The Most Bizarre Movies Coming Out In 2018 That Will Melt Your Mind

From writer/director Evan Marlowe comes Abruptio, a thriller with an intense premise: a man wakes up one morning to find that a bomb has been implanted in his neck. If he wants to keep it from going off, he has to do things—horrible things—all while trying to find out who is doing this to him and why. It sounds pretty bizarre, even before you get to the part in the synopsis where it explains that all the characters "will be performed by life-sized, realistic latex puppets."

Providing voice work are James Marsters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) in the lead, along with horror icons Sid Haig and Robert Englund, and future horror icon Jordan Peele. While it's worth acknowledging that employing puppets to tell the story of a man forced to do things against his will has the ring of potential brilliance, it's also likely that Abruptio may be the kind of Uncanny Valley head-screw that will send audience members with certain sensitivities screaming into the theater lobby. With a tentative release date of May 31, we'll just have to wait to see whether it's a work of genius, madness, or both.

Not many filmmakers are as visually provocative as Lars von Trier, which makes any new project of his a potential brain-bender. But his forthcoming The House That Jack Built sports a truly unsettling premise: it's an examination of the career of a serial killer who has been active for more than a decade and who views each of his murders as a work of art. In the hands of von Trier, such a story promises a deep, dark psychological ride.

Veteran actor Matt Dillon will take the lead, with Bruno Ganz and Uma Thurman also among the announced cast. IFC Films, which was brave enough to release von Trier's 2009 work of insanity Antichrist, announced at Cannes earlier this year that it had snapped up the rights to the film's distribution. Oddly, von Trier had first pitched the project as a television miniseries before deciding to shoot it as a feature on a minuscule budget. No firm release date has been announced, but The House That Jack Built will hit theaters next year. If its maker's previous body of work is any indication whatsoever, it's sure to be not so much a film as an unnerving experience of the highest order.

From the mind of the man who brought Crank and Crank: High Voltage to the screen comes Mom and Dad, a suburban horror flick that pits kids against their parents when a mysterious plague turns the would-be caretakers into rage-filled murderers. Starring the pitch-perfectly cast Nic Cage and Selma Blair as a pair of lethal guardians, the film is said to exploit the former's "natural inclination to turn his performances all the way up to, and past, 11."

Speaking with Deadline at The Toronto Film Festival in 2017, where audiences first saw the bloody bash, Cage said, "I saw this as my right to exercise my belief in freedom of speech. This was Sex Pistols from start to finish, this is punk rock." Translation: If Nic Cage thinks it's crazy, imagine how general audiences will feel.

Combined with The Guardian's additional note that "the infanticidal imagery will linger, whether you like it or not," if director Brian Taylor also decided to crank up his usual penchant for frenzied pacing and eye-popping visuals, the resulting film should be something to behold. 

Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 YA novel A Wrinkle in Time has been melting young brains for generations. The story of a precocious teen girl who must rescue her psychic younger brother from a fate worse than death with the help of interdimensional beings Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, the book's more surreal aspects have made it highly resistant to live-action adaptation. But this shouldn't be a problem for Disney, which has loaded the production with a budget north of $100 million and an all-star cast.

Selma director Ava DuVernay will be at the helm, becoming the first woman of color ever to direct a big-budget live-action tentpole film. Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen screenwriter Jennifer Lee is responsible for the script, and the aforementioned stellar cast includes Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Zach Galifianakis, Ant-Man's Michael Pena, 12 Years a Slave's Storm Reid, and none other than Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which. According to DuVernay, fans of the novel can expect an updated yet faithful adaptation, meaning that filmgoers of all stripes should be in for a brain-bending good time.

Filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are fans of the Tribeca Film Festival, and Festival officials return their affection. Tribeca Executive VP Paula Weinstein labeled them "artists to watch" after the strong showing of their 2012 thriller Resolution, and their latest film The Endless performed admirably there as well. The movie, in which the co-directors also star as characters who share their actual first names, explores the mindset of a pair of brothers who have escaped the clutches of a cult but are compelled to return years later by a mysterious tape sent in the mail.

Early images from the film hint at a trippy visual aesthetic, and the plot synopsis suggests that the cult's crazy otherworldly beliefs maybe aren't so crazy after all. It all adds up to a project that just might be worth keeping a close eye on, coming from a pair of ambitious filmmakers who seem due for a breakout hit. The film's Tribeca appearance led to a wide North American distribution deal, with an eye toward an early 2018 release date.

The astonishing success of this year's live-action Beauty and the Beast remake has encouraged Disney to dig deeper than ever before in search of properties that are ripe for a similar treatment. As we await Guy Ritchie's Aladdin, Tim Burton's Dumbo and many, many more, one project has flown quietly under the radar for a couple years—a live-action adaptation of Night on Bald Mountain, the scariest, trippiest segment of the landmark 1940 film Fantasia. 

The segment—which is notably short on actual plot—features a towering, demonic winged creature called Chernabog that presides over a night of festivities for a host of restless spirits, and it's the classic Disney animation style at its most surreal and unsettling. Screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who penned the Vin Diesel vehicle The Last Witch Hunter and contributed the story to this year's Power Rangers reboot, have reportedly been developing the script, which insiders say will focus on the backstory of the demonic Chernabog much as Maleficent did for Sleeping Beauty's villainous witch. No firm release date has been set, but Night on Bald Mountain should arrive to rekindle old childhood nightmares sometime in 2018.

Perhaps no feature film has endured such a rocky ride to screens as director Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. His quest to get the film made long ago began to mirror the foolish, futile endeavors of the Quixote of the classic Cervantes novel; an entire feature documentary, Lost In La Mancha, was produced chronicling the never-ending series of disasters which nearly caused Gilliam to give up on the project forever, and that was in 2002. But somehow, improbably, Gilliam's labor of love and/or madness is coming to theaters next year (which can only be confidently announced because it has wrapped shooting), and it sounds every bit worth the wait.

The story focuses on an old man who believes he is the legendary Quixote, who mistakes a confused advertising executive for his faithful squire and proceeds to drag the man through a time-jumping, mind-bending adventure where dreams and reality become tough to tell apart. 

Gilliam reminded everyone of his Monty Python roots with his deadpan, self-deprecating announcement of the shoot's completion: "Don Quixote is a dreamer, an idealist, and a romantic, determined not to accept the limitations of reality, marching on regardless of setbacks, as we have done," he said. "Any sensible person would have given up years ago, but sometimes pig-headed dreamers win in the end, so thank you to all of the ill-paid fantasists and believers who have joined to make this longstanding dream a reality!"

In 2010, a blogger coined the "Mandela effect" to describe a situation that seemed to be on the rise with the internet: people remembering the same events in different ways, sometimes completely differently. The term comes from the fact that an odd number of people seemed to remember South African president Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. (He didn't.) Perhaps the most popular and visible "evidence" is that opposing groups can't agree on the spelling of the popular children's book series The Berenstain Bears. (Hint: it's that one.)

Since memory is highly unreliable, it's an effect to which almost anyone is susceptible, and if you care to research the phenomenon, the hole goes insanely deep. But such a head-twisty concept is overdue for the Hollywood treatment: co-writer and director David Guy Levy (Would You Rather) will bring The Mandela Effect to the big screen, starring Charlie Hofheimer as a man for whom the everyday details of the world begin to change—and keep changing, until he starts to question the nature of reality itself. Levy called the concept "a timely and relatable topic which we think audiences will really gravitate towards, and we are excited to make this into a heady sci-fi film that will ooze with indie spirit." Production is currently underway, and The Mandela Effect will hit the screen sometime in 2018—just don't be surprised if you show up expecting the story of Mandela's life.