Best Paranoid Thrillers of All Time, From Klute to It Follows

 Posted on July 20, 2024  |  10 minutes  |  2106 words  |  Larita Shotwell

This October, Variety has enlisted some our favorite spooky content creators to share their scary movie essentials. Chloe Okuno, whose film “Watcher“ is one of the best horror movies of the year, shared her picks for the best paranoid thrillers of all time.  

One of the most primal fears is someone watching every move you make, quietly invading your privacy as they prepare to strike. This terror comes to vivid life in “Watcher,” the feature debut from director Chloe Okuno, which impressed and terrified audiences at this year’s Sundance Film Festival before heading to horror streamer Shudder. Scream queen Maika Monroe stars as an expat who is convinced she’s being watched by someone across from her Bucharest apartment complex. The actress’s performance recalls the emotional complexity of her breakout role in 2014’s “It Follows.” 

Okuno, who also wrote “Watcher,” was the perfect person to help curate Variety’s list of the best paranoid thrillers of all time. She described why the genre is a source of inspiration to her. 

“All of these picks are pretty different,” Okuno said. “Especially for ‘Watcher,’ but for any movie, what draws me to the paranoia genre is the fact that, maybe more so than any other genre, you’re using the tools that you have as a filmmaker to show the audience what the interiority of your character is. Every movie does that to some extent, but that tends to come across more in these movies, not so much through dialogue, but music and cinematography and sound. You’re able to paint this picture of what’s going on inside someone and make it tense and scary. Every filmmaker approaches it so differently.” 

  • Perfect Blue (1997)

    This is a movie that I only first saw in the last couple of years, but it just had such a massive impact on “Watcher” and me. It’s definitely one of my favorite stalker thrillers. First of all, the animation is beautiful. I love the way they portrayed Tokyo and an urban environment that’s very oppressive. There are scenes of Mima on a subway train, just surrounded by people, but also you have a sense of her loneliness in the middle of all of that. That’s obviously something that we wanted to touch on a little bit in “Watcher.”  

    The thing that really sticks with me for “Perfect Blue” is just the level to which director Satoshi Kon was able to portray her objectification. She’s in this Japanese pop group and is then making this transition to being an actress. There’s this really uncomfortable sense of her being sexually objectified, but also an intersection of that and our sense of ourselves as the stalker watching her. They really blur the lines in a way that is really clever and clearly such an influence on other movies that I love, like “Black Swan.” 

  • Klute (1971)

    Jane Fonda is a big reason that movie is one of my personal favorites. Her performance in that is just so incredible. It’s like a style of acting you don’t see very much anymore. She has a naturalism to her in that movie. It’s no secret that Hollywood’s not necessarily very good at portraying sex workers. With her in that movie, it’s such a rich, nuanced portrayal. A woman who, from the very beginning you see her life as a model and actress — she’s objectified and devalued. Sex work is a way of her reclaiming control. It’s just such an interesting character study of this woman. It’s also a great paranoid thriller. I love the score — it’s really creepy and weird. Gordon Willis’ photography just makes everything feel like you’re watching these people from a distance. You’re in Klute’s point of view, but also, you’re seeped in this paranoia along with Bree and Jane Fonda. It’s just brilliant.

  • The Gift (2015)

    Maybe it’s changing now a little bit, but certainly when “The Gift” came out there weren’t that many adult psychological thrillers out there. There’s a little bit of the genre I love, but you saw a lot more in the ‘90s and the ‘70s. “The Gift” is really, really well-directed. It has such an incredible cast. Rebecca Hall is one of my favorite working actresses today. With “The Night House” and “Resurrection,” for me she’s a horror icon. But Joel Edgerton did a really good job of showing — this is a thing you see frequently in psychological thrillers — a picture of upper middle-class life and a person who has this beautiful home, then the horror is in the idea that we see it can be so easily disrupted. And in “The Gift,” that disruption comes from both inside and outside the house.  

    Joel Edgerton is so good and so creepy, but also sympathetic as this stalker. At any given moment, as your experience through Rebecca Hall, part of you kind of likes him, but another part of you knows there is something sinister here. But that’s coupled with the realization that she can’t even trust her own husband (Jason Bateman), the person she knows best. So she’s caught in the middle of these two things. Just seeing her navigate that and feeling like literally nowhere is safe is truly effective.

  • The Invisible Man (2020)

    There’s a clarity and simplicity of concept that works so well. Sometimes with these old Universal Monsters properties, you think, “How do you make people care about them? How do you update it?” It’s the question executives are always asking. Sometimes people twist that and they try to update it in a way that speaks to now, but you can see the effort behind it. This one was just such a perfect marriage of this villain and something very immediate, but also unfortunately an eternal problem: abuse. Domestic violence and the idea of your abuser being invisible is so horrifying and it was executed so perfectly. It’s a truly amazing kind of modern story about gaslighting. And, of course, I love Elisabeth Moss. She’s amazing. 

  • Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

    It’s a funny Kubrick one. I really respond to the central story, which is the very idea of a man’s wife’s infidelity sending him spiraling into a night of total insanity. It does a really good job of showing the fragility of the male ego and how just the idea — not even the actuality — of his wife’s infidelity sends him down this rabbit hole of paranoia. Obviously, so many movies and so many filmmakers, myself included, at one point have tried to explore this idea of wealthy secret societies. The visuals that Kubrick created of these people in this giant house with masks on… I’m sure it had its place in art before this movie, but he seemed to create our currently accepted vision of what wealthy secret societies look like. 

  • Blow Out (1981)

    It’s really fun. Part of me likes it for some slightly more superficial reasons. It’s one of the De Palma movies that looks like a giallo movie at certain points. It has such a crazy use of color and occasionally he’s doing this whole red, white and blue thing, and there’s that sequence at the end with the fireworks and this parade dedicated to America. There’s things going on in that movie where, even if he’s not very overt about it, you can read into as a story about the corruption of America and the politics at the heart of it. But at the same time, mixed in with that, it’s still a really sleazy De Palma movie. Of course, he still has to start with a sequence of a killer stalking naked women, but it’s a meta-commentary because it’s about the process of making movies. It’s delightful because it’s a little bit of a messy combination of so many different ideas and thoughts in this one story. It just tickles me. 

  • It Follows (2014)

    I love that movie so much. I can’t remember if I saw that or “The Guest” first, but either way, Maika is so incredible in that movie and it’s probably one of the movies that started what we now consider to be the renaissance in art house horror, “elevated genre” or whatever your preferred term is. First of all, it’s just beautiful. I think the director was influenced by photographer Gregory Crewdson. There’s this beauty to the photography unlike in most horror movies. I really appreciate the minimalism of it. Rewatching it now, I see how much John Carpenter’s “Halloween” is an influence. The way he photographs her, the use of Steadicam and just the basic conceit, which is so simple but so scary: this expressionless person in the distance slowly moving towards you. It’s the Michael Myers thing: a force of nature, almost a representation of death. People read into “It Follows” more as a metaphor for STDs, but I’ve always really liked the interpretation that it’s more of a coming-of-age movie with death literally moving towards you. It’s inexorable, you can’t ever escape it. That’s the rude awakening of youth and coming to terms with your mortality. 

  • The Tenant (1976)

    That was one we looked at a lot while making “Watcher.” It’s already this creepy, dingy Paris apartment, but still feels relatively normal and grounded. As the movie goes on, your perspective on the entire room just changes. I’ve lived in apartment buildings before where I had problems with my neighbors and it feels like they were always listening to me and I was always forced to listen to them. It was really uncomfortable and creates this sort of paranoia of urban living. Roman Polanski is a director who’s able to show a person’s paranoia and what they’re feeling by making you as an audience member feel like you’re in the place of this unknown presence that’s watching them, like the neighbors in “Rosemary’s Baby” or “The Tenant” or “Repulsion.” There’s this sense of an unknown person who at all times is focused in; therefore, you take the place of that person. It’s obviously not a literal point of view, but more of a feeling. 

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