SPOILER ALERT:  This review has spoilers

Most people can say that they’ve watched a horror movie and made it out alive.  Fear and adrenaline wear off, and you go on with your life. The most you’ll get are a few nightmares, right?  Wrong. After you watch the 1998 classic “The Truman Show,” instead of simple nightmares you’ll have nagging thoughts that your reality is false and your life is for naught.  

“The Truman Show” is one of the scariest movies of all time.  It’s about a man,Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) who finds out that he’s been living in a TV show his whole life, and becomes desperate to escape.  Jim Weir’s direction of a star studded cast really brings this movie to life and makes it a compelling story. The details of the set and props really make it stand out and adds to the realism of the film.  You’ll be immersed into Truman’s world as you find out more about his character and the troubles he’s faced. It’s almost as if you are one of the millions of people watching Truman at home, and that’s the magic and terror this film gets at.

Through outstanding cinematography, “The Truman Show” paints a bizarre picture with yellow brick roads, outlandishly large houses and a problemless small town named Seahaven.  The fact that Truman’s life is unreal, yet somehow similar to what we have experienced in our lives is part of the anxiety the movie produces. We know that his world doesn’t exist because of how bizarre it seems to us, but to Truman, our world would be the outlandish one.  

The Truman show’s concept is also horrific in-and-of-itself.  A child was taken at birth, thrown onto a TV show set, and given a life flooded with advertisements and false situations just to catch a genuine reaction on live television.  His dad was killed as a plot-point of his life! His wife was chosen for him at an audition he didn’t know about! He was all alone in his world, and when he found out that his life was a role of film, he had to fend for himself, knowing that whatever he did, there would be cameras and fake friends trying to stop him from living the life he is entitled to.  This just adds to the horror “The Truman Show” portrays.

So you can say that “Frankenstein” or “The Exorcist” franchises are the scariest around, but I’ll still stand firm in my belief that the psychological manipulation “The Truman Show” puts you through is sufficiently scarier.  For these reasons, the Truman Show is one of the scariest movies of all time, while hidden behind the friendly tone of a family film.