Home - Hal and Dee at the Movies - Top 100 Film Lists

Mail Hal C. F. Astell - Site Map

Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers If the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills is too American a list for your liking, then this one probably won't impress you too much either, but it does add a number of British films into the mix. It comes from a book called Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers by Douglas Brode, published in 2003 by Kensington. While it's heavily biased towards English language films (there is an appendix called The French Connection: The Great Gallic Thrillers), it's another good starting point and one that's easy to argue about. Obviously, I can't link to a book but it is on Google Books and the contents can be viewed for free, starting on page vii. The List # Title Year Director IMDb 1 Psycho 1960 Alfred Hitchcock IMDb 2 M 1931 Fritz Lang IMDb 3 Touch of Evil 1958 Orson Welles IMDb 4 Dr. Strangelove 1964 Stanley Kubrick IMDb 5 The Third Man 1949 Carol Reed IMDb 6 Rear Window 1954 Alfred Hitchcock IMDb 7 Jaws 1975 Steven Spielberg IMDb 8 North by Northwest 1959 Alfred Hitchcock IMDb 9 The Manchurian Candidate 1962 John Frankenheimer IMDb 10 The Silence of the Lambs 1991 Jonathan Demme IMDb 11 Vertigo 1958 Alfred Hitchcock IMDb 12 The Exorcist 1973 William Friedkin IMDb 13 High Noon 1952 Fred Zinnemann IMDb 14 Belle de Jour 1967 Luis Buñuel IMDb 15 Notorious 1946 Alfred Hitchcock IMDb 16 Taxi Driver 1976 Martin Scorsese IMDb 17 The Night of the Hunter 1955 Charles Laughton IMDb 18 Strangers on a Train 1951 Alfred Hitchcock IMDb 19 Rosemary's Baby 1968 Roman Polanski IMDb 20 The Maltese Falcon 1941 John Huston IMDb 21 Alien 1979 Ridley Scott IMDb 22 Double Indemnity 1944 Billy Wilder IMDb 23 The Birds 1963 Alfred Hitchcock IMDb 24 The Sixth Sense 1999 M. Night Shyamalan IMDb 25 The Mummy 1932 Karl Freund IMDb 26 The Haunting 1963 Robert Wise IMDb 27 Shadow of a Doubt 1943 Alfred Hitchcock IMDb 28 The Fugitive 1993 Andrew Davis IMDb 29 Repulsion 1965 Roman Polanski IMDb 30 The Thing from Another World 1951 Christian Nyby IMDb 31 In Cold Blood 1967 Richard Brooks IMDb 32 The Black Cat 1934 Edgar G. Ulmer IMDb 33 Straw Dogs 1971 Sam Peckinpah IMDb 34 In the Heat of the Night 1967 Norman Jewison IMDb 35 The Ipcress File 1965 Sidney J. Furie IMDb 36 Laura 1944 Otto Preminger IMDb 37 The Collector 1965 William Wyler IMDb 38 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956 Don Siegel IMDb 39 Frenzy 1972 Alfred Hitchcock IMDb 40 Island of Lost Souls 1932 Erle C. Kenton IMDb 41 Sleuth 1972 Joseph L. Mankiewicz IMDb 42 Dead of Night 1945 Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden & Robert Hamer IMDb 43 Peeping Tom 1960 Michael Powell IMDb 44 The China Syndrome 1979 James Bridges IMDb 45 The Killing 1956 Stanley Kubrick IMDb 46 Blood Simple 1984 Joel Coen IMDb 47 Seven Days to Noon 1950 Roy & John Boulting IMDb 48 The Contender 2000 Rod Lurie IMDb 49 Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 Robert Aldrich IMDb 50 Carrie 1976 Brian De Palma IMDb 51 And Then There Were None 1945 René Clair IMDb 52 Wait Until Dark 1967 Terence Young IMDb 53 Safety Last! 1923 Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor IMDb 54 Blow-Up 1966 Michaelangelo Antonioni IMDb 55 Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 1931 Rouben Mamoulian IMDb 56 Halloween 1978 John Carpenter IMDb 57 The Old Dark House 1932 James Whale IMDb 58 Play Misty for Me 1971 Clint Eastwood IMDb 59 The Spiral Staircase 1945 Robert Siodmak IMDb 60 The Conversation 1974 Francis Ford Coppola IMDb 61 The Pit and the Pendulum 1961 Roger Corman IMDb 62 Se7en 1995 David Fincher IMDb 63 Klute 1971 Alan J. Pakula IMDb 64 The Passenger 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni IMDb 65 Suddenly 1954 Lewis Allen IMDb 66 Sleepy Hollow 1999 Tim Burton IMDb 67 Black Sunday 1960 Mario Bava IMDb 68 Mad Love 1935 Karl Freund IMDb 69 Basic Instinct 1992 Paul Verhoeven IMDb 70 Cat People 1942 Jacques Tourneur IMDb 71 The Lost Patrol 1934 John Ford IMDb 72 The Wicker Man 1973 Robin Hardy IMDb 73 Fail-Safe 1964 Sidney Lumet IMDb 74 Marathon Man 1976 John Schlesinger IMDb 75 Pickup on South Street 1953 Samuel Fuller IMDb 76 The Others 2001 Alejandro Amenábar IMDb 77 Les Diaboliques 1955 Henri-Georges Clouzot IMDb 78 Die Hard 1988 John McTiernan IMDb 79 The Phantom of the Opera 1925 Rupert Julian et al IMDb 80 A Shot in the Dark 1964 Blake Edwards IMDb 81 Horror of Dracula 1958 Terence Fisher IMDb 82 Memento 2000 Christopher Nolan IMDb 83 Charade 1963 Stanley Donen IMDb 84 Suspiria 1977 Dario Argento IMDb 85 The Most Dangerous Game 1932 Irving Pichel & Ernest B. Schoedsack IMDb 86 From Russia with Love 1963 Terence Young IMDb 87 Scream 1996 Wes Craven IMDb 88 The Last of Sheila 1973 Herbert Ross IMDb 89 D.O.A. 1950 Rudolph Maté IMDb 90 Blue Velvet 1986 David Lynch IMDb 91 Village of the Damned 1960 Wolf Rilla IMDb 92 The Usual Suspects 1995 Bryan Singer IMDb 93 House of Wax 1953 Andre De Toth IMDb 94 Gaslight 1944 George Cukor IMDb 95 Niagara 1953 Henry Hathaway IMDb 96 The Cat and the Canary 1939 Elliott Nugent IMDb 97 Winter Kills 1979 William Richert IMDb 98 Homicidal 1961 William Castle IMDb 99 The Blair Witch Project 1999 Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez IMDb 100 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 1920 Robert Wiene IMDb

Last update: 18th August, 2025