Source: collider.com/By J.S. Gornael
These movies keep you on the edge of your seat the whole way through.
The best thrillers of all time show that the thriller can successfully combine with practically any other genre: mystery, western, political, noir, sci-fi, etc. Though it can come in very different looks, movies that fall under the category have something in common: a looming threat of danger conveyed through suspenseful storytelling. This can be a physical threat, or it can be a psychological one, but there comes a point in movies like Black Swan when one leads to the other.
The level of suspense naturally rises and falls, and some movies keep up the tension more often than others. Sometimes, the mood is lightened somewhat with comic relief, making a gruesome crime at the heart of the conflict a little easier to stomach. Even the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, had a sense of humor. Though one of numerous directors whose careers spanned over 50 years, he’s far from the only artist to inform the craft. And it’s not just about keeping viewers on the edge of their seats. As with any other genre, there must also be a powerful subtext that imbues the tension with greater meaning and makes the audience return to the story countless times over. In this way, the following ten thrillers are perfect because they’re just as exhilarating and insightful every time you re-watch them.
13 ‘Zodiac’ (2007)
Directed by David Fincher
Leave it to David Fincher to make a pretty spectacular thriller. Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. star in Fincher’s 2007 masterpiece Zodiac, which chronicles the manhunt for the infamous Zodiac Killer. As he terrorizes the San Francisco Bay Area throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s, a group of detectives and reporters attempt to solve the mystery behind the elusive and taunting figure.
Zodiac might just be David Fincher’s best movie thus far. Tight, chilling, and almost unbearable tense, the film makes great use of dread to create an inescapable atmosphere for audiences. Few films are as anxiety-inducing as Zodiac, with Fincher utilizing dialogue and staging to tell this tale of cruelty and mystery. The film expertly recreates the vibe of fear and paranoia that dominated the area during the Zodiac’s rampage, making the viewer an actual part of the manhunt rather than just a casual spectator.
12 ‘Jaws’ (1975)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws is more than just an all-time great thriller: it’s also the first modern summer blockbuster. The now-iconic picture follows a group of men—a police chief, a marine biologist, and a professional hunter—who join forces to hunt down a man-eating great white shark terrorizing a beach resort.
By now, Jaws‘ significant contributions to cinema are well-known. The film excels as a riveting thriller thanks to Spielberg’s clever approach, keeping the shark as an elusive and mostly unsees yet ever-present threat whose shadow looms large under the water. What Jaws lacks in overt thrills, it more than makes up in tense-filled, disquieting moments, beautifully accompanied by John Williams‘ equally legendary score. Thrillers don’t get any better than Jaws, a film that single-handedly established many modern conventions for the genre.
11 ‘Memento’ (2000)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Memento is the film that launched Christopher Nolan‘s mainstream career. Guy Pearce stars as Leonard Shelby, a man with anterograde amnesia that results in short-term memory loss and the inability to make new memories. Using a unique system involving polaroids and tattoos, Leonard attempts to discover the man who killed his wife and caused him to develop the condition.
Blending several genres, including mystery and neo-noir, Memento is a fascinating thriller elevated by Christopher Nolan’s unique touch. It’s clever, twisting, and demanding, asking its audience to not only watch but actually accompany Leonard in his journey. What distinguishes Memento from other thrillers is its original narrative, fractured just as Leonard’s mind is and devoid of simple interpretation. Endlessly rewatchable and rewarding, Memento is among Nolan’s finest efforts and a truly mesmerizing thriller.
10 ‘A Man Escaped’ (1956)
Directed by Robert Bresson
Director Robert Bresson claims in the beginning that A Man Escaped (or The Wind Blows Where it Wishes) has been presented as it happened in real life, based on the memoir by André Devigny. Set in Lyon, 1943, this story of Lieutenant Fontaine’s escape from a Nazi prison does a meticulous job of showing the smaller victories of life behind bars: communicating with a neighbor through the wall, using a safety pin to undo one’s handcuffs for temporary relief, fitting a broken piece of frame into a door, so the guards won’t notice, etc.
From the moment Lieutenant Fontaine considers throwing himself out of a moving car, every second is taut with suspense. More than anything else, this movie conveys perseverance and teamwork under the constant threat of death. There is always the possibility of the guards checking something unexpectedly, of someone ratting him out, of being moved to a different cell. Using Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor to great effect, this French thriller will always be one of the best prison escape movies ever made.
9 ‘Fargo’ (1996)
Directed by Joel Coen
Fargo is home to one of William H. Macy‘s best roles: Jerry Lundegaard, a struggling car salesman who tries to have his own wife kidnapped so that she can be held for a ransom that will get him out of his financial troubles. Things don’t go according to plan, though, leading to some of the funniest sequences in the Coen Brothers‘ repertoire. Frances McDormand rightfully earned an Academy Award as a pregnant, polite, and exceptional police officer whose Minnesota accent alone gives the murder investigation a more amusingly casual tone than most procedurals.
Though its “true story” disclaimer is largely misleading, Fargo is one of the strongest movies of 1996 and easily one of the best black comedies ever made. Following in Quentin Tarantino’s footsteps, Fargo showcases some of the funniest mundane conversations between two incompetent hitmen in cinematic history (played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare). But the comedy doesn’t take away from the suspense, as the audience never knows what’s going to happen next in this impressively concise masterpiece.
8 ‘All the President’s Men’ (1976)
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
The definitive movie about the Watergate scandal, Alan J. Pakula‘s brilliant All the President’s Men is based on the famous non-fiction book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. These two groundbreaking journalists are played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman respectively. Since everyone obviously knew the ending at the time of its release, the movie nevertheless shows what it must have been like to slowly discover the level of corruption at the heart of Watergate.
The epitome of a political thriller, this work boasts one of the most well-known characters of all time: Deep Throat, a White House insider who hides in the shadows and gives these two Washington Post journalists hints throughout their investigation. That this man is so afraid to show his face serves as merely one of many details that illustrate that lives, not just careers, were at stake as Bernstein and Woodward uncovered the truth. One of the best movies to be nominated for Best Picture in the 1970s, All the President’s Men still sets the standard for cinema’s depiction of journalism to this day.
7 ‘The French Connection’ (1971)
Directed by William Friedkin
Based on the book by Robin Moore, The French Connection first presents officer “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) dressed as Santa Claus shortly before engaging in police brutality. This perfectly sets up the juxtaposition between a uniform and the brutal character underneath. Director William Friedkin makes it clear from the beginning that Doyle and his partner (Roy Schneider) are racist cops who are gung ho about arresting people and yet haven’t picked up anyone significant.
The famous chase scene between a car and a train is one of many fantastic sequences in this Best Picture winner. By the end, the viewer understands that this isn’t so much about whether Doyle catches drug smuggler Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) as it’s about what Doyle is willing to do to catch him. As Roger Ebert wrote: “He isn’t after the smugglers because they’re breaking the law; he’s after them because his job consumes him.” This masterpiece is a dark showcase of when neither side is really worth rooting for, told with a cold, gritty, documentary-style realism that would inform Friedkin’s later works.
6 ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Jonathan Demme‘s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel, The Silence of the Lambs, is the only horror film to win Best Picture, a feat that requires more than just cheap thrills. It’s also one of the handful of films to win the Big Five Academy Awards (Best Picture, Screenplay, Actor, Actress, and Director). It delivers as a psychological thriller and police procedural, too, with Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) using the detained Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) to track down serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine).
Although the audience knows who the killer is long before he’s caught, the narrative imbues a lot of the tension in Starling’s everyday interactions with her boss and peers. In part through having its actors stare directly into the camera, The Silence of the Lambs ensures that no other film does a better job of depicting the male gaze, conveying tension in ostensibly danger-free places that men typically perceive as completely safe. The storytelling throughout is so electrifying that this thriller proves to be Demme’s greatest work.
5 ‘Parasite’ (2019)
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
There aren’t many thrillers that won Best Picture at the Oscars, but Bong Joon-ho directed one of them: Parasite. It’s not even a thriller until halfway through, starting off as a dark satirical comedy about a family who, one-by-one, fool an upper-class family into hiring them as their personal help. But this jarring shift in tone only makes the second half more thrilling, and the shocking twist forces the audience to think even more closely about what class division does to one’s perception of the world.
Parasite was the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the first non-English language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Another astounding fun fact: only three films have ever won both. Needless to say, it takes a special kind of movie to achieve such recognition, and Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece is certainly that and then some.
4 ‘Vertigo’ (1958)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Though it wasn’t hailed a masterpiece when it came out in 1958, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was given a remarkable reappraisal after the famed director kept it hidden for decades following its initial release. After he passed away in 1980, critics finally saw it for what it was: one of the most suspenseful, visually gorgeous, and emotionally powerful mystery thrillers of all time. Though Hitchcock mostly filmed in black and white, this color picture showed that he knew how to paint San Francisco with an eerily dreamy aesthetic.
This work takes a tough look at romantic obsession. James Stuart plays a former detective called John “Scottie” Ferguson, who has a fear of heights and a friend who hires him to follow his wife around. This leads to one of the most iconic twists in film history. Ferguson later relentlessly pressures his girlfriend to dress up as a woman he used to know. As one of the best movies about perfection of all time, it shows the consequences of lying, chasing an ideal, and enabling another’s unreasonable desires.
3 ‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
The Coen brothers have made many acclaimed films in the past forty-odd years, but their greatest achievement is the Western crime thriller, No Country for Old Men. In the 1980s, Lewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon a huge amount of money in the desert and decides to keep it. But he’s immediately pursued by both the cartel and hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Barden). This is a thrill ride in which Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) meditates on how he feels too old to deal with today’s criminals.
The film’s score is so subtle the viewer can barely detect it, highlighting the terrifying silences that occur when being chased by what feels like an unstoppable force. Anton Chigurh is one of the greatest villains in film history, and his icy presence carries a fatalistic air. He embodies the inevitability of death, and the movie’s script relentlessly takes the movie’s subject to its dark and disturbing conclusion. It’s one of the best thrillers to show and not tell, and it always will be.
2 ‘M’ (1931)
Directed by Fritz Lang
Master of German expressionism Fritz Lang made arguably the best police procedural before the genre even existed: M. In his first sound film, he employs some of the most effective use of voice-over in cinematic history to convey how extensive the search for a serial killer becomes. The shot of the killer’s shadow on the wanted poster is so iconic that its suggestion is chilling to this day. Likewise, those shots of the empty staircase, clotheslines, and other objects as the panic-stricken mother calls her daughter are so cold and quiet that the audience feels Elsie’s death before anyone knows she’s missing.
Lang’s proficiency in the silent era comes through as he often forgoes sound to produce even more suspense. That the criminals of the city decide to take part in this serial killer hunt demonstrates just how desperate everyone gets for life to return to normal. Finally, that trial at the end about pleading insanity is still so intense 93 years later that it cements M as a thriller that was ridiculously far ahead of its time.
1 ‘Rear Window’ (1954)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
There is so much relaxing jazz piano in one of the most suspenseful movies ever made. Based on the short story by Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window begins with the camera taking a look around the courtyard and through his neighbors’ windows. James Stuart plays photographer and eavesdropper L.B. Jefferies, who keeps peeping in on everyone because he has nothing else to do—usually alone in his New York City apartment with a broken leg.
Rear Window is so masterful in the way it lets the viewer know what’s happening without any dialogue. Jefferies watches a man wrapping a butcher knife and a saw in some newspaper, and we perfectly understand what he’s thinking. It’s also a fascinating study of loneliness, and some of the most moving scenes are with characters whose names we only ever see through the window: “Miss Lonely Hearts” having a candle-lit dinner date with herself, for instance. Anyone who doesn’t think it’s one of the best movies about voyeurism probably watched it through a pair of binoculars, and its ability to hold so much tension in such a confined space makes it arguably the most impressive thriller ever made.
