Movies That'll Leave You Feeling Paranoid For Days

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert and better than anyone else at listening to the private conversations of people who'd rather not be heard. But even though he insists that all he does is listen and pass on what he hears, his work has previously led to the deaths of those he's listened to. After he's hired to record a conversation between a couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) in a crowded park, he begins to suspect that his work has once again become deadly serious. Caul is a man who's so protective of his own privacy that he barely lets himself have a life, and, as the movie's events escalate, it still seems likely that he's being spied on and manipulated. Director Francis Ford Coppola excels at creating a slow and steady buildup of tension, which makes The Conversation a movie that will stick with you long after you see it.

Something is coming for you. It knows what you did, and it's always walking toward you at a steady pace. But the really scary thing is that it can look like anyone. It could be someone you know, a random face in the crowd, or something terrifying. Once it reaches you, it's already too late...you're dead. That's the premise of It Follows, a horror film by David Robert Mitchell, starring Maika Monroe as the girl who's being followed. The film depicts a curse which makes its bearer increasingly paranoid. Staying away from crowds, avoiding rooms with only one door, always being on the move. Even knowing rationally that this creature does not exist, it's hard to look at the people around you in public after seeing it and not wondering if they're at all what they seem.

The Matrix, a breakthrough action film from the Wachowski siblings, starts out in a world that looks very much like the real world did at the time of its release in 1999. But Neo (Keanu Reeves) soon learns that the whole thing is a simulation. The world has long since been conquered by machines, and they're keeping humans trapped in this digitized mental projection so they can use their bodies like batteries. The movie explains things like déjà vu and the tendency of many other meats to "taste like chicken" as shortcomings of the Matrix that don't reflect the real world. But those are phenomena that we experience in real life. So are we all in the Matrix? A surprising number of intelligent people seem to think we might be. After all, it would be nearly impossible to tell from the inside. That's what makes The Matrix so compelling.

Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) is a good cop and a good man. True, he might be a little bit intolerant of things that conflict with his Christian beliefs, but in 1973 Scotland that's hardly considered a flaw. So when Howie gets a letter from a secluded island village saying that a young girl has gone missing, he soon makes his way there to investigate. Once there, everyone claims she never existed, and he's watched by strange eyes wherever he goes. When he realizes that the people of Summerisle practice an ancient pagan religion, he suspects that the girl is a sacrifice to those gods. However, even when Howie thinks he's getting to the bottom of things, he never really has a clue. The girl is perfectly safe—she was merely bait to lure him there. Sergeant Howie is the intended sacrifice, and every moment since he received the letter has been planned out by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) to manipulate him into position to be burned inside a giant wicker effigy. He thought he was smarter than the pagans, but he was their puppet all along. And that's what he's left thinking about as he burns to death while they sing. There have been attempts to remake The Wicker Man, but nothing compares to the paranoia of Robin Hardy's original film.

The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula, is perhaps the most paranoid of the post-Watergate American conspiracy thrillers. It stars Warren Beatty as Joseph Frady, a reporter who begins investigating a series of deaths and discovers that the shadowy Parallax Corporation is in the business of political assassination (and who knows what else). Frady never really stands a chance, because ultimately this film tells a story about how the lives of regular citizens are meaningless to the powerful institutions that shape politics and history. Anyone you encounter might be a pawn of these powers, but even scarier is the realization that you might be their pawn too.

Human conspiracies can get pretty scary, but a contagious disease can be far more terrifying. A virus doesn't make plans. It doesn't care who you are or whether or not you stand in its way. All it does is reproduce and infect as many living bodies as it can. That's what makes Contagion, a 2011 film from Steven Soderbergh, so creepy. As a new hybrid virus spreads across the Earth and kills millions, people react in all sorts of ways. But actually avoiding the deadly disease seems nearly impossible. Even when a doctor discovers a vaccine, there's no time to give it to everyone who needs it. Many of the films on this list are about the idea that any person you meet on the street might secretly mean you harm. The thing about an epidemic, like the one in Contagion, is that the person on the street might be friendly and sincere and not mean you any harm at all. However, if they're a carrier, and they touch you or just breathe on you, they might kill you just the same.