The least scary movies of all time – ranked! | film

20. Cars (2006)

Just to be clear on the synopsis, tomorrow is Halloween. But some people don’t like scary movies. Some people don’t like movies that contain intense emotional moments At all. This is mostly a list of those movies. So, for example, Up couldn’t be included in the lineup because her first ten minutes were really painful. Likewise, Finding Nemo could not be included because it is a film about a grieving father searching for his son who he believes may be dead. But the movie “Cars” about some cars can do that. The scariest thing that happens in Cars is when the car approaches the train. Other than that, there is no risk at all.

However, this does not mean that all these films should be intended for children. If you’re looking to keep your heart rate constantly low, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre fits the bill perfectly. Despite being rated a 12, for the rare references to mild sex, it’s fair to say that there’s absolutely nothing going on here. Two men have dinner, talk a lot, and then it’s over. A small army of viewers are quick to describe My Dinner with Andre as the most boring movie ever made. It’s not – a gentle read might be called deliberately cerebral – but nothing in it will keep you up at night.

This adaptation of the classic children’s book (the first published in 1941), about a cute chimpanzee who gets into moderate scrapes, is nothing if not relentlessly charming. Will Ferrell plays a man who seeks to discover a hidden treasure in order to raise money to save the museum, and a monkey follows him everywhere. Unless you’re extremely bothered by scenes of paint being thrown around, this is one of the most innocuous films ever made.

On the surface, Wong Kar-wai’s films seem perfect for this list, since they all tend to move in a dreamy, hypnotic state. However, he seems to like injecting them with sporadic violence. There’s a car accident in My Blueberry Nights, for example, and a stabbing in Days of Being Wild. “In the Mood for Love,” on the other hand, is much more subdued. Two people are brought together after learning that their partners cheated on them with each other, and the result is this quiet, sad story. Trigger Warning Site Will the dog die? It states that food is eaten loudly in one scene, so be aware of that.

I wanted so badly to include the Latvian animated film Flow on this list, until I remembered how terrified my eight-year-old son was. More subdued is Michael Duduk de Wit’s dialogue-free The Red Turtle. A man is stranded on a beach, and his chance to escape is thwarted by a turtle. Although – and here comes the only scary part – the turtle dies, she is reincarnated as a woman who falls in love with a man. Very touching and really beautiful.

15. On the Beach at Night Alone (2017)

The work of South Korean director Hong Sang-soo could have filled this list from top to bottom, as he specializes in quiet, contemplative films where barely anything happens. However, his breakout film remains On the Beach at Night Alone, in which a Korean woman flees to Germany after an affair ends. The introduction makes the movie seem a lot more action-packed than it is, because the most shocking thing that actually happens is that the main character raises his voice all at once. But the lack of a concrete plot is the point. This is a movie made to wash you over.

Compared to on the beach at night alone, everyone wants some!! Action-packed like a Transformers movie. There are drugs, partying, and frequent mentions of masturbation. But this is still a Richard Linklater film, so it’s important to point out that very little happens. For the most part, the film is a loose collection of fun scenes featuring college baseball players hanging out and playing. Maybe with one exception, that’s your heart rate for the entire list, but that doesn’t really mean much.

Philip French has described Michelangelo Framartino’s film as “an essay, a cinematic poem, and a spiritual exploration of time and place” – and it’s hard to find fault with that description. Le Quattro Volte is a film about an elderly goat herder in the mountains of Calabria, who goes about his work in a calm and unhurried manner. It might be worth mentioning that this is ultimately a film about death — it’s sad but not scary — but more often than not this near-silent contemplation feels like a long, slow exhalation.

The legacy of Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a million Netflix documentaries in which chefs are treated with far more respect than they deserve, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a masterpiece. Jiro Ono owns a 10-seat sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station, but his calm focus and dedication to perfection means he has won three Michelin stars. The film’s pleasure comes from the endearing, trance-like scenes of Jiro preparing his food with monastic stillness. It can’t really be called a soothing film, because the man is mean to his son, but other than that it fits the bill perfectly.

The danger, when it comes to adapting a beloved children’s character for modern audiences, is that there’s a tendency to fill Peter Rabbit entirely with terrifying tube gags that sully the charm of the original. There’s none of that in The Peanuts Movie, which is as genuinely good-intentioned as any other. Charlie Brown has a crush on a red-haired girl in his class, and embarks on various self-improvement methods so that she can notice him. It’s so in keeping with Charles M. Schulz’s comics and so light-hearted that you’d have to be a monster not to love it.

Despite his growing sense of ambition (he’s now adapting Merrily We Roll Along, shooting over the course of 20 years, with an eye toward a 2040 release) Richard Linklater’s masterpiece will always be the Before series, in which we intermittently connect with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy through the various stages of their relationship. Although 1995’s Before Sunrise had the biggest impact, as Hook and Delpy are young, sexy and flirtatious, and we get to watch them fall in love in real time, Before Sunset is the heart of the trilogy. As the couple grew older and more bruised, life became more complicated. But it’s still a great, low-stakes, not-at-all-scary movie.

Does the dog die? He has an absolute field day with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s weak fantasy drama. Yes, this is explicitly a ghost movie, but the website notes that they are “friendly spirits” and “not scary ghosts.” And yes, there’s also sexual content in the form of a scene that implies a woman is having sex with a fish, but “it’s not as disgusting as it sounds.” In fact, it’s harder to justify including this film than any other on the list, but the overwhelming tone is so calm and slow that it fits the bill.

8. Playtime (1967)

Jacques Tati’s masterpiece is less a film than an opportunity to marvel at his stunning production design; He built an entire city, Tateville, on the outskirts of Paris to achieve this. A cavalcade of visual jokes you’ll miss, and set in a stylish if sterile vision of modernity, Playtime has no real plot to speak of. Dressed as the bewildered Monsieur Hulot, Tati moves through the scenes more as a spectator than an active participant, as the world goes about its business around him. However, it is a film that you will find yourself getting lost in again and again.

Few David Lynch films can fit comfortably into the list of non-horror films – put a pin anywhere in his oeuvre and you’re likely to land on something that will psychologically terrify you forever – but The Straight Story is his strange film. An old man (Richard Farnsworth) drives a tractor across Central America to visit his dying brother (Harry Dean Stanton), and that’s about it. It was rated U upon release, and there’s nothing to upset even the most sensitive viewers here, with the possible exception of an off-screen car accident. However, the humor and emotion that Lynch crams into such a simple story is extraordinary. One of his finest works.

Jim Jarmusch’s best film, Adam Driver’s best film, and almost certainly the best film ever made about the process of carefully reworking a poem while simultaneously driving a bus. Patterson is an exceptional film with minimal premise. This is literally all that happens. The driver writes a poem, then changes it as he drives his bus around town, and then the same thing happens the next day, and the next. Granted, there are a spike in tension here and there — a guy pulls out a fake gun at one point, and his wife is so relentlessly eccentric that she’ll set your teeth on edge — but for the most part this is just a movie about a guy quietly going about his day.

Compared to the other films on the list, which are more slow-paced, Farmaggedon can feel a bit like you’re trapped in a warehouse of exploding fireworks. But this is about as fun as filmmaking can be, and there’s a generational appeal here. Shaun the Sheep finds an alien in his quiet small town, and decides to help him return home. The premise is just an excuse to introduce gags based on old sci-fi tropes, but the scene that pushes Farmageddon into masterpiece territory is a quasi-scientific demonstration of what happens if you let a hyperactive alien eat too much sugar. This may be heresy to some, but I consider it Aardman’s best work.

In these tough times for cinema, where huge money-making tentpoles can’t be guaranteed anymore, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On was a theatrical release. A quiet stop-motion animation about a shell that somehow wanders around, the film is as niche as it gets. Although very funny and sweet – Marcel is the kind of character you long to protect – there is a sadness surrounding the film that may surprise you. But this is a list of movies that aren’t scary, not movies that aren’t sad, so it’s important.

“The mild comic violence is unlikely to disturb even young children” is how the BBFC describes the classic musical comedy, and anecdotally it’s accurate. I had worried that Donald O’Connor’s aggressive slapstick in the Make ‘Em Laugh series would be too much for my kids when they were very young – you’re basically watching a man injure himself for the sake of applause – but it turned out to be their favorite part. As films about the death of the silent cinema experience go, this one is much more palatable than Babel (which, let’s not forget, included a scene of an elephant defecating directly on the audience).

Many parents will have experienced the horror of jumping into a family showing of a Studio Ghibli film without proper research — I can’t be the only one who abandoned Pom Poko after all the dead raccoons forced the kids to leave the room — but Kiki’s delivery service is the safest bet in town. A film about a young witch who decides to work as a courier, the film is relentlessly entertaining. I was going to say that there isn’t a person on this planet who wouldn’t fall in love with Kiki’s Delivery Service, but I took a look at Does a Dog Die? There is a trigger warning because it contains a body of water, so who knows?

A film about a man silently cleaning toilets for two hours has no right to be as beautiful as Wim Wenders’s 2023 film, and yet it manages to be stunning. Koji Yakusho wakes up, gets dressed, cleans the toilets, eats lunch, comes home and dreams over and over again. The result is the best film about quiet contentment ever made. It helps that public toilets are true works of art – you wonder how many holidays are booked in Tokyo just to visit them – but this is a film about a man experiencing everything as if for the first time. Nature, people, music, peace… It’s a film so meditative that you’ll want to watch it once a month to reset your nervous system.