Al Weisel - CDNow's 10 Essential Thrillers
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| The 10 Essential Thrillers
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Al Weisel
CDNOW Senior Editor, Movies
The thriller is centered on one emotion: fear. Virtually
anything that inhabits our nightmares can be the subject of a
thriller. There are crime thrillers and spy thrillers and
supernatural thrillers. The villain could be a monster, or a
human that acts like a monster, a ghost, or even the police.
Sometimes the audience identifies with the potential victim
fleeing a criminal, sometimes with the criminal trying not to
get caught. A good thriller builds up suspense, jolting the
audience with a few surprises along the way, but withholding
the big pay-off until the end.
Crime has always been a popular subject for the movies from
the first fictional film The
Great Train Robbery to such gangster movies of the
1930s as Scarface
and The
Public Enemy. In the 1940s and '50s, film noir
explored a dark, shadowy world populated with private dicks
and femme fatales in such films as Double
Indemnity and Kiss
Me Deadly. During World War II and the Cold War spy
thrillers cast Nazis and Communists as villains in such films
as Notorious and Pickup
on South Street. In the '70s, with the abolition of
the Hayes Code, directors revved up the sex and violence in
such films as Taxi Driver.
The undisputed master of the thriller was Alfred Hitchcock,
whose films about spies and murderers gave audiences the
perverse thrill of exploring the black corners of their souls
within the safe confines of a movie theater or their living
rooms. But numerous directors have taken a sadistic thrill in
taking their audiences to the brink of terror.
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| 1. Psycho (1960) |
 Alfred Hitchcock's film about a psychotic murderer was
originally dismissed as exploitative trash by critics who were
shocked and disappointed that the director had removed the
glossy veneer from his classy crime thrillers and forced them
to confront the brutality of violence. But it has since gained
in reputation and contains one of the most famous scenes ever
filmed -- the shower sequence -- which used quick editing cuts
to render the horror of quick cuts of a different
kind.
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| 2. The Night of the Hunter
(1955) |
 Directed by actor Charles Laughton, The Night of
the Hunter is a terrifying story of two children chased by
a sadistic murderer (Robert Mitchum), posing as a preacher,
who has the words hate and love tattooed on his
knuckles. One of the most stylish and scariest thrillers ever
made, the film was a box office failure when it was first
released and Laughton sadly never directed a film
again
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| 3. Manchurian Candidate
(1962) |
 This political thriller from John Frankenheimer stars
Laurence Harvey as a Korean War veteran brainwashed in a
prisoner of war camp and manipulated by his ambitious,
scheming mother (Angela Lansbury). A fellow prisoner of war
(Frank Sinatra) discovers that Harvey has been programmed to
be a political assassin and tries to stop him. Best scene: the
brainwashing sequence where the men hallucinate that they are
attending a ladies' garden party.
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| 4. Taxi Driver (1976) |
 Martin Scorsese's chilling account of the life of an
unstable New York taxi cab driver (Robert De Niro) brought new
levels of explicit violence to the screen. De Niro's Travis
Bickle is a complex anti-hero, who on the one hand tries to
assassinate a political candidate, but at the same time is
hailed as a hero when he frees a child prostitute (Jodie
Foster) from her pimp. The film also features Bernard
Herrmann's frenetic, jazzy score, his last
composition.
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| 5. M (1931) |
 In
this remarkable film directed by Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre gives
the best performance of his career as a child murderer pursued
by Berlin's demimonde. His crimes are chilling, but by the end
of the film, when Lorre's murderer is put on "trial" by a
lynch mob, his impassioned speech in his own defense succeeds
in the nearly impossible task of garnering him
sympathy.
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| 6. Notorious (1946) |
 Ingrid Bergman plays the daughter of a traitor forced
to marry and spy on a neo-Nazi (James Mason) to help her
father in this perverse Hitchcock film about sex and betrayal.
Cary Grant plays her "handler," who falls in love with her but
nevertheless lets her put herself in extreme danger, not to
mention sleep with another man, in order to discover the
secret her husband has hidden in the wine cellar. Among the
film's brilliant Hitchcockian touches is an amazing crane shot
that starts from the ceiling looking down on a dinner party
and slowly zooms in to the wine cellar key hiding in Bergman's
hand.
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| 7. The Silence of the Lambs
(1991) |
 Director Jonathan Demme took the thriller to a new
level with this smart, well-acted, and truly terrifying film
about a young FBI agent (Jodie Foster), who elicits the aide
of a vicious serial killer (Anthony Hopkins) to find another
monster murdering young women. Hopkins and Foster both won
Oscars for their roles and the movie won an Oscar for best
picture, an unusual achievement for a film of this
genre.
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| 8. The Sixth Sense (1999) |
 The clever surprise ending to M. Night Shyamalan's
film about a little boy (Haley-Joel Osment) who sees dead
people, is not merely one of the best twists in film history,
it's an epiphany that transforms and elevates everything that
happened before. Osment's remarkable Oscar-nominated
performance as the boy whose special power isolates him from
his classmates makes this film not only scary but also quite
moving.
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| 9. Wages of Fear (1953) |
 This Henri-Georges Clouzot film starring Yves Montand
will have you on the edge of your seat for its entire running
time. Its ingenious premise: Truckers have been hired to take
the extremely volatile chemical nitroglycerine through a
Central American jungle by an exploitative American company
for a measly $2,000. One bad bump and the chemical will
explode, killing the drivers. This film may be the most
unrelentingly suspenseful film ever made.
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| 10. Peeping Tom (1960) |
 Michael Powell's strange, twisted movie about a
murderer who films women as he murders them so shocked
audiences of its day it effectively ended the director's
career. By linking voyeurism, sexuality, and murder, Powell
not only tells the story of one particularly sick serial
killer but also, more profoundly, draws an unsettling parallel
between this character and the audience, which similarly gets
a perverse thrill out of watching him commit his
crimes.
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