Insomnia

Sleep has been called the cousin of death, but doing without it isn’t strictly advisable either, as the films in this series—sometimes quite agonizingly—illustrate. Side effects include visions of vampiric aristocrats (Hour of the Wolf), itchy trigger fingers (Insomnia), delusions of vigilante vainglory (Taxi Driver), split personalities (Fight Club), and other unpleasantness we won’t get into here. A collection of fraught films that will send you sprinting into the arms of Morpheus, movies that take full advantage of cinema’s frightening aptitude for vividly portraying states of acute psychological distress.