Fictional works about insanity?

[KyriakosCH]

Got any interesting one to suggest?

They can be movies as well, not just books/stories.

I have read a few of note:

-The house of Asterion/The South are two very nice short stories by Borges.
-La Horla/He? are a couple by De Maupassant (he has more in this vein)
-The black monk, a largish story by Chechov, which builds up to a memorable conclusion.

Maybe the death of Ivan Ilic, by Tolstoy, although iirc that is more about slow erosion of will to live.

ETA Hoffmann has some interesting stories, mostly variations on the theme of the doppelganger, eg The Sandman.

Re movies, i really liked 2002's Spider, by Cronenberg.

[Mandle]

A bit mainstream, and controversial for altering a lot of the facts of the real story, but:

I've always thought "A Beautiful Mind" is a very good movie about the slow slide down (or sideways perhaps?) into insanity, and also quite...

SPOILERS!

Spoiler

...inspiring in the way the main character can never conquer his delusions but learns to live with them through sheer force of intellect. He learns to use his brilliant mind to recognise the difference between reality and hallucinations, even though both seem equally real to him...

[close]

[KyriakosCH]

It was a very nice movie, yes, although since then i came to dislike Crowe

[CaptainD]

I second Mandle's suggestion, although it does depend on how broad your definition of "insanity" is (idiopathic / iatrogenic / full on psychosis / a form of dementia / brain damage from an injury or disease, paranoid delusions, etc) - but I would also say that A Beautiful Mind should definitely be watched twice.  When you know what parts are real and what parts aren't it's a completely different film, and you appreciate just how beautifully Ron Howard weaved in all the elements.

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick - have only seen the movie (didn't like it much) and suspect the book is a lot better, if you're interested in drug-induced madness.

No others are coming to mind right now, I'll post again if I remember anything worth mentioning.

[Gurok]

Philip K. Dick has a heap. The main character in Martian Time-Slip goes pretty nutter butters when he has to go fix robots at the school. I think they explain it in the book as "autism" (it was the 60s), but it's more like schizophrenia. He starts seeing little tape players inside everyone.

[Mandle]

It was a very nice movie, yes, although since then i came to dislike Crowe

His path of movie choices has gone a tad astray...

From pure awesomeness in Gladiator to total WTF in Les Miserables...

It seems like his journey from fresh face to film icon got a bit more tangled and complex than it should have been...

He should have taken a more direct route...What's that term again?

"As the..."

[Danvzare]

I'm not sure if this is a good suggestion or not (it probably isn't), but what about Sucker Punch.
You'd have to be pretty insane to imagine any of those scenes in that time period...
You'd also have to be insane to think it was a good movie, but that's subjective.

[Radiant]

Slouching Towards Bedlam.

It's a text adventure (interactive fiction) about insanity. Or perhaps it's not. Play it and find out!

Playable online.

[KyriakosCH]

Hm... re games, the Sanitarium was a very well-done 90s adventure (i think it was late 90s?)

"Diagnosis: Crazy!"

[CaptainD]

Oh just remembered... not sure if it fits your criteria (I guess technically it's a fictional account of a genuine historical event) - The Madness of King George was a very good film.

[Mandle]

I'm not sure if this is a good suggestion or not (it probably isn't), but what about Sucker Punch.
You'd have to be pretty insane to imagine any of those scenes in that time period...
You'd also have to be insane to think it was a good movie, but that's subjective.

I think it's a very good suggestion. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not (probably not), but I found myself feeling guilty for enjoying the amazing OTT action scenes in the movie, because of the grim reality of what was really going on.

If it was intentional for the audience to feel that way, then total genius points to the makers!

[NickyNyce]

Just two off the top of my head..

I believe 'The Shining' was about insanity, and is an old classic movie.

I also remember watching a movie called 'Bug'. I wouldn't say it was great or even a good movie, but there is certainly lots of insanity about it. I believe it had to do with two people in a house that thought they were infected with some type of bug.

Check them out on youtube, watch the trailers and see if they are what you're looking for.

[Mandle]

OMG I've seen "Bug"....and woof! That was a weird movie:

Reminded me of another one about going delusional/insane:

I'm guessing KyriakosCH has seen this though, as he already mentioned a Cronenberg movie, but anyways:

"Naked Lunch"

[Snarky]

Madness is one of the great themes in art, and looking through my bookcase about every fourth book could be said to deal with insanity in one form or another (incidentally, about the same as the proportion of people who suffer from some form of mental disorder). There are literally millions of possible things to mention. So just a few examples:

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. The madness of obsession.
The Secret History, Donna Tartt. Group madness.
The Unlimited Dream Company, J.G. Ballard. The psychotic as Messiah.
Catch-22, Joseph Heller. What does sanity mean in an insane situation?

[Blondbraid]

As a fan of Gothic horror, the first thing that came to my mind reading this thread would be the works of HP. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe along with Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte,
but also a short story called The yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Allan Ryan wrote about The Yellow wallpaper:
It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not.

If I may suggest video games as well, I'd strongly recommend Psychonauts, a game about a boy with psychic powers who can enter other peoples minds and while experiencing their inner worlds, resolve their psychological problems,
and Alice: Madness returns, a very dark take on Alice in Wonderland.

[KyriakosCH]

I have heard of the Yellow wall-paper many times, and iirc tried to read it in the past (i think it is a lot of pages, though... i am pretty lazy with reading nowdays ).

Inland Empire (by David Lynch) can be argued to be about a delusional woman, although as is typical in Lynch films there isn't any evident plot combining the sequences in a very concrete manner.
There was a very low-budget (and very adventure-like) scottish film, i think aired in 2014 or 2015, titled "The Lord of Tears", which was allowing a similar explanation of what was going on (delusion) up to the very end when it seemed to alter the meaning heavily.

[vertigoaddict]

1) One flew out of the cuckoo's nest comes to mind (movie and book)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXrcDonY-B8

2) I'm a cyborg but that's okay- A Korean comedy, I remember it having some bubbly surreal parts.
https://youtu.be/1KaOLDZe2GI

3) Who can forget Misery? (movie)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNRXS-lDgYg

4) Pin a horror movie about a man, who was convinced as a child by his father, that an educational 'study of the human body' mannequin was alive, he keeps on believeing it in adulthood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um9rXGoMTv8

5) Lars and the Real girl- Dude has delusions about a sex doll, believing her to be real. The people in town embraces this delusion to help him recover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNcs9DrKYRU

6) Love object- Dude who writes manuals for a living is socially awkward and buys himself a sex doll, when he finds a manual for the doll to make her 'more real'...well, he has delusiona about a sex doll, believing her to be real. It f***s up his life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY391WsPZTc

7) Dead doll- Not sure if insanity is truly the focus but... a sculptor kills his model girlfriend after a fight and turns her dead body into a doll, he then gets killed and the dead girlfriend doll gets picked up by a bunch of different people who somehow get infatuated with her and start to imagine or hallucinate that she is alive.

8) Natural born Killers- a story about psychopathic lovers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpLKNclOtLg

9) American Psycho (movie and book)- about a guy who cares too much about appearances and likes killing people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GIsExb5jJU

10) Siren is a video game that isn't about insanity but *spoilers* [h]the live action movie they made based on it has a twist at the end where the main character figures out she's schizofrenic.[/h]

11) The rulling class- Dude inherts a large estate, dude also thinks he is literal god. It was interesting.(movie/stageplay)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMtkNvDGjV0

12)Lord of the Flies- more of a social commentary about how people need structure, but hey, kids are insane. (book and movie(s))

13) Black Swan [h]thinking about it, it is about the character's descent into madness.[/h]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1XOB-bs

14) Perfect Blue An idol finds a blog about her, supposedly written by her, she finds it amusing at first but then starts to question her own sanity. (Movie/ Novel)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Rj7nn0ZVs

All I could think of at the top of my head.

[KyriakosCH]

Pin!!!

Thank you! I have been looking for the name of that film for half a decade...! (only had seen the first scene )

[Mandle]

How about the book (not the movie): The Mothman Prophecies"?

The author is certainly losing his mind the further into his investigation he delves...The question is: Is he experiencing the impossible things that happen to him because he is losing his mind, or is he losing his mind because of the impossible things that are happening to him?

Supposedly an account of true events...Is it? Both of these issues are up to the reader to decide for themselves...