Film noir’s most unsettling nightmare ends in a flaming nuclear disaster – and if that anxiety weren’t enough, there’s also off-screen torture, ferocious desk-clerk slapping and the casual destruction of a beloved opera record. Robert Aldrich’s perverse masterpiece brings Mickey Spillane’s vicious Mike Hammer (a grinning Ralph Meeker) to life: a vain bottom-feeder prone to using his fists. He’s the sourest of antiheroes. Los Angeles has made him that way.
What separates a psychological thriller from a regular old thriller? As the phrase implies, it mostly has to do with the mind. In the best examples, special attention is paid to the mental disposition of its characters, and the thrills themselves are derived from how those motivations influence the movement of the plot. That might make it sound highfalutin, but the greatest psychological thrillers play on elemental fears, traumas and delusions to send goosebumps racing up the viewer’s arms. As one particularly disturbed young man once said, we all go a little mad sometimes – and that’s what makes the genre so relatable…and often frightening.
Taking all that into consideration, we probed the most shadowy corners of cinema to put together this list of the best psychological thrillers ever made, presented in no particular order. Some are tense and twisty, others are more meditative, but nearly all of them will leave you feeling dizzy, discombobulated and probably in need of some fresh air afterward.
Recommended:
😬 The 100 best thriller movies of all-time
🍆 The 35 steamiest erotic thrillers
💣 The 101 best action movies of all-time
🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time