Why is the beach such a popular vacation spot? There is something to be said for the warm sun, the soft sand; the cool waters in their eternal rhythms: the meeting of land and sea creates a space that can be trance-inducing, awe-inspiring, and relaxing, all at once. For the majority of us that do not live by a sunshiny shore, movies are the closest we can get to the serenity of the beach. The image of waves and sand delivers the fickle promise of vacation: a transcendent peace, an encounter with the amorphous that we can carry into the stringent routines of our "normal" lives.

Yet there is more to this meeting of land and sea than serenity, as anyone who has been caught in a riptide can tell you. It is a threshold between elemental forces; the battleground between that which is solid and evolving and that which is liquid and eternal. Whether the shoreline represents a tranquil horizon at the edge of being or chaotic forces fighting to exist really depends on the mood you bring (and the weather).

Below we'll be taking a look at nine films that embody what is strange, surreal, and ineffable about the beach. These films won't necessarily compel you to take a beach walk -- but they might convince you that your destiny lies in the sea.

RELATED: Best Movies About Vacations Gone Wrong, Ranked

9 Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Through a Glass Darkly
Janus Films

Swedish film master Ingmar Bergman practically has a sub-filmography of people on islands losing it. For our purposes, the clear choice is Through a Glass Darkly, the only film of the bunch to feature a dank shipwreck where one character's blurred psychological barrier (between psychosis/sensation/the mystical on the one hand and order/restraint/the definable on the other) is obliterated.

The story follows a family vacationing on an island in the shadow of mental breakdowns and crises of faith. The opening image depicts the family coming to shore from a romp in the ocean, and while the surface reads "blissful vacation", the scene takes on an alternate meaning as we are exposed to the frail ties binding these people together. The sea is the tempestuous souls of the characters; the island the common ground they attempt to find through family.

This threshold between sanity and psychosis, peace and despair, the comprehensible and the ineffable, is one that is explored throughout the film, most strikingly in the voices behind the peeling wallpaper that beckon to the most troubled of the protagonists. This character is summoned to the room by the sound of a foghorn, furthering the connection between the ocean and the realms beyond consciousness. It all culminates in that rotting ship, where the already fuzzy barrier is swept away by a taboo act.

8 Spring Breakers (2012)

MOV_SpringBreakers1_2362
A24

Probably the widest-seen project by film provocateur Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers fits in with Korine's weird American aesthetic, a nihilistic land of vacant lots, stuff, and morally ambiguous characters seeking release. The movie's over stimulation of bodies, drugs, waves, and Skrillex puts us squarely in the minds of our protagonists, played by Disney Channel good-girl types like Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez who are letting their hair down.

The straight-forward Spring Break shenanigans end when the girls are arrested and bailed out by Alien, a drug dealer and rapper. The girls enter his web of criminal activity, and while some get scared and abandon ship, others find that Alien's outlaw lifestyle is exactly what they wanted from vacation. So long as they get to return to the safety of their lives, by the end, those that stick around are willing to find out what they're capable of when they have no restraint.

Spring Breakers never takes its characters' stated motivations at face value. The film doesn't condemn their desires (even when they lead to increasingly questionable decisions) - but it doesn't rationalize them, either. "Finding oneself" is a convenient and unambiguous way to frame behavior we might otherwise view as out of control. If you leave this journey at wild hedonistic trips to the beach, there's no need to challenge this narrative; but if you go deep enough, you may find that the urge for vacation takes root in a complicated part of the psyche - a part wilder than we could have imagined.

7 The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

The Heartbreak Kid
20th Century Studios

Elaine May's cringe-comedy masterpiece is the least surreal on the list, but by no means the least unsettling. The story follows Lenny and Lila, two woefully mismatched newlyweds honeymooning in Miami Beach. When Lila is badly sunburned, Lenny takes to the beach on his own to pursue Kelly, a college girl who represents everything Lenny thinks he wants.

Framed in uncomfortably tight compositions with an unflinching gaze on its protagonist's journey of destruction and rationalization, The Heartbreak Kid is one of the great works of the New Hollywood Movement. As attuned to pain as comedy, May skewers the senseless ambition of American desire, a bottomless pit of wanting. This idea of desire and ambition is symbolized by Miami Beach, an intoxicating land that rich-girl Kelly owns confidently, that Lenny wants to own, and that poor Lila is satisfied to spend a beautiful vacation in before returning to New York with the love of her life.

May portrays the sun in psychedelic zooms and pans, offering it the gravitas of a deity as merciless as it is beautiful. Sunburn is connected with vulnerability: Lila is always herself, trusting that Lenny loves her, and she gets burned for it; after Lenny's request for Kelly's courtship is denied by her father, the newlyweds finally go to dinner together -- where Lenny tries to break off the marriage. As he beats around the bush, he wonders how it got so hot in the restaurant, and Lila calmly suggests that the heat is from his sunburn. This moment is loaded with subtext: though Lenny is clearly the jerk here; he and Lila have both been burned by a warm feeling they thought they could trust.

6 The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

The Witch Who Came from the Sea
MCI

Of the many worthwhile films caught up in the Video Nasty moral panic, Matt Climber's The Witch Who Came from the Sea is one of the major outliers. This film is grindhouse: there is plenty of transgressive material, some of which remains shocking to this day. Yet the film's portrayal of a woman combusting under the weight of her unacknowledged trauma and myth-making is shockingly sensitive and (for this kind of movie) psychologically incisive.

Molly is a troubled bartender working in the Venice area of Los Angeles. She is a loner, save the time she spends with her nephews. She takes them on beach walks and tells stories about her father, a brave and noble sailor. Her sister insists their father was an abusive alcoholic and is horrified by Molly's myth-making. Molly has a violent fixation on men: she watches athletes on the beach and imagines their bodies being mutilated. It isn't long before Molly's fantasies are acted out.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea uses the archetypes of nautical myths to tackle sexual violence, patriarchy, and cycles of self-destruction. Molly thinks of her father as the brave masculine sailor; an Odysseus who conquers the sea. In actuality, he was a scumbag (not unlike Odysseus), largely absent and sexually abusive when he was around. The line between Molly's myth of her father and his actuality drives her mental collapse. The film is rife with femme sea monster/goddess imagery (the Birth of Venus, the mermaid). These creatures tie the seductive and destructive pull of the sea to female sexuality and autonomy. Molly becomes a variation on these beings, a seductress who punishes men for the violence inherent in their masculinity.

The ending is one of the quietest and saddest in an exploitation film, and the final image of Molly adrift speaks volumes about trauma's ability to banish us to an endless raging sea.

5 Us (2019)

Jordan Peele
Universal Pictures

Much has been written about the social elements of Jordan Peele's films - and rightfully so: he has shown the unique ability to rewire horror archetypes to reflect on the harmful psychological forces implicit in them. His films are overtly political, examining social sicknesses that manifest in our institutions and interpersonal relationships; but what makes his metaphors so powerful is his ability to connect them to images that play on atavistic terrors.

Though it is rife with commentary on class, the sins of the past, and othering, Us is less forth-coming in its themes than Peele's Get Out (2017). The particulars of its plot are enough to provide social commentary, so Peele loads it with uncanny imagery that is confounding and terrifying. A major source of the unsettling tone is the way Peele transforms an attractive vacation spot like Santa Cruz into a nightmare realm. The opening sequence of a little girl pulled away from the nostalgic carnival lights of the boardwalk to a shadow realm is made extra creepy by the looming presence of the ocean, a force beyond control. The beach becomes a threshold between this world and the underworld.

Peele has stated that he enjoys making the idyllic frightening, as it illustrates the darkness that lurks beneath the attractive veneers of our civilization; and for a film that suggests the leisure and ease of some relies on the subjugation of others, a beach-side amusement park above a maze of trapped shadows is the perfect setting.

RELATED: Top 10 Horror Movies of the 2010s Ranked

4 The Long Goodbye (1973)

The Long Goodbye
United Artists

Meaning is in flux in Robert Altman's neo-noir classic The Long Goodbye, as traceable as a single drop of water on the ocean's surface. Philip Marlowe is a burned-out private investigator who lives in a cluttered apartment in Hollywood, right at home with New Hollywood's canon of alienated men in crisis. When Marlowe helps out a friend that is later accused of his wife's murder before being declared dead, he seeks to clear his late friend's name while working on seemingly unrelated cases.

Behind his scrappiness and seventies snark, Marlowe is a man of principle, believing in loyalty and honor, in line with the values of the Raymond Chandler protagonist he is based on. This makes him ill-matched for the political corruption, entitlement, and nihilism of the '70s. Marlowe can be thought of as a man swept away to sea, trying desperately to swim to shore - but the strokes he takes pull him deeper into the watery abyss. Altman captures the film's world of conspiracy in watery zooms and dollies that compliment his vision of the golden state as a land of drifters, eccentrics, crooks, and the elite, as stable as the ocean it lies next to.

3 At Land (1944)

At Land
Maya Deren

Maya Deren may be the most significant figure in American avant-garde and independent cinema; and while the average viewer may not know her films or theory, they're probably familiar with the traces of her oneiric filmmaking innovations in anything from Mulholland Drive (2001) to Inception (2010), from the dream sequences in The Sopranos (1999 - 2007) to the fluid camera work in Gene Kelly's musicals. Deren sought to create a film vocabulary distinct from the other art forms, using the capabilities of the camera and editing to craft experiences impossible in other mediums. Her films make use of match cuts, frame rates, camera motion, illusions, and dance to link moments in space and time, forming a cohesive visual narrative. Most of her films are silent to avoid sound's overbearing influence on the visuals.

Deren's second film At Land, begins with a woman (Deren) washed ashore. She travels up a piece of drift wood that leads to a dinner party through a brush trail (... it makes sense visually, we promise). A man at the table plays chess - one of the pieces falls off the table and onto the beach, and the woman travels through a dreamscape to retrieve it.

At Land is structured to drift, dive, and tumble ocean-like through its own logical current. The social games of modern life are presented as a succession of obstacles one is pulled through in their pursuit of ... something. There are many metaphors and meanings suggested by the film, but Deren is ultimately interested in creating something that transcends words. The last image of Maya Deren running down the beach, the chess piece held triumphantly over her head, is powerful as a symbol of female liberation, beating the system, even of Deren's own journey (creating independent movie magic despite the dominance of the Hollywood model) - but first and foremost it is the culmination of a series of images that came before it, all echoing and bleeding into one another to create a whole that transcends its parts. At Land washes the viewer ashore into a world of obstacles and false consciousness, before returning them to the liberty of the sea.

2 Swimming in Your Skin Again (2014)

Swimming in Your Skin Again
Borscht Corp

Filmmaker Terrence Nance is the closest thing this century has to a Maya Deren. Where she prioritized silence to create a hypnotic state that was filmically absolute (i.e. relies exclusively on the instruments of the film form: motion photography and editing), Nance embraces sound to add new dimension to his visual labyrinths.

Swimming in Your Skin Again is a lyrical film that begins by asserting it has no fixed meaning or philosophy. It then drifts through spaces loaded with religious and ritualistic imagery, focussing particularly on a church community (though the word "Jesus" is bleeped out of the preacher's sermon, suggesting the exaltation on display extends past any particular deity). Nance uses associative editing, choreography, and an ever-evolving soundtrack to blend these locations together, fusing and contrasting the natural world and human forms into a wave of light and color.

Water is a significant motif in the film. One dream figure spends his time in his pool, seeking the presence of someone in the water. Later, this character and his sister exit the surreal backyard they occupy and walk through the streets of Miami. The brother worries that they are walking too far from the pool, but his sister chides him: "she lives in the ocean." This is one of the film's few moments that can be broken down into concise metaphors, and it informs the overall meaning of this "meaningless" work. Humans seek the sublime and hope to comprehend it through paradigms (religions, philosophies, etc.) - these paradigms can tap into the sublime (just as the pool can tap into the watery logic of the ocean), but their real power lies beyond the boundaries of classification.

1 The Lighthouse (2019)

A24

Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse is a beach movie only in the sense that it takes place on the threshold between land and sea. Its "beach" is a desolate rocky island; its characters don't sunbathe or chomp on popsicles, and there's not a surfer in sight. Instead, this film is a perfect encapsulation of what is terrifying and awe-inspiring about the beach's uncanny gateway. A young man and an old wickie live in isolation on an island, tending a lighthouse to guide sailors through the tumultuous waters. Resentment quickly builds between the two, fueled by the job's hierarchical structure, their differences in superstitious belief, and the island's secrets. The film taps into capitalism, toxic masculinity, the Promethean myth, sadomasochism, sea lore, homoeroticism, and guilt - but more than anything, it taps into an unclassifiable madness.

Like Bergman before him, Eggers understands the psychological power of putting people in a confined space with a tumultuous ocean around them: eventually, chaos will break into shelter, from without and within. Beneath the dry floorboards of our personas rages a madness as old as time - all it takes is a little claustrophobia and tension to bring it forward.

There are many stories of sailors losing their minds at sea. This could be because of the isolation one experiences when trapped on a vessel; or it could be in response to a vastness beyond mortal man's comprehension. Either way, the ocean depths tap into the shadowy forces that move through our souls. Where land allows us to build structures and create strict definitions (until that land is reclaimed by the sea), the ocean reveals that all organization, classification, and knowledge is little more than a coffin-shaped boat hovering over an endless drop - and the boat has a leak. The beach represents the barrier between the known and unknown; it is beautiful - but if you aren't careful, you could be swept away.