If you’re into the unexplained, these five offer plenty to think about
#1 Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’
Spielberg’s sci-fi movies have always been about more than just pure entertainment. With Disclosure Day, the Oscar-winning American director explores aliens, the idea of telepathy between humans and other beings, which he shows as a heightened form of human empathy. The film is less about the phenomena themselves and more about what discovering them would mean for humanity. What would happen to faith and religion if we discovered that higher beings and telepathy existed?
By the bye, the topic of telepathy also came up in the much-talked-about 2026 film Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The movie follows two sisters with telepathy and other powerful psychic abilities, including mind control, mind-jumping, and telekinesis. They were separated as children, with one of them taken and placed in a laboratory while the other tried to save her.
Our fascination with telepathy — the idea of reading someone else’s thoughts — has never really gone away. We’re still fascinated by the possibility of knowing what someone is thinking. The idea is simple enough in theory, but much harder to actually test. It’s easy to convince yourself that you can read minds, but once you put the ability to a real test, the results may be very different.
If you’re curious to see how you’d actually perform, the best telepathy app VEREVIO at Apple Store or Google Play already exists. Here you record a few thoughts, not by saying them out loud, but by thinking them into the microphone, and then label each thought afterward. The app plays them back one by one, and you identify each thought. It then uses mathematical formulas to calculate your results and show whether your performance is above chance or above average. There are also plenty of other exercises in the app for working on different extrasensory abilities, which we’ll get into below.
#2 Jacob Chase’s ‘Insidious: The Bleeding World’
The next movie is built around one of the more interesting paranormal ideas: astral projection, the belief that your consciousness can leave your physical body and move around somewhere else.
People have been reporting out-of-body experiences for years, in all kinds of cultures and spiritual traditions, which makes the idea pretty fascinating. In Insidious: The Bleeding World, that “somewhere else” is the Further. You can get there through astral projection, but you’re definitely not alone once you do. The Further is full of supernatural entities that can see and interact with anyone who enters it.
Interestingly, people who practice or believe in astral projection often say it’s something you can get better at with meditation and practice. Some yoga traditions have also talked about the experiences, and advanced practitioners are believed to be able to reach these states more easily.
#3 Damian McCarthy’s ‘Hokum’
If you want to watch a horror movie about demons and a witch, the new one is Damian McCarthy’s Hokum. A big part of the story is Ohm’s trauma after accidentally killing his mother. He never really comes to terms with what happened, and the guilt follows him into the house, where his inner demons almost become real ones.
The movie plays with the idea that the things we keep buried can come back in a very physical way. And we need to face them before we can move on. That actually lines up with the way some spiritual practitioners talk about ghosts. They often believe a spirit can remain attached to a person or place because of strong emotions, unfinished business or a traumatic death.
#4 David Robert Mitchell’s ‘The End of Oak Street’
David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street starts with a pretty normal family living on a pretty normal street. Then a strange flash hits, and suddenly the whole street is thrown about 200 million years into the past, when dinosaurs were still around. Now the family and the other people from the street have to figure out how to stay alive while dinosaurs are basically walking around their new neighborhood. Eventually, they discover a strange bubble that lets them jump through time, giving them a way to get back.
And this is not really a horror movie, despite all the dinosaurs and people trying to survive. There are some surprisingly funny conversations and moments, and the dinosaurs themselves can be a lot of fun to watch. The whole situation is so bizarre that the movie sometimes feels more playful than scary.
The time-travel part is what really makes it interesting from a paranormal point of view. We still don’t know everything about how time works, so there are plenty of ideas about what might be possible that we simply can’t test or explain yet.
You also see this in all kinds of conspiracy stories about old photographs, where people claim to spot objects that supposedly shouldn’t exist yet because they hadn’t been invented at the time. That doesn’t prove anyone actually traveled through time, of course, but it shows why the idea keeps coming back. If you’re looking for a more serious paranormal movie, go to the next documentary on the list.
#5 Ryder Lee’s ‘Psychic Agent: The Gate Program’
It is a documentary about the remote-viewing program connected to the U.S. government. The idea sounds crazy: you sit somewhere, receive a target you know nothing about, and try to describe it using only your impressions.
Remote viewing has been surrounded by controversy for many years, but the story behind the program is real. The U.S. government did investigate psychic phenomena during the Cold War, and the work later became associated with programs such as Stargate. Remote viewing is still practiced today by people.
What makes Psychic Agent especially interesting is that it goes beyond remote viewing itself and looks at the other programs and research that became connected to the story, including the Monroe Institute’s Gateway work and the public-school GATE program.
These are not all the same program, and even the filmmaker has pointed out that they should not be mixed together. The documentary is interested in whether there were connections between these different worlds and what the government’s interest in psychic abilities was really about.