum depicted this way. The events within are always surreal and usually overly violent and brutal (such as his being killed or beaten by the doctors and staff multiple times) while deranged and schizophrenic camera editing always follow the patient's POV (scenes without him are completely clean). The kicker is that after every one of his "deaths", [[ResetButton he ends up back in his padded cell]], implying it was a delusion.[[spoiler: During the last event, thinking he'll just be sent back to his cell to tosses himself into a furnace to escape the doctors pursuing him. This one wasn't a delusion]].

*** Although, really, if you're going to try to apply normal standards of what's "possible" to the plots from the X-Files, you're on a fool's errand.
* Present in the SomethingCompletelyDifferent ''DoctorWho'' episode "Love & Monsters" by RussellTDavies, though Davies doesn't emphasize the horror aspect. However, the {{Whoniverse}} does come across as a more disturbing place in this episode than it does normally. As well as the Doctor himself.
** I flew into the wild and fire -- I danced and died a thousand times!

* A significant chunk of the whole point of ''HigurashiNoNakuKoroNi''. It doesn't help that sometimes it's a [[UnreliableNarrator first-person narrative]] at the time. Although some objective explanations are given. Eventually.
** Although a good chunk of the explanations are only [[AllThereInTheManual in the visual novels]].

** While not perhaps an entirely pure example, one episode which features a cyberbrain found from a flea market that captures peoples' minds within itself in a never-ending movie does fit in this trope in the sense, that the entire experience is impossible within the logic of the series, where a Ghost cannot exist without a brain of some sort, and one brain shouldn't be able to hold several Ghosts.

** [[MindScrew Both.]]
*** It's not as much of a MindScrew as it seems, especially if you watch [[MindScrewdriver End of Evangelion]] and find out what was going on outside of Shinji's head. Put it simply, Instrumentality happened, and Shinji's tortured psyche became reality as giant naked Rei gave him God-like powers to remake the world as he sees fit.

* Another of Kon's works, ''PerfectBlue'', has this among the many tricks it plays with perception and reality. Unfortunately, these tricks are used so many times that the viewer is expected to keep several different alternate "realities" in their memory, up until the unsatisfying conclusion which explains absolutely nothing. Was it a good ending? A bad ending? An ironic ending? Nobody can tell. This is an example of MindScrew.
* Most of Kon's works are like this. ''MillenniumActress'', while not frightening, makes you wonder what the heck is real and what's not especially when the old woman is introduced. "I hate you more than I can bear but I love you more than I can bear." Screwed up.
** ''Paprika'' is also another example though more eerie than MillenniumActress because of the whole [[NightmareFuel parade thing]] goin' on...

Describe ThroughTheEyesOfMadness here... or it might be here.

* The ''CriminalMinds'' episode "Normal".

* Early in the first game of ''TheSuffering'', you gain the ability to turn into [[SuperpoweredEvilSide a hideous monster]] that does excellent melee damage to foes, but suffers from a constantly decreasing KarmaMeter. Two later characters reference your berserk furies in which you tear foes apart with your bare hands, and are somewhat unnerved that you seem to believe you physically transform into a monster when you fight like this. It's never quite clear to what degree this is hallucinated and to what degree this is not. On the one hand, nobody thinks you really transform, and we know from the endings that being evil coincides with being insane. On the other hand, your real self probably couldn't do such tricks as a GroundPound. And on [[BodyHorror the giant knives that used to be your hands]], there doesn't seem to be such a thing as "objective reality" in this series.

* Most of Kon's works are like this. ''MilleniumActress'', while not frightening, makes you wonder what the heck is real and what's not especially when the old woman is introduced. "I hate you more than I can bear but I love you more than I can bear." Screwed up.
** ''Paprika'' is also another example though more eerie than MilleniumActress because of the whole [[NightmareFuel parade thing]] goin' on...

* ''The Machinist'' is nearly a fantastic example of this trope. However the ending revelation rationalizes everything.

* ''The Amityville Horror'' is one of the best examples, especially the remake. The protagonist becomes posessed by the haunted house, seeing his own children (and wife) as demons and eventually killing his own dog with an axe! Later on he goes after the family too, but [[spoiler:after being knocked out and dragged away from the house, he becomes sane again.]]

* TheKillingJoke. Joker's flashbacks.... [[MultipleChoicePaster Are they what actually happened or simply a fabrication of his twisted mind?]]

** By the way, "The Horla" actually ''inspired'' the [[CthulhuMythos Call of Cthulhu]]. HPLovecraft praised it, and said:

* A version of ''The Emperor's New Clothes'' featured in one of the Datlow/Windling FableRemake collections plays a relatively lighthearted version of this. Due to a twist involving the boy who reveals that the Emperor has no clothes, both the narrator (The brother of the Emperor, who is a manipulative, treacherous would-be usurper who's far more incompetent than he realizes) and the reader are left wondering whether the clothes didn't exist, or they really ''did'' exist, and the narrator couldn't perceive them because he was wholly unfit for his position.

* Several of HPLovecraft's stories read in this fashion, it often never being quite clear whether what's happening to the characters is actually happening, actually happened, or whether the characters just went insane. The fact that many of them start off clearly not that well adjusted in the first place and even more of them wind up in an insane asylum or living deep in ParanoiaFuel Territory really doesn't help things.

* The terrifying "The Repairer of Reputations" in ''The King in Yellow''.

** "The crashing tide can hide a guilty girl
From jealous hearts that start with gloss and curls.
I took my baby's breath beneath the chandelier
Of stars and atmosphere
And watched her disappear
Into the midnight show."

If it's clear that it's not all in the protaganist's mind and the danger is real, then the main character is [[ProperlyParanoid Properly Paranoid]].

* ''{{Ghost in the Shell}}'' has one of these. [[spoiler: An assassin is interupted by the protagonists, but blows himself up to take out his target]] Well, actually not. That minute of footage was all from his viewpoint, so he only thought he pulled it off. It's subtle to catch too, reading the revealing line wrong makes it look like there was some DeusExMachina going on.

* ''VanillaSky'' (2001), directed by Cameron Crowe and starring Tom Cruise. Remake of 1997 Spanish film ''Abre los Ojos'', a.k.a. ''Open Your Eyes''. After a car accident that kills his girlfriend and disfigures his face, the protagonist is haunted by increasingly bizarre occurences. The ending explains that [[spoiler:everything that has occurred after the car accident has been a dream. In real life, after the car accident, he signed a contract with a company that preserves its clients' bodies after death and keeps their brain waves active in lifelike virtual reality dreams, and then committed suicide. The bizarre occurrences are explained as glitches in the program. In the end, he decides to wake up from the dream program.]]

* Since ''TheDescent'''s main character was hallucinating without a doubt at several separate points, there is a popular theory that the cave monsters were all in her mind and it was her that [[spoiler:killed all her friends]]. The director orignally put a crawler silouette into the first hallucination sequence (which took place outside the cave) but had it edited out because he wanted to leave it more ambiguous.

** The original Koji Suzuki short story just about counts as this trope, too. Yoshimi experiences several minor paranormal occurences, and at the end is unsure whether it was real or the product of her over-stressed mind.

* In ''TheTerror'' by Dan Simmons it's not clear if the monster slaughtering them is just a combination of sleep deprivation, lack of food, denial, stupidity and one hungry bear or if it is actually the incarnation of Arctic rejecting the explorers.

* Stanislaw Lem's character Ijon Tichy is subject to this in ''TheFuturologicalCongress'' after being dosed with powerful hallucinogenic drugs.