20 movies that make people paranoid

Jordan Peele burst onto the horror scene with his debut feature Get Out,  which uses the conventions of horror to scathingly examine racism in America. Daniel Kaluuya gives a haunting performance as Chris Washington, a young Black man whose trip to visit his girlfriend’s parents turns terrifying when it’s revealed that they have been implanting the brains of White people in the young, healthy bodies of Black men and women. Get Out induces paranoia precisely because it is so astute in its examination and exploration of the fraught racial dynamics of America.

Jordan Peele has quickly established himself as one of the most skilled horror directors working in today’s Hollywood. Though his film Us isn’t quite as blistering as Get Out, its story about a group of sinister doppelgangers that emerge to torment a family, including Lupita Nyong’o's Adelaide, is still terrifying. Even more frightening and paranoia-inducing is the film’s conceit that these doppelgängers live in tunnels under the United States, even though their ultimate purpose remains hazy. Us wisely refuses to reveal all of its information about its villains, and this, more than anything else, makes it truly disturbing. 

Both the Austrian and American versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games are the epitome of paranoia-inducing cinema. After all, it’s impossible not to be terrified about the possibility of two innocent-looking youths turning up at one’s doorstep, only to reveal themselves to be sadistic torturers with the seeming ability to manipulate time. These films get under the skin and into the mind of the viewer, suggesting that violence, brutality, and ugliness are always lurking just around the corner, ready to destroy a family without any provocation. 

David Fincher loves using cinematic narrative to play with viewers’ understanding of what’s unfolding. This is certainly true of The Game, which stars Michael Douglas as Nicholas Van Orton, a banker whose brother gives him the gift of a strange game that, once started, constantly calls into question the boundary between game and reality and the very rules of the game itself. It’s a challenging but rewarding film, even if it often engenders a sense of encroaching paranoia and unease in character and viewer alike.

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn  may not always be narratively coherent, but it’s undeniably a compelling watch, thanks to Barry Keoghan’s disturbingly intense performance as Oliver Quick. Though at first, he seems to be a disadvantaged student at Oxford, once he works his way into the good graces of the wealthy Catton family, it becomes very clear that he is not what he seems. This is one of those films that inevitably engenders paranoia, suggesting that one can never really know whether a stranger really is who they say they are. 

Fight Club perfectly captures the angst of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, particularly when it comes to men and masculinity. Edward Norton is particularly notable as the nameless Narrator, a disenchanted white-collar worker whose life is turned on its head thanks to the timely arrival of Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden. In this dark, sinister, and cynical world, however, nothing is as it seems, and this is one of those David Fincher films that challenges everyone’s sense of self.

Martin Scorsese has spent most of his career using his films to interrogate and explore American masculinity. Leonardo DiCaprio stars in the chilling Shutter Island, in which he portrays Edward "Teddy" Daniels, who comes to the psychiatric hospital of the title on an investigation, only to find more than he bargained for, destabilizing his entire sense of identity in the process. Beneath all of the narrative twists and turns — all of which force the viewer to consider what’s real and what isn’t — there’s a surprisingly heartbreaking engagement with grief, loss, and guilt. 

Christopher Nolan has always had a keen command of narrative, and he enjoys making films that challenge the viewer in numerous ways. Memento focuses on Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby, whose particular form of amnesia means that he can’t retain short-term memories, which complicates his attempt to discover who murdered his wife. This is one of those films that encourages the viewer to doubt anything and everything, up to and including their own memories and sense of the world around them. 

Cary Grant is dashing as always in North by Northwest, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most remarkable big-screen offerings. He portrays Roger Thornhill, who finds himself the victim of mistaken identity and, as a result, becomes part of a Cold War conspiracy. Like so many other films produced during the Cold War, North by Northwest captures the angst of a culture that was consumed with the idea that double agents and spies were lurking everywhere, and it has gone on to become a truly iconic film, with the crop duster and Mount Rushmore scenes, in particular, becoming particularly well-known.

Michelangelo Antonioni brings his considerable skills as a director to bear in Blowup, which focuses on David Hemmings’ Thomas, who seems to take a picture of the aftermath of a murder while in the park. It’s a film that succeeds due to its rich atmosphere, and it is one of those movies that excels in its ambiguity. It withholds just as much information as it reveals, leaving both its protagonist and the audience more than a little perplexed and unsure about what, if anything, they have actually witnessed.

Drawing on Blowup, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out  stars John Travolta as a sound technician who accidentally witnesses what seems to be an assassination of a potential presidential candidate. This is one of those films that succeeds in both its subject matter, which is all about conspiracies and cover-ups, and its aesthetics, with De Palma at his best. Like the best suspense thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock, this is the kind of film whose atmosphere stays with the viewer long past the ending.

If there was one director who was known for his ability to capture suspense, it would be Alfred Hitchcock. A sense of paranoia permeates many of his films, including Vertigo, which focuses on James Stewart’s Scottie Ferguson, whose investigation of another man’s wife becomes a perilous story of dangerous obsession and unstable identities. Like so many of the director’s other works, Vertigo calls into question the very nature of truth and reality, and its remarkably rich aesthetic heightens the growing sense of paranoia and fear that saturates its narrative. 

The idea that one lives entirely within a constructed reality is a remarkably potent fear, and it's the entire premise of The Truman Show.  Jim Carrey gives one of his most layered and mature performances as Truman Burbank, whose whole sense of reality is turned upside down when he realizes that he’s actually been living in an extensive and meticulously crafted TV show. In an age in which all of reality seems to be mediated in one way or another, this is the kind of film that only grows more relevant and seemingly accurate with every passing year.

Rosamund Pike is at her very best in Gone Girl, in which she plays Amy Elliott Dunne, a woman who frames her husband for her disappearance and presumed murder. As the film goes on, it becomes clearer just how ruthless Amy is and how there is little that she won’t do. As a whole, the film leads the viewer to ponder just how much anyone can be trusted, even (especially!) those with whom one has built a life and a future.

The Manchurian Candidate is, in many ways, Cold War paranoia distilled into its cinematic essence. Its story about an American soldier who is essentially subverted by the Communists was every postwar American citizen’s worst nightmare, made all the more tragic and wrenching by the fact that it was his mother who did it to him. The film features a terrifying performance by Angela Lansbury, and it’s one of those movies that is so disturbing precisely because it seems so very plausible. In the world of films like The Manchurian Candidate, nothing and no one is to be trusted.

Released in 1974, The Parallax View is definitely one of those films that seems very much of its moment. Released in the same year that Nixon resigned from the presidency, it certainly captures and expresses the sense of paranoia and suspicion that were so much a part of American culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its story about a journalist who investigates the Parallax Corporation feeds into the prevailing sentiment that no one’s actions are ever what they seem and that, when it comes down to it, anyone can be a scapegoat. 

Final Destination could only have been made in the early 2000s. It focuses on a group of high schoolers who avoid dying in a plane crash only to find themselves targeted by the insatiable specter of death, with many of them dying in unexpected (yet surprisingly banal) ways. As such, it’s an uncanny reminder of just how common death is and how easy it is for even the most everyday activities can prove fatal if the circumstances are just right.

Jaws looms large in the history of creature features, and it showed that Steven Spielberg had what it took to be a blockbuster director. The movie, about a dangerous great white shark that terrorizes a New England coastal community, taps into humans' deepest fears about what lurks in the ocean. Even today, it has the power to make one paranoid about venturing into the ocean for fear that one may also fall victim to a shark that has developed an insatiable desire for human flesh.

Each iteration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers  has neatly tapped into the anxieties of the period, and the 1970s version is particularly haunting. It has a remarkably paranoid and claustrophobic atmosphere, capturing the angst of a period in which everything seemed out of joint and disturbed. The ending still packs a punch, as Donald Sutherland’s Matthew reveals himself to have been taken over by these sinister creatures from outer space. This is a world in which there is no hope and where anyone could be a body snatcher.

The Matrix is, in some ways, the very epitome of a paranoid film.  After all, its central story focuses on Keanu Reeves’ Neo Anderson and his awakening to the reality that what he thought of as the real world is instead an elaborate construct known as the Matrix. Brilliantly directed by the Wachowskis, this film dares the viewer to rethink everything they thought they knew about the world and their place in it. If everything one believes is actually a lie or an elaborate construction, then it becomes impossible  not to be paranoid.