10 Horror Movies Where You Don't See The Monster
4. Duel
It's certainly possible to take Steven Spielberg's iconic directorial debut at face value, that it's simply a tale of a man (Dennis Weaver) being relentlessly pursued by the anonymous driver of a rusted-out tanker truck.
Yet Spielberg makes such great pains to conceal the identity of the trucker's actor, Carey Loftin, by only showing his arms and boots that it's easy to accept there's something altogether more heightened going on here.
This is bolstered by the fact that when Weaver's protagonist David Mann manages to trick the trucker into driving off a cliff at film's end, a bestial roar is heard which couldn't have been produced by either the driver or the truck.
For literally 50 years, fans have speculated that either the driver or the truck itself harbours some demonic properties.
This is only accentuated by Spielberg's ruthless minimalism, never allowing us to get a clear fix on the driver, an approach that also paid out dividends in 1975's Jaws, where malfunctioning shark props forced the director to focus his suspense on the power of the unseen.