For Halloween, Guardian writers have picked the most efficiently terrifying films outside of the horror genre from How to Have Sex to The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Minor spoilers ahead

Hiding in plain sight throughout Lee Chang-dong’s deliciously enigmatic Burning, in which a spirited young woman (Jeon Jong-seo) disappears, and a wealthy playboy (Steven Yeun) gives serial killer vibes, is a disaffected male rage. That’s perhaps the most commonplace horror of our times, whether on the internet or politics, and you feel the tremors of it steadily breaking the surface in Yoo Ah-in’s performance. He plays Jong-su, an aspiring writer, quietly frustrated with his lot in life. Jong-su works odd jobs and tends to his incarcerated father’s dilapidated farm, growing more desperate to grasp some sense of control over the world around him, which is where the scary part comes in. Lee is the master dramatist who with Burning tilts violently into thriller territory, navigating elements from Taxi Driver, The Vanishing and Michael Haneke’s Caché, using the language of horror movies to conjure up a creeping anxiety and dread that erupts into pure existential fear. Radheyan Simonpillai

The Berlin-born performer had a gift for languages that took her to Hollywood, landing roles alongside Peter Sellers, Dick Van Dyke and Paul Newman

Elke Sommer, the prolific German star of the Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark, early 70s Agatha Christie adaptation And Then there Were None, and British sex comedy Carry on Behind, has died aged 85. Bild magazine reported that Sommer died in Los Angeles of heart failure.

German-born Sommer, whose best-known film roles were in the 1960s and 70s, was one of the wave of European performers who crossed over to Hollywood and English-language cinema with considerable success, following the postwar emergence of European new wave cinema. Sommer was one of the few German actors to make waves at the time, as Hollywood made much of her bombshell image.