10 TERRIFYING Made-For-TV Horror Movies

Steven Spielberg's first crack in the directors chair led a million film historians to wonder what the true meaning of Duel really is. The slow inevitability of mechanisation? Male emancipation? The decline of ruralism? Or perhaps it's just about one man having a really bad day.

In classic Spielbergian everyman characterisation, Dennis Weaver's David Mann is the fish out of water, the ordinary bloke who gets in way over his head when returning home via the long coastal Californian highway, miles of sprawling desert wasteland and forgotten truck stops. He impatiently overtakes a rust bucket truck, only to be relentlessly pursued by one man seemingly hell bent on killing him for the traffic slight.

The writer Richard Matheson, perhaps the most prolific of American screenplay writers around the middle of the last century, keeps the plot sublimely taught. No emotional backstory, no explanation, just pursuit, panic and paranoia. Spielberg wisely shoots the entire film from Mann's POV, with an increasingly disturbed internal monologue, exactly how we would live the experience for real.

All the Spielberg signature traits show up - extreme facial close ups, tight pacing and an uncanny knack for raising the tension that had not been seen as effectively since Hitchcock ruined showers the world over. Of course, this director's greatest trick was still up his sleeve - Duel is many things but a preamble to Jaws is certainly one obvious quality. Televisual nightmares don't often get any better or more effective than this.