![]() ![]() M is cinema's darkest landmark: a portrait of awful appetites that was revolutionary for also being an oblique mirror on society at large. Berlin's most moneyed and celebrated director, Fritz Lang, was drawn to the subject, which would become the spine of his first sound film, in many ways the commercial birth of the modern psychothriller. Several real-life child murderers, cannibals and serial killers – their nicknames are grisly enough: the Butcher of Hanover, the Vampire of Düsseldorf – terrorised Germany in the 1920s. The killer moment: It has to be the crop-duster sequence, which begins like a Western standoff and ends with the suavest man in cinema face down in the dirt. But it’s Grant’s movie: a Hollywood A-lister happy to be the punchline when the scene calls for it. And the cast? Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau and Jessie Royce Landis – heroes, villains and worried mothers, they’re all having a ball. It’s all a tribute to Hitch and his ensemble of behind-the-camera talents, including screenwriter Ernest Lehman, Saul Bass (designer of the iconic title sequence) and Bernard Herrmann, whose score lends menace and levity in equal measure. Of course, making a movie this effortless is hard work. The greatest joy in Alfred Hitchcock’s spy caper is how effortless it all feels: a gliding magic-carpet ride from New York to Mount Rushmore, via Chicago and a Midwestern bus stop, as Cary Grant’s ad man suffers a potentially fatal outbreak of Wrong Man-itis. If there’s a thriller out there more exhilarating, sexier or packed with iconic moments than this one, we’ve yet to see it. □ The greatest pyschological thrillers ever made □ The 60 most nerve-racking heist movies ever □ The 22 best thriller movies on Netflix ![]() □️ The 35 steamiest erotic thrillers ever made Written by A bbey Bender, Joshua Rothkopf, Yu An Su, Phil de Semlyen, Tom Huddleston, Andy Kryza, Tomris Laffly & Matthew Singer Sounds good? Get started with these heart-rate-firing classics. All with the intention of leaving you shaken up. They know exactly which nerves to hit – and when to hit them. The best thrillers impress not just with their provocative dialogue or voyeuristic camerawork, but by injecting the cinematic experience with frantic, anxiety-inducing energy. If you find yourself sitting closer to the edge of your seat, or find your palms getting clammy, you’re more than likely watching a thriller. But it speaks to the breadth of themes and subjects they can cover, and it’s perhaps easier to identify a thriller from how they make you feel rather than what they’re about. It might feel strange to lump serial-killer procedurals, ‘70s conspiracies, and obsessed artists all together in the same genre of film. Occupying the blurry middle ground between the raw adrenaline blast of horror films that you watch through your fingers and psychological dramas – Bergman et al – that you feel in the pit of your stomach, the thriller genre covers a deceptively large amount of ground in the cinema pantheon. ![]()
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