The 10 Best Psychological Thrillers of All-Time
Audiences have always flocked to thrillers, though it’s the ones that play mind games and really get in our boo boo that are the most memorable. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of The 10 Best Psychological Thrillers of All Time, listing both the recent and classic nail-biters that have true staying power.
Whether our protagonists are trapped in a claustrophobic situation with an insane person, or are victims of their own debilitating obsession, there’s a lot to chew on in our selections, which span from the 1940s all the way to recent years.
Check out our list below and be sure to hit “Full Screen” on a desktop!
What do you think of our list of The 10 Best Psychological Thrillers of All Time? Which are your favorites? Which worthy films did we leave off? Let us know in the comments below!
The 10 Best Psychological Thrillers of All-Time
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Stoker (2013)
Park Chan-wook of Oldboy fame made his English language debut with this film (and CS was on the set!), which alternately takes cues from Hitchcock, De Palma, Edward Gorey and, of course, Bram Stoker himself. There are no vampires, however, in this intriguing tale of a young girl named India (Mia Wasikowska) who loses her father in a car accident and is forced to live with her unstable mother (Nicole Kidman). Enter Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a mysterious man who harbors murderous tendencies. Despite the lack of vampires, there is a VERY covert supernatural element in the connection between India and Charlie that makes for even more mystery within a very complex and troubling film.
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Zodiac (2007)
Director David Fincher dives back into the serial killer well, although unlike Se7en, this one takes a more grounded look at perhaps the most infamous unsolved serial killer case as well as the psychological effect it had on those who pursued him. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Robert Graysmith, a real-life cartoonist and amateur sleuth who took it upon himself to try to find out who murdered four men and three women in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s after the police's investigation ran cold. Future Avengers Robert Downey Jr. (playing a fellow reporter) and Mark Ruffalo (playing Detective Dave Toschi) add depth to what is an incredibly obsessive movie about the nature of obsession.
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Silence of the Lambs (1991)
This is the film that many point to for legitimizing the horror-thriller genre after it won a clean sweep of Oscars for Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, director Jonathan Demme, Best Screenplay for Ted Tally and Best Picture. Foster plays FBI trainee Clarice Starling assigned to interview the cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins) in the hopes he can help catch a transvestite serial killer named Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). Unfortunately, this leaves Clarice vulnerable to the good doctor's canny ability to get inside her head, leading to some dangerous transference between the two.
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Misery (1990)
Author Stephen King's book, and subsequently Rob Reiner's film, took a look at the darkest side of fandom with this terrifying story of a romance novel author named Paul Sheldon (James Caan) who is "saved" from a car wreck by a deranged fan named Annie (Oscar-winner Kathy Bates). The way Annie manipulates Sheldon into writing his latest novel specifically to her whims foreshadowed the current era of Twitter entitlement in which fanboys demand and even threaten creators when things don't go to their liking.
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Sorcerer (1977)
William Friedkin's loose remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 suspense masterpiece The Wages of Fear took the scenario of four down-and-outers driving trucks full of explosives through dangerous terrain and gave it a new level of realism. The Exorcist filmmaker took his camera crew, actors and trucks into the South American jungle and filmed everything -- including a white-knuckle scene of trucks crossing a rickety bridge -- for real. The dazzling Tangerine Dream soundtrack only fuels the tension.
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The Conversation (1974)
Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert who records a conversation between a couple that may-or-may-not be a discussion of a murder plot. As he digs deeper into the case, his own sense of a paranoia begins to unravel his own life. Francis Ford Coppola made this film as a tribute to Antonioni's Blowup, but at the time it was interpreted as a response to the Watergate scandal's recordings.
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Straw Dogs (1971)
Dustin Hoffman plays a dweeby mathematician pushed to the breaking point when an old boyfriend of his wife's begins terrorizing them in their country house. It leads to a final conflict with a town mob in which Hoffman's character learns to nut-up and defend his castle, so to speak.
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Peeping Tom (1960)
While Psycho may be the grandaddy of all modern slasher films, Peeping Tom (released a month before its American rival) has it beat in the sick voyeurism department and then some. It revolves around a compulsive filmmaker named Mark (Carl Boehm) who attaches a knife to the end of his camera so he can film his female victims as they die, his camera itself an instrument of death. This film was so disturbing it pretty much ended Michael Powell's career as a director in the UK, and is still very effective today.
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Vertigo (1958)
Arguably Alfred Hichcock's masterpiece, it casts nice guy James Stewart against type as a disturbed detective with a fear of heights who meets a woman (Kim Novak) who he believes resembles a woman he let fall to her death. He proceeds to develop a disturbing obsession with her that leads to startling revelations and, ultimately, tragedy.
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The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
Orson Welles directed and co-starred with his then-wife Rita Hayworth in this potboiler about a seaman (Welles) who gets entangled in a fake murder plot that blossoms into a real one. The film is best known for its stunning finale which involves a gunfight in a hall of mirrors.
