This October, Variety has enlisted some our favorite spooky content creators to share their scary movie essentials. Chloe Okuno, whose film “Watcher“ is one of the best horror movies of the year, shared her picks for the best paranoid thrillers of all time.
One of the most primal fears is someone watching every move you make, quietly invading your privacy as they prepare to strike. This terror comes to vivid life in “Watcher,” the feature debut from director Chloe Okuno, which impressed and terrified audiences at this year’s Sundance Film Festival before heading to horror streamer Shudder. Scream queen Maika Monroe stars as an expat who is convinced she’s being watched by someone across from her Bucharest apartment complex. The actress’s performance recalls the emotional complexity of her breakout role in 2014’s “It Follows.”
Okuno, who also wrote “Watcher,” was the perfect person to help curate Variety’s list of the best paranoid thrillers of all time. She described why the genre is a source of inspiration to her.
“All of these picks are pretty different,” Okuno said. “Especially for ‘Watcher,’ but for any movie, what draws me to the paranoia genre is the fact that, maybe more so than any other genre, you’re using the tools that you have as a filmmaker to show the audience what the interiority of your character is. Every movie does that to some extent, but that tends to come across more in these movies, not so much through dialogue, but music and cinematography and sound. You’re able to paint this picture of what’s going on inside someone and make it tense and scary. Every filmmaker approaches it so differently.”