15 Best Movie Thrillers From The 1980s
The decade that taste forgot had a good line in thrillers - which was best?
The thriller genre is both simple and difficult to define. At its core, it is a film which thrills you, something high octane, or replete with the kind of tension which locks you to your seat.
But the genre can so easily bleed into other styles - after all, the majority of films are looking to elicit something like a thrill from its audience. There are many hybrids - action-thriller, horror-thriller, the lesser spotted weepie-thriller.
For the purposes of this list, we’ve omitted anything that skews too hard towards the other side of the hyphen - so, no Die Hard, no The Thing. Fine films both, but not fit for the purposes of the list.
The ‘80s produced some of the greatest thrillers the genre has ever known. Many of them are heavily informed by the time in which they were created, and accordingly feature a great deal of steamy sex, loose morals, and less charmingly rather dated depictions of women.
The best of them transcend the Me Decade, though, and remain a lesson in how things should be done.
15. Mississippi Burning
It’s worth noting up top that the cavalier attitude the filmmakers took towards a true story is on the naughty side to say the least. The real life murder of three civil rights activists was the inspiration for this (undeniably well meaning) film, but the artistic license taken drew accusations of carelessness and perpetuating the White Saviour myth.
That aside, Mississippi Burning is a weighty and often startling depiction of racist violence, bolstered particularly by strong performances from Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, and Frances McDormand.
Director Alan Parker has never been one to shy away from the horrors of violence, and he pulls no punches here. It’s a film about murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan, so it was never going to be an easy watch, but some of the content here is truly not for the faint hearted.
Inaccuracies aside, Mississippi Burning achieves its purpose well - it’s an angry film with an incredibly serious point to be made. As a polemic, it’s passionate if slightly sloppy; as a socially motivated thriller, it holds up well, primarily thanks to its stars.