20 Mind Blowing Conspiracy Movies You Must Watch

6. The Parallax View

Not in quite some time has a movie been released more pertinently to the time period and mood that it is reflecting: While America wallowed in the aftermath of Nixon fucking with them and the subsequent Watergate scandal where he fucked with them a little bit more and the country tried to recover from the Vietnam war, Alan J. Pakula delivered one of the best cinematic studies in paranoid fears becoming very real, deadly facts in the greatest political conspiracy flick of the 70s. When a popular US senator is shot dead by a waiter at the Seattle Space Needle three years previously, Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), a television reporter, goes to dishevelled and poorly regarded hack journalist Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), frightened for her life. According to her, any and all witnesses to the death of the senator three years ago have been systematically killed in murders dressed up as supposed accidents and she believes she is next in line. Frady discounts her fears as irrational paranoia, but after her alleged suicide, doubt starts to creep into his mind. Against the better judgement of his weary editor, Edgar Rintels (Hume Cronyn), he starts investigating the story that she originally brought to him and uncovers, in the process, a huge conspiracy involving the mysterious €˜Parallax Corporation€™, a secret company that recruits assassins to eliminate troublemakers on their €œlist€ by way of mind-control and subversive indoctrination (represented in the film€™s key moment by an expertly edited €˜induction€™ video that all recruits are shown by Parallax.) Like The Manchurian Candidate, the film was delayed in its release and eventually snuck out in June of 1974 only to find critics and audiences embraced the film as a deliberate attempt to offer some sort of explanation for the JFK assassination through historical parallels (the photographs that imply a second gunman at Dallas that day; the fact that many of the assassination witnesses died mysteriously in the immediate years after 1963).