Blind Terror, aka See No Evil (1971)
This is one of the purest suspense exercises in cinema history. The recently blinded Sarah (Mia Farrow) arrives at her aunt’s country house, which she knows intimately, just after a homicidal maniac who wears sinister cowboy boots has murdered the entire household. At first, the heroine wanders unconcerned among corpses … but when she becomes aware of the danger she’s in, she puts her knowledge of the place to her advantage to evade the relentless killer. Scripted by Brian Clemens, a master of the simple scary situation, and expertly directed by the underrated Richard Fleischer.
Cash on Demand (1961)
A change-of-pace thriller from Hammer Films, this is also a perfect Christmas movie. On 23 December, Scrooge-ish bank manager Fordyce (Peter Cushing) is visited by bluff gent Hepburn (André Morell), who claims he has kidnapped Fordyce’s family and will electrocute them unless Fordyce helps him rob the bank. Having only just nagged and tyrannised his staff into efficiency, Fordyce must agonisingly try to get past security arrangements he has forced them to adopt. It’s a great, simple situation but also shows how suspense can arise from performances with Morell suavely turning the screw on Cushing.
The Hurt Locker (2008)
Though remembered as an Oscar-winning serious film about the Iraq war, Kathryn Bigelow’s film is also the best entry in the comparatively small field of the “red-wire-no-the-blue-wire” bomb disposal movies. Driven hero Jeremy Renner gets pliers-to-detonator close with a succession of improvised explosive devices. It opens with a stunning sequence as the hero’s predecessor (Guy Pearce), wearing what looks like a space suit, approaches a makeshift bomb and makes the wrong move. This gets him blown to specks in ultra slow-motion … establishing that anyone might die at any moment, and making all subsequent missions – even with dud bombs – pulse-raising.
Duel (1971)
Originally made for TV, this streamlined, austere roadcummonster movie – based on a paranoid short story by Richard Matheson – remains the most perfectly achieved of Steven Spielberg’s films. Driving across California, ordinary motorist Dave Mann (Dennis Weaver) incurs the wrath of a filthy petrol tanker driven by a psychopath (like the killer in Blind Terror, seen only as a pair of cowboy boots). A game of mutual overtaking and disrespectful gestures turns deadly as the dinosaur-like tanker repeatedly tries to crush Mann’s fragile coupe, and the desperate motorist finds no one will believe his claims that the monster is after him.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is encouraged to consult with imprisoned serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in an attempt to catch an at-large murderer. Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel set the tone for innumerable follow-ups and spin-offs. It delivers conversational suspense in the barbed exchanges between plucky heroine and plausible monster, but its real chills come when Clarice gets out in the field, thinking she’s just interviewing a minor witness, and falls into the nightmarish lair of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), blundering around his cellar of horrors in the dark while he spies on her with night-vision glasses.
Fear is the Key (1972)
One of many early 1970s films based on Alistair MacLean thrillers, this has a complicated plot – resourceful John Talbot (Barry Newman) poses as a criminal in order to infiltrate the mob he holds responsible for the death of his family – but director Michael Tuchner is more enthused by action and suspense sequences. The first third of the film is a sustained car chase through varied Louisiana terrain which might just outdo the better-known sequences in Bullitt or The French Connection – one of the driver/stunt arrangers is Carey Loftin, the Duel trucker. Also memorable: a finale is an overpressurised diving bell.
Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) (1957)
Suspense thrillers often fall into “the one where …” category of cinema. Louis Malle’s early hit is “the one where the murderer gets stuck in the lift”. Ex-soldier Julien (Maurice Ronet) kills his mistress’s war profiteer husband and makes it look like suicide, but remembers a vital clue and nips back into the dead man’s office block to retrieve it … only for the power to go out while he’s in the lift. Parallel stories follow Julien’s stolen car, his waiting mistress (Jeanne Moreau) and the cops on the case, but the unforgettable stuff is his struggle to escape the cage.
North by Northwest (1959)
Mistaken for a non-existent spy, ad man Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is sought by enemy agents and the authorities, framed for murder and chased across the map. Alfred Hitchcock, “the master of suspense”, is in playful mood here and puts the game, grey-flannelled Grant through a non-stop ordeal – filled up with booze and put in a brakeless car on twisty clifftop roads, making an embarrassing scene at an auction to evade assassins, stranded in the middle of nowhere and harried by a crop-spraying biplane, meeting a duplicitous blonde (Eva Marie Saint) on a train, and hanging off the presidential faces of Mount Rushmore.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
How do you make a suspense movie when the world knows the ending? Kathryn Bigelow follows the lengthy process of locating 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and then putting into action a plan to take him off the board with a lightning assassination raid. With CIA analyst Jessica Chastain sweating at a desk and in the field, struggling with the minutiae of intelligence reports and tip-offs, it works hard to convey the routine tensions of the war on terror, with several shock departures – then ramps up the action and tightens the screws with the climactic night-attack on bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.
Sleuth (1972)
Almost free of onscreen violence, this is a conversational suspense movie based on Anthony Shaffer’s fiendish stage thriller. Whodunnit writer Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier) invites hairdresser Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), his wife’s lover, to his puzzle-filled mansion for a session of cruel game-play and – perhaps – murder. And, in Act Two, things get even tricksier as Inspector Doppler (Alec Cawthorne) shows up to uncover secrets. Joseph L Mankiewicz, a director known for acidic witty banter, and two great, contrasting performers bring out every nuance of Shaffer’s constantly surprising script as onion-layers of illusion – real murders behind fake robberies? – are peeled away.
