#The 10 Best Doppelganger Horror Movies

October is defined in Webster’s Dictionary as “31 days of horror.” Don’t bother looking it up, it’s true. Most people take that to mean highlighting one horror movie a day, but here at FSR, we’ve taken that up a spooky notch or nine by celebrating each day with a top ten list. This article about the best doppelgänger horror movies is part of our ongoing series 31 Days of Horror Lists.

Mister Rogers taught us that we’re special. There is only one you. That is our gift to this lovely planet. Only we can do what we can do. You’re welcome. As these ten films below will reveal, though, Mister Rogers was a liar. There are others who want what we have. There are others who can do us better than we can. These doppelgängers will wait in the shadows no more. They’re ready to step out of the mirror and wear our skins.

Keep reading to diabolically double your pleasure with the Boo Crew — a.k.a. Chris Coffel, Valerie Ettenhofer, Kieran Fisher, Anna Swanson, Rob Hunter, Meg Shields, Jacob Trussell, and yours truly (at least I think I’m yours truly) — as we put these wretched wannabes under the microscope and explore the best doppelgänger horror movies.

10. Possession (1981)

The best movie that could have also been called Marriage Story, Possession is an operatic and unshakeable masterwork that is at once deeply resonant and profoundly bizarre. The film stars Sam Neill as a spy in a relationship-on-the-rocks marriage, who begins to suspect that all is not as it seems with his wife, Anna (the inimitable Isabelle Adjani). He soon crosses paths with his son’s teacher, Helen (Adjani, again — doppelgänger horror!) and this is only the start of the mystery. Unfolding in an audacious and originally nightmarish fashion, and featuring one of the greatest sequences set to celluloid, the legendary subway scene, Possession is the cinematic equivalent of capturing lightning in a bottle. While the story might be about doubles, the film itself is an accomplishment that could never be duplicated. (Meg Shields)

9. Coherence (2013)

Comets are bad news. Whenever they pass our precious little rock, a world of weirdness falls upon us. Certainly, that’s what movies have taught me. In Coherence, the cosmic close-contact tears a riff into space and time. Eight pals are simply trying to enjoy a night in when the power cuts out, and hijinks ensue within their little party domicile. Who is the jokester? They are. Multiple realities crash into each other, and it becomes a game of survival of the fittest. Which world wants it more? Coherence is a trippy step into the Twilight Zone, where comedy and dread dip into each other. As the runtime ticks toward its finish, the anxiety of the partygoers, as well as the audience, ratchets north. When a mirror shatters, you discover that the characters you’re rooting for might not actually be the characters you’re rooting for. (Brad Gullickson)

8. Cam (2018)

One of the freshest takes on the dangerous doubles subgenres comes from camgirl-turned-writer-and-producer Isa Mazzei. In Cam, a camgirl named Alice (Orange is the New Black’s Madeline Brewer) navigates the high-wire act of keeping her online shows separate from her everyday life, until one day another version of her pops up online. The other Alice is stealing our protagonist’s fans, reputation, and income, not to mention her face. Is this identity theft? A glitch? A curse? Doppelgänger horror? Mazzei shines a nuanced light on the online sex work industry while also delivering a tense and shocking story about what happens when one’s double life manifests in human form. (Valerie Ettenhofer)

7. Lost Highway (1997)

One does not step into a David Lynch film with ease. From the moment you press play, you’re on guard. The world, as first presented, is not the world it appears to be. Lost Highway does everything Mullholland Drive does, but sooner, quicker, and more viciously (sorry, Anna – see below). Who are you? What’s your purpose? What’s your reality? The questions burn in our hero Bill Pullman’s brain the moment he starts to receive mysterious VHS tapes and the accusations of murder land at his feet. The film is straight neo-noir dread until it’s not. Lost Highway presents a double that is at once fantastical and all-too-real emotionally. As always, Lynch revels in the horrific and the baffling to capture emotional authenticity. When Pullman’s character meets the man in the mirror, you can bet your ass that you’ll recognize him. (Brad Gullickson)

6. Body Double (1984)

Brian De Palma, as he is known to do, channels his inner Hitchcock with Body Double, the story of a struggling actor that gets caught in a world of voyeurism and violence. While house-sitting for a new friend, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) becomes obsessed with a woman that does a striptease at the same time every night directly in front of her bedroom window. He eventually witnesses her murder and then soon discovers that the woman he developed an obsession over may not have been the woman he saw dancing every night. De Palma developed the idea while interviewing body doubles for Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill. From there, he borrowed elements from Rear Window and Vertigo and delivered a masterpiece of an erotic thriller as only he can. (Chris Coffel)

5. Vertigo (1958)

Doppelgängers and doubles are prominent in a few of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, but Vertigo is the most twisted and exciting of the bunch. Often cited as the director’s most personal film, Vertigo is the earliest example of doppelgänger horror on this list and stars James Stewart as a detective who gets hired to retrieve his friend’s wife. But he’s obsessed with the woman who isn’t real. When he meets her double, he spirals out of control and makes her start dressing like the so-called imaginary woman he fell in love with. While Vertigo hints at the supernatural, there’s a perfectly plausible explanation for the double at the end. However, the real horror lies in its examination of a broken and twisted psyche. It’s utterly haunting. (Kieran Fisher)

4. Mulholland Drive (2001)

At first glance, Mulholland Drive is about doppelgängers and doubles, but as its labyrinthine plot unfolds, it becomes apparent that what is truly at play is the fracturing of the self. The divisions in identity here are perhaps not created by film but are certainly fostered by cinema as both an industry and a visual medium. David Lynch’s magnum opus is a richly complex take on personal identity and interpersonal relationships that, even on umpteenth viewings, continues to possess a beautiful unknowability. Fittingly, Mulholland Drive on its own could be one hell of a double feature. Any viewing will create the desire to immediately re-watch and with so much at play, the experience will never be the same as it was the last time. (Anna Swanson)

3. Annihilation (2018)

To adequately discuss the doppelgängers of Annihilation is to inherently spoil the film, so if you haven’t seen Alex Garland’s blending of sci-fi, horror, and philosophical ideations on life: what are you doing? Go watch it now. Are you back? Great. When we are first presented with the alterna-Kane (Oscar Isaac), we don’t know he is an alien double like the one Lena (Natalie Portman) squares off against in the finale. Rather, in a way that is surely an explanation for the doppelgänger phenomenon through history, we believe Kane’s changed behavior is some form of post-traumatic stress, not unlike a soldier coming back from war (which we know Kane has via flashback). His reality has been inextricably altered in an extraterrestrial world, but as we learn, that’s not all that’s been changed. Ultimately, Annihilation is just an LSD-soaked version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where something from the stars plans to take us over, slowly and methodically. But what makes the annihilation entity far scarier than the pod people is that they want to do more than just change humans, they want to alter the very fabric of reality on Earth. Gotta admit, nowadays that doesn’t sound half bad, right? (Jacob Trussell)

2. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Jack Finney’s acclaimed novel The Body Snatchers has seen numerous adaptations over the years, both official and otherwise. None, though, have captured doppelgänger horror and the fear of losing your identity or the identity of loved ones so horrifyingly as Philip Kaufman‘s late ’70s masterpiece of paranoia. An alien invasion has begun, but rather than obliterate humanity with lasers and rectal probes, these crafty visitors are beating humanity at its own game — by becoming us. People are copied and discarded fleshy bags of trash while their copy incubates and awakens fully formed. Are they better than you? Than us? Probably, but it’s their adherence to conformity that dooms our own species to extinction. Hmm, maybe there’s a lesson there… Like John Carpenter’s film below, this is top-tier horror appearing on more than one of this year’s lists, and its effect is no less powerful no matter how many times we watch. (Rob Hunter)

1. The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter’s The Thing is a movie that never exhausts. A Halloween doesn’t pass without a dozen or so film writers championing its brilliance. It’s a masterpiece, and you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would disagree (and if you do, I wouldn’t trust them, because they’re probably the Thing). For me, with every watch, a new piece of dread becomes my focus. Some might not think of this as doppelgänger horror, but on this recent viewing, I found my stomach churning early as Blair (Wilford Brimley) conducts his autopsy of the mangled, burnt creature, and the genetic calculations start to formulate. If this alien lifeform can perfectly replicate a human, would it even know that it was not human? Meaning, would you know you’re not human? Is the Thing the double, or are you? This impossible knowledge is the ultimate scare of the film, and as Kurt Russell and Keith David sit across from each other in the final moments of the movie, the questions of their biology churn your stomach. If you can even claim your stomach to be your stomach. (Brad Gullickson)