The 10 Most Disturbing Psychological Thrillers, Ranked (2024)

Thrillers are exciting and excellent at building tension and suspense while subverting the audience's expectations. Psychological thrillers, however, are thrillers that excel at playing with the audience's psyche. Blood, gore, and special effects disturb people; but psychological thrillers dig deeper by disturbing the audience's expectations.

This subgenre explores the psychological and emotional parts of tension-building, which is why these films can be even more effective. They shock the audience's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, which can have a lasting effect. The following films do precisely that, sticking with audiences long after the film has ended. These are the most disturbing psychological thrillers, ranked:

The following contains descriptions of grim and gruesome subject matter. Please be advised.

10 'Hard Candy' (2005)

Directed by David Slade

Hard Candy is a revenge story for the internet era as young Elliot Page plays a fourteen-year-old who punishes a predator in a way that answers the question: What if To Catch a Predator was really violent? When a grown man (Patrick Wilson) tries to pick up a teenager online and lure the teen over to his place for sex, the teen goes along with the plan until the tables are turned in a satisfyingly gory way. The once innocent and naive teen is actually a calculating vigilante.

It is wild that Page's early work consists of Hard Candy and Juno as the two films could not be further apart. What is clear is that he has always been an incredible actor with great range, capable of displaying compassion and cruelty in one complex character. The violence of Hard Candy is disturbing, but the moral dilemma that sprung onto the audience is even more disturbing.

9 WATCH ON AMAZON PRIME'Soft and Quiet' (2022)

Directed by Beth de Araujo

Soft and Quiet is best viewed knowing next-to-nothing about it as there is a jaw-dropping reveal exactly ten minutes into the movie that tells the audience exactly what the film is about. The vague-sounding plot describes "a group of like-minded women whose meeting goes astray when someone from the past shows up". Even though that sounds obtuse, it also accurately describes the basis of the movie.

While Soft and Quiet does get very violent, the psychological torment befalls the viewer because of having to follow the unrelenting point-of-view of horrible people. Thanks to the cinematography, the film is punishing in the way that it continuously follows the women. Soft and Quiet is the debut film by filmmaker Beth de Araujo, and it is an exciting introduction to what she may do next.

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8 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' (2011)

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

Mass violence is disturbing - being the mother of a perpetrator of such violence may be more disturbing than that. We Need to Talk About Kevin is a creative and prescient look into motherhood gone wrong as the film follows Tilda Swinton, the maligned mother of a son who killed several people in a shocking act of mass murder.

The film follows her in the present day as she moves about her small community as public enemy number one, and back in the day as a young mother who never felt an attachment to her son. Is that the issue? Is she to blame for what's next? Or does a mother love her son no matter what he does?

We Need To Talk About Kevin

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Release Date

September 28, 2011

Director

Lynne Ramsay

Cast

Tilda Swinton , John C. Reilly , Ezra Miller , Jasper Newell , Rock Duer , Ashley Gerasimovich

Runtime

112 minutes

Main Genre

Drama

Writers

Lynne Ramsay , Rory Kinnear , Lionel Shriver

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7 'Se7en' (1995)

Directed by David Fincher

David Fincher is the modern master of thrillers that leave audiences biting their nails through tense plots. Se7en is the scariest of his thrillers as we watch a serial killer play cat-and-mouse with a seasoned detective (Morgan Freeman) and his rookie partner (Brad Pitt). The killer stages elaborate crime scenes based on the seven deadly sins. They have to stop him before he completes the cycle.

Se7en is praised for its disturbing ending, but that ending almost didn't happen. New Line sent the script to Fincher by mistake. They wanted the ending changed to something more mainstream, but Fincher was fascinated by the script and wanted to direct it with the ending intact. The result is an oft-quoted and bleak ending that makes this one of the most disturbing thrillers ever made.

Se7en

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Release Date

September 22, 1995

Director

David Fincher

Cast

Brad Pitt , Morgan Freeman , gwyneth paltrow , R. Lee Ermey , Daniel Zacapa

Runtime

127 minutes

Main Genre

Thriller

Writers

Andrew Kevin Walker

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6 'Perfect Blue' (1997)

Directed by Satoshi Kon

Anime fans know that animation does not guarantee a happy-go-lucky viewing experience. Look to Perfect Blue as an example of that in this fascinating tale of obsession and celebrity. After a member of a J-Pop girl group decides to leave music to pursue a serious acting career, one of her obsessed fans stalks her to let her know how disappointed he is in her new career choice.

Perfect Blue was Kon's directorial debut, and it enjoyed international acclaim and analysis. It is a very modern look into the public's obsession with celebrities, particularly young female celebrities who are under constant scrutiny. Perfect Blue shows how dangerous public life can be, and it offers a very early look into the now-common phenomenon of parasocial relationships.

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5 'Oldboy' (2003)

Directed by Park Chan-wook

Oldboy follows a man named Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-suk) who has been held captive in a sealed hotel room for 15 years. He spends that time practicing martial arts and focusing hatred on his unknown captors, losing his sense of reality in the process. He is suddenly released and tasked with the mission of finding and killing his captors in five days. What transpires is a wild story with crazy twists that won't be spoiled here.

Oldboy was not Park Chan-wook's first film, but it is the one that garnered him international attention. It has been remade twice, once by Spike Lee and once in Hindi, but the original is the most disturbing due to an unhinged performance by Choi Min-suk. His twisted smile and exaggerated facial expressions stick with audiences well after the film ended.

Oldboy (2003)

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Release Date

November 21, 2003

Director

Park Chan-wook

Cast

Choi Min-sik , Yoo Ji-tae , Kang Hye-jung

Runtime

120 minutes

Main Genre

Mystery

Writers

Garon Tsuchiya , Nobuaki Minegishi , Park Chan-wook

4 WATCH ON NETFLIX'The Vanishing' (1988)

Directed by George Sluizer

George Sluizer's Dutch drama The Vanishing is still one of the most disturbing kidnapping films ever made. The plot follows a Dutch couple vacationing in France. The couple stops at a rest stop and the young woman completely vanishes. Gene Bervoets stars as the helpless boyfriend searching for his missing girlfriend who starts receiving threatening clues from the kidnapper years after this happened. The boyfriend slowly loses his mind as he gets closer to the truth and meets the sad*stic kidnapper.

The ending to The Vanishing is incredibly eerie as the plot unfolds in such a way that the audience starts to feel like the hero: senses unraveling, unable to tell whether the mystery is close to being solved. The film deftly manipulates the audience along with its grieving protagonist, which is why it is so masterfully disturbing. Even Stanley Kubrick thought it was one of the most terrifying films he had ever seen!

3 RENT ON AMAZON PRIME'Jacob's Ladder' (1990)

Directed by Adrian Lyne

Since its release in 1990, Jacob's Ladder has had a cult following that managed to propel it to the forefront of conversations about psychological thrillers. Adrian Lyne directed this nerve-wracking thriller about a postal worker (Tim Robbins) whose experiences in the Vietnam War have given him haunting hallucinations. His suffering worsens, so he does whatever it takes to figure out what is happening to him and how he can make it stop. It is a twisted look into trauma and PTSD told only as Lyne could.

Critics at the time felt the film was punishingly sad, with Roger Ebert calling it "a thoroughly painful and depressing experience" and Owen Glieberman saying of watching it that "you just want out". Modern audiences are less likely to want to tap out of the film, but it will still disturb viewers.

2 WATCH ON PARAMOUNT+'The Game' (1997)

Directed by David Fincher

Fans of psychological thrillers know that The Game is one of the most disturbing of David Fincher's unflinching filmography. The Game follows Michael Douglas as an investment banker whose brother gives him a peculiar birthday gift: taking part in an interactive game that bleeds into his everyday life. As the game goes on, he struggles to differentiate between his nightmarish new reality and the game and suspects there is a greater conspiracy at play.

The Game is ahead of its time in its terrifying use of gamified reality. Fincher's ability to create a dark atmosphere as a disturbing story unfolds is unparalleled. While The Game was not as successful at the box office when it was initially released, and it struggled to avoid comparisons to Se7en; the tide has changed on the film and elevated it to one of the most disturbing thrillers ever made.

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1 'The Silence of the Lambs' (1991)

Directed by Jonathan Demme

Is there a more chilling villain than Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins)? Even those who have never seen Jonathan Demme's masterpiece TheSilence of the Lambs know the name Hannibal Lecter. They likely even know that he is a cannibal. The fact that people who have never seen the film can name those facts shows how pervasive this disturbing crime drama has been in American culture. As the Oscar-winning gold standard in this genre, Silence of the Lambs is such a good film that mainstream audiences did not mind its dark subject.

The film follows Jodie Foster as a rookie FBI agent assigned to solve a series of gruesome murders committed by a killer dubbed Buffalo Bill. She speaks to Hannibal Lecter to get into the mind of the criminal and forms an uneasy friendship with him in the process. There are two horror villains in the film: Buffalo Bill the active serial killer, and Lecter with the psychological games he plays on people (as well as his cannibalistic tendencies). As a result, the film is a multi-layered thriller with plenty of disturbing elements to obsess over.

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