Top 10 movie thrillers to put you on the edge of your seat

A good thriller, done right, gets the adrenaline racing as fast as any horror film. These 10 pulse-pounding thrillers will have you clawing at your armrest in anticipation of what happens next. Note: This could have easily been a top 10 list of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films, but we’ve limited ourselves to two.

Things To Do app: Get the best in events, dining and travel right on your device

10. 'Cape Fear' (1962)

The 1991 Martin Scorsese remake is also quite good, but the original has something it can’t possibly match: Robert Mitchum at his villainous best. He plays Max Cady, an ex-convict who tracks down and terrorizes the lawyer, Sam Bowden, (Gregory Peck) who sent him to jail for rape. Desperate to protect his family from the madman, Bowden takes his family to a houseboat on Cape Fear, where Cady’s psychosexual terrorizing reaches a fever pitch – and there is no escape.

9. 'Seven' (1995)

David Fincher delivered one of the darkest mainstream films to ever make bank at the box office with this grim and grimy psychological thriller about a pair of detectives — veteran Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and his young, impulsive protege, Mills (Brad Pitt) — hunting down a serial killer with a trail of victims like a deranged sermon, each murdered in a uniquely grotesque fashion to complement one of the seven deadly sins. It's steeped in gloom, brilliantly staged in an unidentified urban dystopia so oppressive it seems like optimism when Somerset concludes, "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part."

8. 'Oldboy' (2003)

The original South Korean thriller, released in 2003, is pure, unhinged insanity — the kind that, when done right, can only work once. And it only did. A man is held captive, without explanation, by an unknown captor for 15 years, then released to unravel the mystery, setting him on a desperate, deranged path that involves beating people to death with hammers and leads to an even more gruesome conclusion.

7. 'Memento' (2000)

This twisty neo-noir psychological thriller remains Guy Pearce's finest moment. And despite the astronomical budgets and box-office returns of all those Batman films and "Inception," it's still director Christopher Nolan's finest moment, too. Pearce stars as Leonard, a man suffering from such extreme short-term memory loss that he can only make it through each day by maintaining a note-keeping system. The story is told in reverse-chronological order, so we know Leonard already has killed the man who raped and murdered his wife. But by working its way back to the beginning, this brilliantly edited puzzle reveals just how unreliable a narrator Leonard is.

6. 'Psycho' (1960)

Alfred Hitchcock made a handful of instant classics during his storied career, but none shattered social norms and filmmaking possibilities as definitively as "Psycho." It's shocking in the context of the filmmaking era from which it emerged, flouting a rigid Production Code with implications of sex, flirtations with nudity and as graphic a murder scene as could be depicted through genius editing. Brilliant for its time, yes, but brilliant still as a psychological portrait of madness.

5. 'No Country for Old Men' (2007)

Anton Chigurh was inducted to the hall of infamy the second the credits started to roll on this best-picture-winning Coen brothers film. Chigurh was nightmared into existence in the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel — one that doesn’t feature any dead babies, making it one of his more chipper books! — as a psychopathic hit man hired to recover a stolen satchel of drug money from a deal gone wrong. If there’s anything worse than a crazy man armed with a cattle gun, it’s one with a twisted moral code and a mod Prince Valiant haircut. Javier Bardem took home an Oscar for his otherworldly portrayal.

MORE AZCENTRAL ON SOCIAL: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest

4. 'Mulholland Drive' (2001)

David Lynch is America's best horror-film director, although he isn't typically labeled as such. But many of his utterly uncategorizable movies are nightmares you both want to desperately wake from and never want to end. This Hollywood-set fever dream has an amnesiac and a wannabe actress (Laura Harring and Naomi Watts) plumbing the depths of Hollywood's dark side to solve a murder. But the deepening mystery is much less romantic than its Tinseltown trappings, and Lynch pulls back the layers to reveal a true Hollywood tragedy.

3. 'The Silence of the Lambs' (1991)

Evil genius is a category all its own, and the halls of cinematic infamy are crammed to the rafters with lasers, genetic engineering gone wrong and various doomsday devices. But few minds are keener — or as twisted — as that of Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a cannibalistic serial killer who, from his high-security cell, helps FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) profile a serial killer on the loose who skins his female victims. He'd be the best detective ever if he didn't have such a taste for liver, fava beans and a nice chianti.

2. 'Rear Window' (1954) 

The summer heat is brutal and everyone has their windows open in New York, where Jimmy Stewart — wheelchair bound after breaking his leg — entertains himself with a harmless bit of voyeurism, spying through binoculars on his neighbors in the apartment building across the way (why he can't find another way to entertain himself with Grace Kelly in the room is a mystery unto itself). Soon Stewart is convinced that one of the neighbors has offed his wife, and he and Kelly team up to find the evidence. It all builds up to one of the most nail-biting climaxes of Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre — and that's really saying something.

1. 'The Third Man' (1949)

It’s not hyperbole to call this a perfect film. Shot on site in a bomb-ravaged post-war Vienna that’s as alive as any character in the film, the Graham Greene-written story follows American Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a sharp-witted, luckless writer of pulp westerns as he travels to visit his childhood friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to be told that he’s dead – but a deadly black-market penicillin business suggests otherwise. “The Third Man” overflows with unforgettable images and iconic details, from the canted camera angles and all-zither score to Lime’s famous Ferris wheel speech on the merits of the cuckoo clock. Flawless from beginning to end, it’s a pure, undiluted hit of movie magic.

Reach the reporter at bvandenburgh@gannett.com or 602-444-8371. Twitter.com/BabsVan.