Political Conspiracy Movies To Make You Even More Paranoid

We live in an era of conspiracy theories, in which it is increasingly rare for people to take anything at face value. Life is tough enough, so when we are confronted with a truth that is too disappointing, too heartbreaking, or just too unbelievable (according to our own personal belief system), we look for a more satisfying, and often comforting, answer, in our own alternate version of the truth.

Hollywood has known about this tendency for a long time, and a good conspiracy thriller — especially the political kind — has often been a sure bet with audiences. But just as conspiracy theories in real life can lead people down some pretty bizarre rabbit holes, movies about them can sometimes lead us to question everything we thought we knew about the world and how it works.

If you're already worried about shadow governments, techno-dictators, and mass hypnosis, the films we lay out here aren't exactly going to reassure you. It's true that some of them end on more optimistic notes than others, but almost none of them will set your mind at ease about what may or may not be going on every day behind the scenes of history. If you're not paranoid already, a marathon of these movies may just do the trick. These are the most terrifying, thought-provoking, and unsettling conspiracy movies around.

The original 1962 film of this name, directed by John Frankenheimer, is the quintessential example of its genre — so much so that the term "Manchurian candidate" has become part of the vernacular. The film, based on the novel by Richard Condon, stars Frank Sinatra as Bennett Marco, a Korean War vet and Army Intelligence officer who starts to realize that all is not well with his platoon mate, a supposed war hero named Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey).

Marco uncovers a plot that involves Shaw's scheming, depraved mother (Angela Lansbury), a devastating mind control technique, and a communist plan to install a dictatorship in the U.S., all of it centered around Shaw and his family. Frankenheimer, a master of using the camera to take us inside the heads of his psychologically compromised characters, is at the top of his game, even using an out of focus shot to get the best performance from the famously uneven Sinatra.

This gripping classic was remade in 2004 with an updated storyline that replaces the communists with an evil corporation, starring Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber, and Meryl Streep. It's good, but not as surreal as the original, although the cast — especially Streep — were cited for their work.

Many conspiracy theories center around the idea of shocking government coups. This 1969 classic shows you how it's done, step by brutal step. The sad part is, it's rooted in true events: Although it's based on a novel, Vassilis Vassilikos' Z, the film, like its source material, is a thinly fictionalized account of the 1963 assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis and the events that followed. Director Costa-Gavras, himself of Greek descent, also offers a cry of outrage against the far-right military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974, making this very film a dangerous act of resistance.

The first film to ever be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film by the Academy Awards, Z follows the chain of cataclysmic actions that lead to assassinations, a crackdown on the press, an overthrow of the elected government by the military, and the banning of art, music and literature. The film is as chaotic and kaleidoscopic as a real-life scenario of this magnitude might be, and is a firm warning that it could happen anytime, anywhere. For a grim double feature, see also Costa-Gavras' 1982 film Missing, in which Jack Lemmon searches for his vanished son in Chile following the rise of a military dictatorship.

Although it was directed by Sydney Pollack and not Alan J. Pakula, Three Days of the Condor is often thought of as part of the same string of conspiracy thrillers that the latter filmmaker made, including The Parallax View, Klute and All the President's Men. It also helps that Redford starred in two of them, including Condor, where he plays an unassuming CIA researcher named Joe Turner. When he comes back from lunch one day to find everyone in his office dead, Joe goes on the run, but soon discovers that it may be his employer that is actually out to get him.

Although Pollack and Redford were accused of capitalizing on real-life revelations about CIA "dirty tricks," Pollack insisted that he and Redford simply wanted to make a spy movie. And they did indeed make a hell of a spy movie, full of tension and dread. But Three Days of the Condor, with its bland New York City locations and bleak atmosphere, still manages to touch on real-life fears about the reach of our government and how far it might go to suppress the truth. The final scene with Cliff Robertson as a deputy CIA director will leave you profoundly disturbed.

James Brolin, Sam Waterston and, uh, O.J. Simpson play the first three astronauts to attempt a manned NASA mission to Mars in this 1978 thriller from director Peter Hyams. The journey is successful — or at least that's what the public is led to believe. Even though the spacecraft is launched, the men are not aboard, and the whole landing on the red planet is faked inside a TV studio. But when the ship blows up on its return trip, the astronauts realize that they are presumably dead as well — which leaves both them and NASA in a tricky position.

Capricorn One doesn't quite hold up in terms of its plausibility, even with Elliott Gould as an intrepid reporter who teases out the conspiracy. But the movie isn't so much about the realism of faking a landing on Mars as it is about the overall implications of it: How do we know that anything is real? After all, some folks believe that Stanley Kubrick filmed a fake moon landing for the U.S. government. Capricorn One is a fun thriller, and though it's more disposable than other entries on this list, you can't shake off an uneasy undercurrent of paranoia after you watch it.

Oliver Stone's epic JFK is the mother of all conspiracy movies, taking one of the most significant events of the 1960s, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and spinning it into a kaleidoscopic alternate history of that turbulent decade. The sheer scope of the conspiracy that Stone imagines is breathtaking. During one central sequence, in which an unnamed insider (Donald Sutherland) explains the grand set-up to a stunned Kevin Costner, you're held tight both by the audaciousness of the plan and by Stone's commitment to spelling it out.

Costner plays New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, an archetypal American who finds himself through the looking glass as he learns that everything he believed about his country is wrong. Stone's techniques — multiple film stocks, subliminal edits, newsreel and original footage mashed up in a torrent of images — mirrors the disorientation that Garrison feels as he plunges deeper into the seemingly bottomless morass of the plot to kill Kennedy. But while your mileage may vary in terms of how much of it you believe, the lesson of Stone's film is resoundingly clear: Never take anything at face value and never trust without verification. JFK started a cultural debate that's still going on.

Most of this list is comprised of some pretty grim films. So let's lighten the mood with Wag the Dog, a 1997 black comedy from director Barry Levinson that, in its own absurdist way, foretold news headlines that surfaced a month after it came out. To distract from a presidential sex scandal just weeks before the election, political consultant Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) hires Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) to concoct a fake war with Albania, complete with battle footage, orphans, and a theme song. It works for a while, until it doesn't, and then Brean and Motss have to take further action. 

A month after Wag the Dog came out, President Bill Clinton became embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal — a scandal during which Clinton's administration bombed Sudan, Iraq and Kosovo (right next to Albania). Coincidence? Draw your own conclusions. Hoffman allegedly based his character on legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans, although he's denied this and said it was based on his father. Either way, Hoffman is perfect in the movie, as is De Niro, and the scathing implications of this acidic satire remain as relevant as ever.