Films and TV shows that feel like In Dreams by Roy Orbison

A lonely man drifts into a dream where his lost love returns, only to wake at dawn and find her gone. It is tender, eerie and heartbroken, and it plays out like a fairy tale.

1. Blue Velvet (1986): The song's most famous screen moment, with Dean Stockwell lip-syncing it in a scene that turns romantic longing into menace.
2. Twin Peaks (1990): Lynch's dream-logic small town carries the same mix of retro tenderness and lurking dread.
3. Mulholland Drive (2001): A dream of love and glamour that collapses at waking, like the song's own structure.
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): It treats lost love as something lived in dreamlike memory, and it's just as aching.
5. Lost Highway (1997): Obsession, a vanished woman and a nightmare that blurs with reality.
6. Pleasantville (1998): Early-60s-style nostalgia, a dreamlike pastel world and a wistful sense of something lost.
7. Big Fish (2003): A fairy-tale romance told in a storybook tone, bittersweet and half-remembered.
8. Carol (2015): Restrained, hushed longing for an unreachable love, with a hazy mid-century glow.