Some movies affect us more than others. Some movies we forget about as soon as they finish, some we may remember for the rest of our lives. And some movies haunt us even in our dreams. Often this is due to the subject matter, other times a specific scene, and sometimes simply the nightmarish atmosphere. Though fear is often what haunts us, love can haunt us even more. So can visceral disgust, or terrible grief. Perhaps regret haunts us most of all.

In an effort to touch on various genres and styles, here are 25 films that will haunt you long after the credits roll.

25. Chinatown (1974), directed by Roman Polanski

In 1974 director Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne turned noir on its head, thereby reinventing the genre and ushering in a neo-noir fascination that continues today. Towne’s screenplay is frequently described as one of the greatest ever written, in part due to its tragic climax that paved the way for downbeat endings in crime and popular cinema.

Towne’s script hit on all the conventions of noir but spun them in new directions: protagonist Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a P.I. investigating a cover-up—but his involvement makes everything worse; the setting is Los Angeles—but it’s so sunny it hurts; the introduction of Faye Dunaway’s character Evelyn sets her up as femme fatale—but she proves to be the only character acting selflessly.

But Chinatown’s most important element is the haunting final scene which broke the “justice served” honored convention of the genre and could only have been written in an America that saw the civil rights movement, Watergate scandal, and Vietnam War, allowing the public to realize that in their beloved country the rich and powerful commit terrible crimes—and they get away with them. The look on Gittes’ face when this truth hits is “haunting” personified.

24. Boys Don’t Cry (1999), directed by Kimberly Peirce

The most refreshing aspect of the way Boys Don’t Cry, released in 1999, treats its protagonist, a young woman who thinks of herself as a man, is the distinct lack of P.C. culture’s myriad terms to describe a person’s sexual identity as if it matters. Because it doesn’t matter; whatever protagonist Brandon Teena (based on the real-life Teena whose story this film depicts, played breathtakingly by Hilary Swank) identifies as is beside the point. This is a film about tragic love and the violence of male fragility.

Because Boys Don’t Cry is based on real events, we know the outcome, and the film pushes toward its tragic climax with the assuredness of an excellent screenplay directed well. Brandon and new lover Lana find comfort and happiness in each other, doing nobody any harm and adding a little joy to the world while they’re at it. But some men insecure in their perceptions of themselves cannot abide anything that makes them look inward, and Brandon pays the ultimate price for their weakness. Boys Don’t Cry is haunting because the commonplace tragedy of it really happened, has happened since, and will happen again.

23. The Imposter (2012), directed by Bart Layton

Bart Layton’s The Imposter is possibly the greatest, and most self-aware, example of the power documentaries wield in manipulating their audiences. The film is so twisty and intriguing it could almost be mistaken for an M. Night Shyamalan flick. It concerns how 23-year-old, black-haired, brown-eyed, French-Algerian con artist Frédéric Bourdin pretended to be 16-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed, American schoolboy Nicholas Barclay who had gone missing three years earlier at the age of 13—and how Barclay’s family believed Bourdin, welcoming him home as their Nicholas.

If this sounds stranger than fiction, it’s because it is. But The Imposter takes a frightening turn when the slow realization hits that there may be a more sinister reason a family would so readily ignore the discrepancies between this new Nicholas and the old. The final shot of the documentary strips away the thrills and reminds us of its fundamental truth: that Nicholas is still missing, and he may never be found. It’s a shot that haunts long after the screen fades to black.

22. 8MM (1999), directed by Joel Schumacher

Nicolas Cage, a torture-porn tape that might be real snuff, a screenplay by the writer of Se7en, Joaquin Phoenix in a supporting role as sex shop employee Max California, and cameos by James Gandolfini and Peter Stormare. What’s not to love?

Except that this 1999 thriller is dark. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker had already shocked the world four years earlier with his relentlessly bleak detective-cum-horror story Se7en. Somehow, Walker went even darker with 8MM, in which P.I. Nicolas Cage is hired by a rich old lady to find out if a porno tape she found in her recently deceased husband’s safe depicting the horrific murder of a young woman is in fact a snuff film or a very convincing fake.

Save for a select few, Roger Ebert among them, critics tore 8MM apart. Released at the turn of the millennium when the internet was new to the general population and the many horrors it contained all too easily stumbled upon, pornography and the dangers of the internet weighed heavy on the public’s mind. The world was simply not ready for a film like this. The most haunting moment? At the end when Cage screams “Why?” at the snuff film’s executioner, who responds, “Because I like to. Because I want to.”

21. 28 Days Later (2002), directed by Danny Boyle

Is there anything more terrifying to modern society than the prospect of civilization’s total collapse? What if most people in the post-apocalyptic new world have become infected with pure rage, hellbent on murdering with their bare hands anyone not yet tainted with the disease? Such is the world Danny Boyle launches us into in his masterpiece of horror, 28 Days Later.

The most haunting moment of the film occurs right at the beginning when protagonist Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up alone in hospital following a coma to then wander a London City totally abandoned of its inhabitants, a London so still and silent Jim must surely wonder if he’s awoken at all or is trapped inside a dream—or in this case, a nightmare.

20. I Saw the Devil (2010), directed by Jee-woon Kim

Few filmmakers can do “haunting” quite like the masters of South Korean cinema, such as filmmaker Jee-woon Kim. Already a successful auteur on the world stage, Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), a modern reimagining of an old Korean folk tale, established Kim as a powerful voice in horror cinema. Then, seven years later, Kim’s I Saw the Devil arrived, a movie about the evils of revenge so unflinching in its depictions of violence, so relentlessly brutal yet visually stunning and elegiac, that it defies easy categorization. South Korea is renowned for its revenge thrillers (such as Chan-wook Park’s Vengeance Trilogy), but with I Saw the Devil Kim managed to breathe fresh life into the genre by fusing it with that of the slasher to create something new.

As for the film’s ability to haunt the viewer—virtually every scene in this twisted tale of grief and blood will linger long after the credits roll, but the most haunting element is the crazed journey into the darkness of the human soul the film takes viewers on as the “hero” protagonist becomes increasingly sadistic in his pursuit of revenge against the man who raped and murdered his wife (most of which we see onscreen at the beginning). Yeah, this probably isn’t one to watch on a first date.

19. The Act of Killing (2012), directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

In 1965, General Suharto of Indonesia’s military executed up to one million people suspected of being communists in one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. Suharto, who ruled the country as dictator for 32 years until his death in 2008, and the generals and soldiers who perpetrated the mass murders never had to answer for them. In fact, they were celebrated as heroes in the narrative that dominated the country.

In 2012, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer came up with an ingenious and bizarre concept: With no way to document survivors’ stories safely and document the truth of the communist purge without the tyrannical government harming the survivors in retaliation, Oppenheimer instead turned his sights onto the perpetrators, offering many of them eager to brag about their roles in the purge the opportunity to recreate their killings through dramatic reenactments of their own devising in which the perpetrators would act not only as themselves but also as the people they had tortured and killed. The resulting B-movie spectacles of varying degrees of outlandishness and divorce from reality are metaphor for the Indonesia’s national denial of the purge and the denial by the perpetrators of the purge as a crime.

This denial is perhaps most chillingly expressed in a scene when a man named Anwar Congo, wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt, demonstrates in vivid detail how he strangled his victims with wire because when he beat them to death “there was too much blood” before dancing the cha-cha in the same spot he’d committed mass murder in all those years before.

18. The Wrestler (2008), directed by Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky knows how to make his audience feel, and none of his movies better illustrates this than The Wrestler. Mickey Rourke gives the performance of a lifetime as aging professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a man, like Rourke, past his prime and fallen from stardom with damaged relationships and burned bridges behind him. Randy is a lonely man and a man alone, who has only his wrestling and, despite his doctor’s advice that with his heart problems the wrestling may kill him, Randy will not give up the only thing he has left.

The Wrestler is haunting because, when we’re in our good times, we never conceive that these times will come to an end. And when they do, any one of us could become as alienated and filled with regret as Randy, desperate for just one more moment of glory to make life worth living.

Cinema inspires, astounds and mesmerizes us, transporting us to situations and locations totally alien to our daily lives or so similar to our own experiences and feelings we can hardly believe someone had managed to capture them. Cinema allows us to live in other worlds and other times, to jump inside the skin of others and experience the unknown. And, in all its style and gloss and bravado, cinema is the definition of cool.

All of the above is true tenfold for a particular filmmaking device: extended single-shot sequences. The long takes and tracking shots of extended single-shot sequences are a technical marvel, requiring a deft hand and extremely skillful manipulation of light and shadow, timing, and movement. But the function of these sequences goes beyond technical prowess—their role is to immerse the audience inside the scene so completely that the film becomes for the audience a temporary reality. And when done right, with style and confidence, certain extended single shots in cinema practically glisten with cool.

Here are 16 of the coolest single-shot sequences in cinema.

16. Hard Eight (1996), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, D.P.: Robert Elswit

The debut feature of director Paul Thomas Anderson is also his most overlooked. Hard Eight is as slick as the rest of Anderson’s catalog, but the off-beat casino drama is bequeathed with an extra smattering of glitz: the film oozes cool. Although Philip Baker Hall’s mesmerizing performance as smooth-as-silk gambler-conman Sydney is responsible for much of these vibes, it’s the film’s setting of the glossy Reno casinos that provides the bulk of them.

No scene in the film shows this more vividly than the 1-minute-20-seconds tracking shot that follows Sydney through the casino. With the screen awash in glowing neon, blinking machines, and frenetic gambling energy, few scenes in cinema immerse the viewer inside a casino quite like this one.

15. The Protector (2005), directed by Prachya Pinkaew, D.P.: Nattawut Kittikhun

Thai actor Tony Jaa exploded onto the international martial arts scene with his lead role in Prachya Pinkaew’s Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior in 2003, which featured some of the most incredible fighting scenes ever filmed, including many in excellently rendered long takes. Then, two years later, Jaa and Pinkaew teamed up again for The Protector and somehow stunned martial arts fans the world over once again with a film that was bigger, bolder, and more accomplished in every way than its predecessor.

The film concerns a peaceful young man (who happens to be an insanely talented Muay Thai fighter) who lives in rural Thailand where he tends to the elephants that he absolutely adores until one day a baby elephant is stolen and transported to Australia where this man must go to retrieve the elephant at all costs. While plot is obviously not the focus of martial arts films, The Protector is surprisingly touching all the same in between all the expertly choreographed fight scenes, the most impressive of which is the single-shot sequence that follows Jaa up through a building as he battles a seemingly never-ending supply of goons. It’s still one of the longest single-shot hand-to-hand combat scenes ever filmed, and one of the most accomplished.

14. Boogie Nights (1997), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, D.P.: Robert Elswit

The second Paul Thomas Anderson film on this list opens with a tracking shot so gloriously joyous and vibrant it’s impossible not to become infatuated with the movie immediately upon seeing it. Influenced in no small part by the famous long take from a certain Martin Scorsese film also included on this list, Anderson’s opening shot instantly transports viewers to a nightclub in 1970s San Fernando Valley (AKA Porn Valley) and into a tale chronicling the rapid rise to stardom and eventual decline of a young male porn star in California’s booming porn industry of the era—a trajectory which mirrors that of the industry itself as the epoch peaks and ends.

With a knockout cast, complex characters, and subtle script, Boogie Nights is a classic Hollywood film about Los Angeles and, through its pornography-industry analogy, about Hollywood itself. This opening shot establishes that perfectly.

13. Jackie Brown (1997), directed by Quentin Tarantino, D.P.: Guillermo Navarro

Few directors, if any, epitomize cool in their films like Quentin Tarantino. Although Pulp Fiction is Tarantino’s most obviously cool movie, the filmmaker’s underrated gem of Jackie Brown positively oozes cool as well—it just does so in a more restrained, less flashy fashion. Adapted from the novel Rum Punch by crime fiction legend Elmore Leonard—who is perhaps Tarantino’s biggest influence outside of cinema—Jackie Brown’s eponymous character is a middle-aged black woman and the setting is Los Angeles, both of which differ from the book’s white-skinned Jackie Burke and setting of Miami.

In making these changes, Tarantino lifted the story from entertaining crime caper with a middle-aged woman lead—which was somewhat radical—to a retro blaxploitation featuring a middle-aged person of color in the lead role (played by Pam Grier, no less) and a soundtrack and style evoking the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s while avoiding the harmful stereotypical portrayals of black Americans prevalent in those films—all of which added up to being very radical.

In true Tarantino fashion, the film’s entire intentions are introduced vividly and stylishly in the film’s opening sequence in which the camera follows Brown for the entire length of Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” (itself the theme tune to the 1972 film of the same name about violence between blacks and whites in New York City). Even the font of the text as the movie’s title appears on the screen during this sequence evokes this era: it’s the same font as 1974’s Foxy Brown, also starring Grier. By the time this opening sequence ends, the tone of Jackie Brown is firmly established, and the audience has been sucked deep into Tarantino’s world.

It’s worth noting that Tarantino lifted this opening straight out of the opening sequence of Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) starring Dustin Hoffman. But Tarantino’s rendition adds subtle layers of meaning to its use of the shots, and is more memorable and visceral.

12. The Shining (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick, D.P.: John Alcott

Because of how important the setting of the Overlook Hotel is in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel, it was crucial that the film bring the hotel vividly to life as a character in its own right. The unsettling silence of the huge, empty Overlook is the source of the film’s (ironically) claustrophobic atmosphere, so bringing the audience into the hotel was key. Kubrick achieved this vividly in his use of a long tracking shot that glides behind little Danny Torrance as he cycles his tricycle around various sections of the hotel.

The eerie smoothness of the camera’s movement combined with the quick pace evokes a sensation of something in pursuit of Torrance rather than merely following him. Which is to say, the tracking shot feels less like the audience along for the ride and more like the audience privy to a sinister presence observing the child intently. The vast emptiness of the hotel, its creepy color scheme, and the cold silence masked only by the tricycle’s spinning wheels are the finishing touches that preserve this sequence in cinema history.

11. Hard Boiled (1992), directed by John Woo, D.P.: Wing-Hang Wong

Looking a little like most of Die Hard and the prison shootout in Terminator, the famous hospital shootout sequence in John Woo’s Hard Boiled delivers so much energy and fast-paced thrills that even by modern standards it feels fresh. With the camera largely showing the POV of the protagonist as he blasts dozens of enemies into oblivion, the effect is similar to that of shoot-’em-up video games such as Doom.

The stylized, intimate violence and creative spin on action movie tropes in John Woo’s films provided great inspiration for a generation of filmmakers, and Hard Boiled is Woo’s masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest action movies of all time.

10. Oldboy (2003), directed by Chan-wook Park, D.P.: Chung-hoon Chung

At a screening of Oldboy in Toronto earlier this year, the host introduced the film with background information on South Korean culture, claiming that rage bubbles beneath the surface of that country’s society, waiting to erupt. If this statement is true, almost no South Korean film expresses that rage so ferociously as Oldboy (the only film that outdoes Oldboy in this regard is Jee-woon Kim’s I Saw the Devil from 2010).

The story of a seemingly innocent man imprisoned in a tiny room without explanation for fifteen years until suddenly released and craving revenge, the man’s rage-induced desperation is most vividly displayed in a virtuoso single shot in which the man, played brilliantly by modern legend of South Korean cinema Min-sik Choi, fights an army of goons (easily more than thirty) in a narrow hallway with nothing but a hammer and his bare hands to the subtle soundtrack of a Western-electronic fusion theme and the bone-crunching and deep-breathing sounds of hand-to-hand combat loaded with realism.

9. True Detective, Season 1, Episode 4 “Who Goes There” (2014), directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, D.P.: Adam Arkapaw

Since the debut of The Sopranos in 1999, television drama series have become increasingly cinematic, and, adding the rise of streaming services into the mix, the distinction between film and TV has blurred considerably. Season one of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective is arguably the greatest example of just how cinematic TV can be—and no sequence in the entire show displays this better than the mind-blowing tracking shot that occurs during a faux police raid while Matthew McConaughey’s Detective Rust Cohle is undercover.

The sequence is a whopping five and a half minutes of high tension and explosive action with intricately timed choreography, and showcases the recognizable visuals that season one of True Detective is known for. There is a moment occurring around the 2 minutes, 50 seconds mark when a cleverly disguised cut might be hidden, but the effect is seamless, and the two shots either side of the cut are masterful examples of how visceral single-shot sequences can be.