10 Movies That Made New York City Look Like The Worst Place In The World

4. Summer Of Sam (1999)

Spike Lee depicts an unsettled neighborhood in The Bronx in Summer Of Sam - a tale about a killer terrorising this area of NYC to the point where tension bubbles over into wild panic. In a similar vein to another one of his classic NYC-set dramas Do The Right Thing, Lee's Summer Of Sam slowly escalates as the heat in the neighborhood grows unbearable, with citizens on edge as the murderer continues to slay his way across the city. New York adopts the appearance of a twisted, panic-stricken place on the edge in Summer Of Sam, reaching the point where the serial killer is effectively controlling everybody through his ability to spread mass hysteria across the Bronx. Lee conveys 1970's NYC as an increasingly paranoid and unstable environment, sporadically sliced between violent images of killings and murder scenes. It's pretty horrid place to look at.