5 Best Dark Adventure Movies, Ranked

Everyone loves a good adventure movie. Whether it's a Nazi-punching, globe-trotting ride with Indiana Jones, a visit to a theme park with prehistoric animals, or a battle with an ancient mummy, the best adventure movies transport us to exciting locations, deliver incredible thrills with a side of romance, and more. From pulp literary adaptations to expensive summer blockbusters, the adventure film is integral to the medium of cinema. What's more, the adventure genre itself is quite malleable and can easily integrate elements of fantasy or science fiction. In the end, though, the greatest adventure flicks offer escapism while still grounding us in our own world and the wonders right outside our door.

This is why, as great as a traditional adventure movie can be, there's something truly special about dark adventure movies. These are films that focus on the more sinister parts of our world (or other worlds, for that matter), including the dangers lurking in forgotten, forbidden, or hidden places. A good dark adventure movie has some allure of the unknown, but it draws the audience in through a morbid sense of curiosity rather than a standard call to action. It then punishes those who jump at the chance to explore the world by showing nature to be ruthless and deadly.

Before we get to our list of the best dark adventure movies, it's worth acknowledging some of the excellent TV series that fall into this same sub-genre. Whether it's HBO's "His Dark Materials" turning adolescence into a dark and dangerous trek, or the phenomenon that was "Lost" making Hawaii look like hell on Earth, there are plenty of dark adventure TV shows that represent the polar opposite of something silly and bright like, say, "Gilligan's Island."

So, without further ado, let's rank the five best dark adventures movies.

What if you combined the terror of a found-footage horror movie and mixed it with the escapades of an "Indiana Jones" movie? You'd get 2014's criminally underrated "As Above, So Below," which is loosely inspired by "The Divine Comedy" but moves the circles of Hell to the Catacombs of Paris. The film stars Perdita Weeks as Scarlett Marlowe, a scholar searching for the mythical philosopher's stone. In time, her hunt leads to her, her ex George (Ben Feldman), a cameraman named Benji (Edwin Hodge), and more besides venturing into the Parisian catacombs. There, they encounter increasingly eerie phenomena in a wildly entertaining dark adventure flick that doubles as one of the scariest found-footage movies ever.

Over the course of "As Above, So Below," director John Erick Dowdle seamlessly blends the scares and horror of found-footage with the sense of exploration and excitement of an adventure film. It's a very claustrophobic movie, yet it never stops making the Catacombs feel like a place you'd actually want to check out in real life. The best dark adventure movies share the same hunger for adventuring, but they also show the dangerous, unsettling, and sometimes even deadly consequences that often come with it. "As Above, So Below" is the scariest entry in this list, and its characters often find themselves in seemingly hopeless situations. Even so, it's hard not to root for them to push forward and continue trying to see what they can uncover on the next level of the very literal Hell they find themselves in.

/Film's own Sandy Schaefer put it best when writing about this underrated adventure flop starring co-starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson: Every James Gray film is not as much about what the protagonist is looking for, but rather about what they're really trying to find, spiritually. "The Lost City of Z" may be about Charlie Hunnam's Percy Fawcett trying to find a lost civilization in the Amazon jungle, but in reality, this is a meditative dark adventure about the cost of one man's obsession with legacy and restoring his family name. The film is inspired by the story of real-life explorer Percy Fawcett, who's said to have been the inspiration for many classic adventure novels, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World." But what makes this movie stand out is how Gray tells the story at a slow pace that steadily builds dread throughout, all the while accompanied by the imposing visuals of the jungle, the allure of classic adventure epics, and a feeling that something isn't right.

This results in a film that feels almost like a psychological horror movie, with the jungle adventure serving more as an invitation to death than a quest for glory. Fawcett is a more likable and relatable character (at the start, at least) than Col. Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now," but he still falls victim to the same descent into self-destruction as Kurtz. The Amazon jungle is similarly depicted as an unforgiving, deadly place full of dark mysteries. You can see why people would be drawn to explore it, sure, yet it's all too clear why they're destined to fail.

Most adventure movies view the world with a sense of wide-eyed wonder and yearning, especially when it comes to the marvels of the unknown. Not Alex Garland's "Annihilation," though. There's nothing beautiful or welcoming about the world the film presents. Instead, it explores a nightmarish landscape full of untold horrors. The movie picks up after a meteor lands on a wildlife preserve in Florida, creating a mysterious bubble — referred to as the Shimmer — where weird phenomena start happening. From there, we follow a research expedition as it enters the Shimmer to discover both how it works and what happened to a previous group of people that ventured into the area, with only one of them returning alive.

Adapting Jeff VanderMeer's book of the same name, "Annihilation" does a great job translating the novel's trippy nature to the screen. In doing so, it creates an alien setting that's eerie and off in every way, yet it still lures you in with the promise of excitement and wonders ... only to reveal it's full of nothing but horrors. Indeed, the Shimmer is populated by biological organisms that look nonsensical, growing and merging in ways that feel unnatural. In fact, every corner of this realm is unwelcoming, hostile, and creepy. Like any other good adventure movie, "Annihilation" makes its journey into the unknown both external and internal, as traveling through the Shimmer eventually becomes a Freudian psychological excursion for the film's characters. The result is a cerebral and ethereal movie that presents some truly horrific and stunning imagery — like a nightmare bear mutant we'll never be able to forget.

Though William Friedkin's "Sorcerer" is mostly considered a thriller, it very much works as a dark adventure film. It follows a group of men on a dangerous mission, traversing perilous terrain and new, deadly locales, as their quest reveals certain truths about them. A rather bleak film, "Sorcerer" is an existential thriller that, from the get-go, extinguishes all hope that this story will be an exciting trek through the jungle. Instead, we learn early on that the four fugitive men we'll be following are in for a horrible time, having been tasked with the life-threatening mission to transport two battered trucks filled with old and unstable dynamite hundreds of miles in order to seal an oil well blaze.

It's no wonder this is Stephen King's favorite movie of all time. "Sorcerer" excels at building tension and character, with Friedkin using a quasi-documentary style to adapt Georges Arnaud's 1950 novel "The Wages of Fear" in a way that makes its proceedings feel all the more real. And while this movie isn't strictly about the places visited by its characters, their journey through South America plays a bit like the inverse of a typical adventure flick. Here, instead of finding places that are full of wonder or undiscovered treasures, its leads uncover nothing but misery, exploitation, and violence. This is a film about desperate people being pushed to do desperate things and navigate hell in order to maybe, just maybe, see their mission through to its end.

First thing's first: "The Green Knight" is a perfect Christmas watch in terms of its setting, atmosphere, and themes. It's also a perfect dark adventure movie that follows its protagonist on a long journey that's full of perils, mysteries, and wonders, and ultimately leaves them changed and disturbed by what they experienced. David Lowery's film is, of course, a revisionist take on the 14th century poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," a tale of bravery and chivalry that follows the cocky Gawain on an expedition to prove his courage and face the titular Green Knight. In this case, however, the story is less about a brave man showing off his feats and more an interrogation of the idea of knighthood and chivalry. Indeed, Lowery's movie constantly questions Dev Patel's Gawain and his cowardice, including the many shortcuts he takes. But most of all, it's primarily concerned with facing one's mortality, the folly of ambition, and the dark side of the pursuit of greatness.

Much like Christoper Nolan's "The Odyssey," Lowery cleverly sets "The Green Knight" in a world of magical realism. As grounded and realistic as the movie can be in certain respects, it very much presents its setting as one filled with things that bear no logic and mysteries that simply cannot be explained, including otherworldly creatures and sorcery. The titular Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), for instance, seems like an Eldritch horror that's been alive for eons, with Gawain encountering ghosts, witches, and others touched by unnatural abilities on his trek. On top of all that, Lowery employs an episodic narrative structure to better illustrate both the thrills and terror that await Gawain as he encounters various individuals, entities, and locales on his way across Camelot and into the unknown countryside.