Andrew Klavan ranks thriller movies using an S-tier system, awarding Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Vertigo, along with Fritz Lang's M and Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique, top honors for their artistic merit and impact. He critiques Brian De Palma's Dress to Kill as a sleazy ripoff earning a D, while praising Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows and Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter as essential A-tier classics. Klavan recounts his failed attempt to Americanize The Vanishing after refusing to alter its ending, ultimately concluding that only Psycho, Vertigo, and Diabolique represent the pinnacle of the genre despite his occasional reluctance to rate certain films too highly. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Ranking Thriller Movies00:06:29
All right, today we're not going to do one of the painful things where I have to sit and watch TikTok videos, which I think are just taking years off my life.
But what we're going to do is we're going to rank a list of thriller movies.
Now, I didn't pick these and I haven't seen them yet.
So don't write in and say, how could you have left off that?
You know, that whatever movie you feel was left off.
That's the wrong question.
The wrong question is, when are you going to get, when am I going to get a real life and do something worthwhile for society?
And the answer to that is probably never.
So we're going to rank a list of thriller movies.
This is the S-tier ranking system, which was created by somebody who had nothing else to do.
S means superb or super or spectacular or whatever it means.
S-A-B-C-D.
And after that, I don't know the alphabet after that, so it doesn't matter.
All right, let's go.
Thriller movies, Psycho by 1960, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
A great movie.
It is a great, great S movie.
It's both frightening and has, of course, a spectacular mystery.
But even after you know the mystery, even after the fear wears off, it is a deeply sorrowful.
And a meaningful movie.
And so that's a very hard thing to pull off, and Hitchcock pulled it off.
Gaslight, 1944, directed by George Kuecher.
This is based on a play called Angel Street, I think.
And it's where we get the term gaslight because the guy is fiddling with the gaslights to convince his wife she's mad.
The movie is okay.
The movie is good.
It's got Boye, Charles Boye, and Ingrid Bergman in it, and they're very good, and it's very compelling, but it's not a great movie.
We'll call it a B. Dress to Kill, 1980, directed by Brian De Palma.
I just rewatched that while I was writing Kingdom of Cain.
It's a Hitchcock ripoff, which Brian De Palma did a lot of and got these great reviews for them.
And I just think that they're ripoffs.
I think this is one of the sleazyest, stinkiest movies ever.
I think it's a sleazy, bad movie.
Every scene in it is ripped off.
It's supposed to be an homage, but I just think it's garbage.
So we'll give it a D.
I really think it's bad.
Cape Fear, 1991, this is directed by Martin Scorsese.
This is a remake of a much better movie with Robert Mitchum.
But I thought this was good.
I thought the changes in it were unnecessary, and I don't want to go into it too much, but I'll give it a B-, I think.
Deliverance.
You know, that's 1972, directed by John Borman.
Now, that's a really interesting movie.
It's got some upsetting scenes in it.
I haven't seen it since 1972.
I saw it when it came out.
I found it good.
I found it a good, strong movie, but I don't know if it's dated, and it has a great performance by Burt Reynolds in it.
John Voigt is also terrific in it.
I'll give it a B on that one.
Black Swan, Natalie Portman, as a ballerina, right?
By Darren Aronofsky.
I like that.
Yeah, I'll give it a B.
That was good.
Elevator to the Gallows, directed by Louis Malle, 1958.
That is an A movie.
It's dated a little bit.
It's obviously foreign, but it's still pretty good.
It's an A film.
Night of the Hunter, 1955, directed by Charles Lawton, our great actor.
Also, a Robert Mitchum film.
Everybody loves that movie and thinks it's a classic.
I really, really like it.
And I just have to say, I do not think it's a great movie, but I think it is a really compelling movie.
And it's got some iconic stuff in it.
Robert Mitchum with his hands with good and evil on it, wrestling with each other.
And Shelley Winters is terrific in it.
I'm going to give that an A.
It doesn't quite make.
I'm trying to avoid great inflation on these, so I'll give it an A.
I don't think it's quite the S movie people think it is.
The Vanishing, 1988.
This is the original Dr. George Sluzer, director George Sluzer.
Man, it's a good movie.
It's a little bit long, a little bit slow, but it is a good, spooky, scary movie.
I was called in to ask if I wanted to write the American version of it, and I said, Yes, I'll write it if you promise not to change the ending.
They said, Absolutely not.
And they didn't hire me, and they made it, and they totally changed the ending.
It was garbage.
But the original is really spooky.
I'm going to give that an A.
I think that is a really, really good movie.
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Diabolique, one of my favorite films.
Diabolique, directed by Henry Georges Clouseau, nineteen fifty five.
This is what inspired Hitchcock to make Psycho because he saw a small black and white film and he never won.
Hitchcock never felt he had all the popularity, but he never felt he got the respect.
He never got an Oscar until much later in life.
He never felt he got the respect.
And when Diabolique came out, Clouseau was just lauded to the skies.
And what was aggravating for Hitchcock is they called him the French Hitchcock and they gave him much more respect as an artist.
I love Diabolique.
The Diabolique Story00:04:39
The first time I saw that film as a kid, I was 12 years old.
Literally, and I mean literally, on the edge of my seat.
It was so good.
I've seen it maybe three times since, which is not something I do often.
That is an S film.
That is a great, great movie.
And also inspired the S film Psycho.
Blow Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
I'm going to give that an S film a little bit reluctantly.
And the only reason I'm a little bit reluctant is it does date, but it is so iconic and it captured the time.
You know, Britain in the 60s, you know, where London was the hippest place on earth.
It captured it and it's Its story, which is so slowly drawn out, is so good.
And it's.
Talk about iconic.
That's iconic.
I'm going to give that an S. Blowout is Brian De Palma ripping it off and ripping off every other movie.
I'll give that a B because it's actually pretty good.
But it's.
But it's, you know, it's just a ripoff of Blowout.
Don't Say a Word, based on my novel.
How can I say this?
Don't Say a Word was a big hit.
It was the first hit after 9 11.
It was not written by me.
It was based on my novel.
A lot of times people introduce me and they say, I wrote these.
Movies, but I didn't.
I wrote the first script of it, which gave me a Hollywood career because everybody wanted to hire me because the script was so good.
And then they threw the script out.
Partly my fault because I didn't know anything about Hollywood and they wanted to make some minor changes.
And I thought, don't change my work, but you know, I'm the writer.
But don't say a word is a good film.
It's suspenseful, it's entertaining.
But read the book.
Read the book because the end of the book, the last 30 pages of the book, are spectacular.
A lot of dirty words in the book, by the way.
I warn you about that.
But the book is really suspenseful and the last 30 pages are terrific and they change the ending.
I couldn't believe they did.
The ending is fine.
But the film is a B.
It's a good film, good solid film.
And it was a big hit and it was number one on video forever.
Blue Velvet. directed by David Lynch.
I recently rewatched that film and I'm not a big Lynch fan.
A lot of people love Lynch.
He's always a little too weird for me.
But Blue Velvet, I saw Blue Velvet after six months of not seeing a movie and being in a theater.
I was so wrapped up in it.
It's a little bit goofy, but I'll give it a B plus because it's got some wonderful stuff in it.
It was back in the day when people were shocked to find that there was sexuality, you know, there could be violence with sexuality.
But I'll give it a B.
It's a good movie.
Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock, another S film.
Maybe Hitchcock's greatest film, certainly my favorite of his films.
It is a work of art.
It is so beautiful to look at.
It goes for a half an hour with no dialogue.
I'm making up the time, but it feels like about half an hour.
The dialogue is so tense, so terse.
The story is, you know, a thriller story, so it's a little bit absurd, but it is meaningful.
It is deeply, deeply meaningful.
And the only thing that keeps it from being maybe the greatest movie of all time is that Hitchcock was just in love with Grace Kelly.
I was in love with Grace Kelly.
And she got married to the prince and left and he never forgave her and he always wanted to replace her to show her that he didn't need her, but he did need her.
Kim Novak, who is lovely and is kind of perfect in the role she plays, is still not Grace Kelly, who would have been the exact right person for it.
But other than that, S film, one of the greatest films ever made.
M by director Fritz Lang.
People pick on this because it's tough.
but I think it's an S film.
I think it's a great film.
It's a film about a child molester, you know, but it's 1931, so you're not seeing anything, but I think it's a great, stirring, well-directed film.
Basic Instinct by Paul Verhoeven.
I am not a fan of this film.
I think it's pretty trashy.
It has the famous scene, you know, of the girl crossing her legs, but I'm not a fan of it.
I think the dialogue sucks.
I think that the plot is stolen from Sea of Love with Al Pacino.
And I never thought much of it, but it's iconic in some ways in the worst possible way.
It's so blunt, and I don't know.
I just don't like it.
I'd give it a C.
And I got to stop.
So I will stop.
I'll stop on a C, but you got a couple of S's in there, and I'm keeping the grades from getting inflated.
And some of those are just great films.
Thrillers, the movies are made for thrillers, and certainly Vertigo, Psycho, and Diabolique.
Great, great, great films.
Worth seeing if you haven't seen them.
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