Warren Beatty’s Joe Frady is a reporter investigating the assassination of a senator, but as he digs into the story, everyone he interviews ends up dead. Beatty traces everything back to the shadowy Parallax company, which seems to be recruiting assassins for their nefarious purposes… and soon becomes a target himself!

It’s a delightfully twisty thriller directed with a relentless sense of bleak realism that seems to be a trademark of Pakula’s films.

More than just a remake of Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World, Carpenter’s sci-fi masterpiece is not only among the most tense suspense-thrillers of all time, it’s also the greatest practical special-effect film ever made. But beyond that, it’s a film all about paranoia.

When the all-male residents of an Antarctic research station (lead by the lushly bearded Kurt Russell) are set upon by a shape-shifting alien, no one knows who is human and who is an alien in disguise. I’m jealous of everyone who has never seen The Thing, because they get to see it for the first time!

Ahhh, to be rich and bored. Michael Douglas is a man who seems to have everything… but he’s haunted by his father’s suicide and his own approaching 48th birthday (the same birthday on which his father did the deed). So, his excitable younger brother (Sean Penn) enrolls him in an immersive game, from a company called Consumer Recreation Services, that younger bro says will “make your life fun."

What ensues is an increasingly terrifying series of life-or-death situations and conspiratorial invasions of privacy as “The Game” gets out of hand and takes over Douglas's life. Fincher’s direction is flashy. Douglas’s terror is palpable. The ending is a bit bonkers, but it’s completely in keeping with the excess of the mid-1990s.

What if you came back from lunch and all your co-workers were dead? That’s just what happens to Robert Redford’s Joe Turner (codename “Condor”) who works at a place called the American Literary Historical Society… which is a secret branch of the CIA.

Joe goes on the run, not knowing who he can trust. This conspiracy thriller involves faked suicides, Middle East oil fields, shadow agents and whistleblowing. It’s a true classic of the genre led by a real movie star.

Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) is a Vietnam veteran turned postal worker who is being plagued by visions of demons. He soon realizes that several members of his old platoon are suffering similar symptoms, and Jacob begins to fear that they were all victims of a nefarious military experiment.

This hallucinatory, fever-dream of a film is far too fun and twisty for me to blow the reveal for you here. But be forewarned: it’s fucking scary. Watch with the lights on and not too close to bedtime, or you may end up with dreams like Jacob's!

The set-up is simple yet horrifying. A single mother goes to pick up her daughter up from preschool, only to have the young girl go missing. When the police (led by Laurence Olivier) come to investigate, they realize that all of young Bunny Lake’s clothes and possessions are missing from her room too.

What follows is a very weird mystery in which everyone’s motives and sanity are questioned.  Bonus points for an appearance by the band The Zombies! This is one you’ll never forget.

Wanna get itchy? Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon star in this claustrophobic slice of drug-induced paranoia that truly gets under your skin.

Adapted from the stage play of the same name, this single-location film somehow never seems stage-bound because the direction from the great “Wild Bill” Friedkin keeps us squirming. The title comes from the belief that Judd and Shannon have somehow been infected with parasitic insects crawling just under their skin, and they rapidly descend into madness.