George Cukor’s Gaslight isn’t just a psychological thriller, it’s officially synonymous with manipulation and horror. These are our picks for the greatest psychological thrillers ever made, with only one caveat: there’s only one film from each director, because some filmmakers make a cottage industry of this genre, and it’s important to share as many brilliant films from as many different perspectives as possible. We are, instead, just going to focus on the films we think are absolutely, 100% thrilling, and absolutely, 100% rooted in psychological anxiety. Like many genres of storytelling, the criteria can be a little nebulous and we’re not going to get hung up on that. However, it can be difficult to pin down which films are psychological thrillers and which ones are just thrillers in which the characters - like they would in any other genre - are motivated by their own, personal psychology. They exploit the anxieties of the audience while providing much-needed catharsis, putting our fears out in the open and revealing that they can either be conquered or, at the very least, have genuine validity. They are stories of paranoia, delusion, phobias, and abuse. Psychological thrillers focus less on external adventure and threat and more on the interior worlds of heroes and villains whose grasp on reality is dangerously close to failing. We long for escapism.īut that’s not what psychological thrillers are all about. The desire to experience new stories, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to live out exciting events that might otherwise never be possible. It could be said that we go to the movies in the first place for the thrills.
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