This article was originally published on November 4, 2020. Just in case you weren’t feeling anxious (and possibly paranoid) enough ahead of the 2024 presidential election, we’ve updated the list to include ten more conspiracy-driven movies.
In his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,†historian Richard Hofstadter identified a “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy†that served as a recurring pattern in American history (though not exclusively in American history). Writing in 1964, Hofstadter connected the dots between eruptions of panic about the Illuminati and Freemasonry through anti-Catholic conspiracy theories up to the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Writing today, Hofstadter would have have little trouble extending that line, from the Kennedy assassination theories that started to crop up immediately after the president’s death the previous November through internet-fueled conspiratorial thinking that has become a prominent part of the 2020 presidential election thanks to QAnon.
Movies have had a complex relationship with conspiracy theories. Misleading — and often outright false — documentaries have been used to push everything from 9/11 conspiracy theories to COVID-19 disinformation to alleged UFO cover-ups to whatever nonsense Dinesh D’Souza is trying to push on any given day. Yet the same elements that can make for irresponsible journalism — and conspiracy theories have a tendency to fall apart upon close examination — can prove irresistible to storytellers. The sense that we live in a world filled with dark forces and sinister plots can be queasily intoxicating. That sense can also spill into films not explicitly about a conspiracy theory. We’ve included a few of those, too. For ranking purposes, they fall a little lower on the list. (A certain Spielberg film would rank higher on a list of science-fiction films, but certainly earns a place here anyway.)
What might not literally be accurate can still be metaphorically true. Here’s Hofstadter again: “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.†In the right hands, conspiracy theory–inspired movies tap into a deeper sense of unease and distrust. They can also feed into it. Would our distrust of the government have deepened quite as intensely after Watergate were it not for the Watergate-inspired films that followed it? We may never know. But we can explore the question via some compelling films inspired by the deepest, darkest pockets of political discourse.
25.
Soylent Green (1973)
Everyone knows the twist at the heart of Richard Fleischer’s adaptation of Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (If you don’t, we won’t spoil it here.) The climactic revelation is so powerful it sometimes overshadows the movie leading up to it, in which Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston), a near-future New York detective, follows one clue after another that exposes the corruption and inequality of an overcrowded, misery-filled city. Well, it’s miserable for some. Soylent Green might be science fiction, but its world of haves using deception to live on the backs of have-nots is of a piece with other stories that use outrageous conspiracies to suggest closer-to-home truths.
24.
National Treasure (2004)
A conspiracy-theory movie for the whole family, National Treasure stars Nicolas Cage as historian–slash–professional treasure hunter Benjamin Franklin Gates, who decides to steal the Declaration of Independence. His intentions are pure, however, and allow him to discover a map on the back leading to a fortune stashed away by Freemasons, a fixture of countless conspiracy theories. But, as in the 2007 sequel National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, the conspiracy itself is pretty benign, even patriotic. The bad guys are those seeking to exploit it for their own gain, not America’s.
23.
Conspiracy Theory (1997)
It might seem weird to think of a paranoid thriller as being the product of a more innocent time, but consider this: To disseminate his wild theories about militias and the UN and the Vietnam War and whatever else crosses his mind, Conspiracy Theory protagonist Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) (1) uses a newsletter that he (2) physically mails to followers who (3) actively choose to subscribe to it. In 1997 (if not for much longer), conspiracy theorists still had to work to get their message out and then struggled to reach beyond a self-selecting bunch of the like-minded. And consider this: Gibson already had a reputation for being something of a conspiracy-addled kook in the mid-’90s (thanks to some wild ideas he had about Rhodes Scholars being tools of the New World Order), but he hadn’t yet picked up the violent, hateful, racist reputation he would develop few years later. His weirdness was considered part of his charm. Directed by Richard Donner and co-starring Julia Roberts, the film is at best mildly diverting as entertainment, but it’s an intriguing time capsule of a moment when conspiracy theories still felt marginal enough to be kind of amusing.
22.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
National Treasure served as one generation’s introduction to the idea of cover-ups and hidden truths; their predecessors got their first glimpse of that world via Steven Spielberg’s Jaws follow-up, in which a group of extraterrestrials upend the lives of a bunch of unsuspecting earthlings as they prepare to make first contact. Though ultimately optimistic, the film puts its characters — primarily an ordinary Indiana electric-company employee played by Richard Dreyfuss and a single mom played by Melinda Dillon — through the wringer as they have to deal not only with alien visitors but a government determined to take extreme measures to keep information about those visitors a secret. The real threat comes not from the skies but from anonymous suit-clad agents who do not want the truth spilling out.
21.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Like another California story a little higher on this list, Who Framed Roger Rabbit has roots in real history. No, Los Angeles never had a Toontown and flesh-and-blood humans never shared space with animated characters. But L.A. did have a functional, privately owned streetcar system put out of business by the development of a freeway system. The Pacific Electric Railway Company’s decline had many contributing factors — from changing population centers to the popularity of automobiles — but Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s depiction of a popular and effective service undone by powerful forces in search of profits repackages the historical truth in conspiracy theory form.
20.
Executive Action (1973)
It’s hard to direct anything but faint praise toward the grandaddy of all Kennedy assassination movies, but this Dalton Trumbo–scripted docudrama — taken from a story by playwright Donald Freed and Rush to Judgment author Mark Lane — remains a fascinating document of a particular moment in conspiratorial thinking. Mixing documentary footage with reenactments and dramatic scenes (not unlike a later, more famous Kennedy assassination movie), Executive Action wastes no time establishing who killed Kennedy. It opens on a secret meeting of conservative titans played by the familiar faces Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Will Geer, and others. All (eventually) agree that Kennedy has to be taken out because of his support for civil rights, his plan to end the war in Vietnam, and other perceived inconveniences. The rest of the film meticulously lays out how their plan unfolds.
Executive Action stirred up considerable controversy in the early ’70s, with many critics arguing the whole project was in poor taste. Its tastefulness remains an open question, but the film is a perfect encapsulation of how quickly conspiracy theories attached themselves to the Kennedy assassination. It also captures how Kennedy’s death came to symbolize the moment everything went wrong for a whole generation. The film’s shadowy conspirators provide viewers with villains at once detestable and comfortingly familiar. Of course these anonymous men who meet in secret to maintain the status quo are the bad guys. They’re always the bad guys, and bad guys are in the business of cutting down those who challenge the system, a notion only confirmed by the subsequent deaths of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and others — at least for those who saw a hidden hand behind those deaths.
19.
Rebel Ridge (2024)
Not all conspiracies have to dupe the whole world. Some can work on a much smaller scale. In this tense, Jeremy Saulinier–directed thriller, Terry (Aaron Pierre) tries to bike into the small Louisiana town of Shelby Springs to bail out his cousin, buy a pickup truck, and start a new life somewhere else. But after cops stop Terry and take the stack of cash he’s brought with him by declaring the theft “civil forfeiture,†Terry discovers that the ill-gotten money that funds the town is something of an open secret, as is its police chief’s (Don Johnson) ability to exact revenge. It’s an effective action movie that doubles as a maddening exposé of an everyday sort of conspiracy that’s more than theoretical.
18.
Wag the Dog (1997)
Larry Beinhart’s 1993 novel American Hero takes place in a world in which Operation Desert Storm was fought to boost the political fortunes of George H.W. Bush. Wag the Dog, directed by Barry Levinson from a script by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, takes the premise a step further: What if a scandal-plagued president running for reelection led the country to victory in a war that never happened (complete with heart-rending stories, hard-fighting heroes, and even a theme song)? To pull it off will take the combined efforts of a shadowy fixer (Robert De Niro), a presidential aide (Anne Heche), and an ego-driven Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman). Watched with too much scrutiny and Wag the Dog falls apart pretty quickly. But as a satire of image- and sound-bite-driven politics and the ease with which misinformation can drown out the truth, it’s as clever as it is cutting. What looked timely in the ’90s looks downright prescient a few decades on.
17.
Absolute Power (1997)
Looking back, 1997 now seems like the year of truly evil fictional presidents. Where the unseen president of Wag the Dog is accused of sexually assaulting a child, Absolute Power’s President Alan Richmond’s (Gene Hackman) sadistic sexual appetites lead to the death of a billionaire’s wife, which is subsequently covered up by the Secret Service. And they might have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for meddling jewel thief Luther Whitney (Clint Eastwood, who also directs), who witnessed the killing while on the job. The film starts from a point of cynicism that assumes, of course, those in charge are no good, and its outlook grows darker as Whitney discovers just how dangerous it is to be in the possession of information so damning it could take down the most powerful person on the planet.
16.
JFK (1991)
Director Oliver Stone has always spoken of JFK as a “counter-myth,†a kind of alternate story — maybe true, maybe not, and filled with contradictions either way — that pushes back against the official story of the Kennedy assassination detailed by the Warren Commission. That’s a playing-with-fire approach to making a film about history, and JFK has probably done more to further reckless theorizing about Kennedy’s murder than any of the assassination literature that preceded it. But that’s the power of filmmaking. However questionable its methods and conclusions, JFK is nothing if not a tour de force demonstration of how films can reshape reality. Kevin Costner stars as Jim Garrison, a New Orleans DA who follows a trail of clues that leads him to believe Lee Harvey Oswald was not Kennedy’s sole assassin. Stone crafts the film as an hallucinatory swirl, using multiple film stocks, jarring editing, and a disorienting soundtrack to simulate the confusion and fear stirred by Kennedy’s death and the possibility that we’ll never know the whole story. As a serious attempt to uncover that truth, it’s wanting, but that’s not how counter-myths work.
15.
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
This second adaptation of Richard Condon’s 1959 bestseller (you’ll find the first a little further up the list) updates the original’s Cold War setting to fit the concerns of the early-’00s. The literal Manchuria of the original becomes Manchurian Global, a deeply connected equity firm with a vested interest in keeping the globe unstable and making sure war stays alive and well. It’s tough to remake a classic as respected and well-known as Frankenheimer’s original, but director Jonathan Demme reshapes the material in his own style, putting the emphasis on characters and the personal costs suffered by the brainwashed Major Marco (Denzel Washington) and the damage done when the unscrupulous attempt to profit by undoing democracy from within. Meryl Streep is particularly memorable as a senator with nefarious intentions that many at the time assumed, despite Streep’s insistence to the contrary, to be based on Hillary Clinton.
14.
Winter Kills (1979)
Another, even wilder adaptation of a Condon novel, Winter Kills stars Jeff Bridges as Nick Kegan, the half-brother of a JFK-like president who starts to unravel the true story behind the president’s death nearly 20 years later. His investigation sends him on an increasingly disturbing journey that leads him to suspect everyone from the mafia to rival politicians to a Hollywood studio — until arriving at the grimmest possible solution of all. Director William Richert uses the JFK assassination as a fodder for dark comedy (with an emphasis on darkness), creating a kind of grotesque caricature of political paranoia featuring a cast that includes John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Sterling Hayden, and an uncredited Elizabeth Taylor. (Richert had to work hard to make it, too. After shady dealings and a murdered producer shut down production, the director and Bridges made another movie in part to finance the completion of Winter Kills.) Not very popular in its time, it plays like the almost nihilistic endpoint of the paranoid ’70s thriller. Speaking of …
13.
Under the Silver Lake (2018)
A slacker who already sees the world as a place filled with conspiracies and hidden messages, Sam (Andrew Garfield) is either the best or worst person to investigate what appears to be a real mystery in this darkly comedic (and underseen) David Robert Mitchell film. Set in a Los Angeles filled with coded messages, secret hideouts, seemingly ancient songwriters, serial killers that target dogs, and other oddities, the film plays like a cross between Inherent Vice and Foucault’s Pendulum that somehow makes more sense the weirder it gets and the deeper Sam falls into the crack in reality opened up by the disappearance of a neighbor (Riley Keough) under (maybe) mysterious circumstances.
12.
The Insider (1999)
Michael Mann’s fact-based follow-up to Heat uses the story of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), a former tobacco-industry executive who reluctantly agrees to go public with some damaging information at the urging of 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman to depict how powerful corporations use fear to keep their secrets: making explicit threats of legal action and implicit threats of bodily harm. In this case, the cover-up might not be worse than the crime — secretly increasing the addictive properties of cigarettes to hook more customers — but it’s still pretty bad, and Mann’s chilly, understated style creates an atmosphere that underscores the sense of inescapable dread.
11.
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
If the Kennedy assassination opened up cracks of distrust in the foundation of American life, Watergate turned those cracks into fissures. Movies had featured shadowy government operatives before, but it took the 1970s, and paranoid thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, to turn them into movie staples. Sydney Pollack’s film goes even further, creating a world in which nothing is quite what it seems and every ordinary-looking stranger walking down the street might be a threat. Robert Redford stars as a low-level CIA analyst who returns from a lunch run to find everyone in his New York office has been taken out. Feeling he can trust no one, he forces an unsuspecting woman (Faye Dunaway) to shelter him. This being a film starring Robert Redford, they fall in love, but the pair soon finds love offers little protection from threats that seem to stretch to the highest levels of the government. The ambiguous downbeat ending seems to confirm a sense that something in American life had broken and might never again be put back together.
10.
Seven Days in May (1964)
John Frankenheimer followed his The Manchurian Candidate with another story of an attempt to take over the U.S. government. The two make for a terrific study in contrasts. Scripted by Rod Serling, Seven Days in May’s power comes from its matter-of-fact approach and understated performances, which combine to create a disarmingly plausible depiction of a military coup to supplant the president (Frederic March). Kirk Douglas stars as a marine colonel who comes to suspect the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Burt Lancaster), a hero of seemingly unimpeachable character, is conspiring to stage a coup d’état. The film plays at times like an extension of Frankenheimer and Serling’s previous work in live TV, giving it an immediacy that a more stylized approach wouldn’t be able to achieve.
9.
The Parallax View (1974)
Director Alan J. Pakula became synonymous with paranoid ’70s filmmaking thanks to films like Klute and All the President’s Men, the latter bringing the style of a ’70s thriller to a fact-based account of Washington Post reporter’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s breaking of the Watergate story. Those films sandwich The Parallax View, a conspiracy theory–inspired thriller starring Warren Beatty as Joe Frady, a reporter who comes to suspect the witnesses to the assassination of a presidential candidate are being knocked off one by one. As his investigation deepens, clues lead Frady toward the mysterious Parallax Corporation — but Frady quickly finds himself in over his head in ways he couldn’t have anticipated. Famed for its brainwashing sequence, Pakula’s film amplifies the era’s fearful mood to hysterical extremes but doesn’t seem any less truthful for it. It joined a chorus of films echoing the notion that corporations and the government — often working hand-in-hand — weren’t always acting in our best interests, even if their efforts didn’t match our wildest, scariest flights of fancy.
8.
They Live (1988)
John Carpenter’s science-fiction classic uses a clean, powerful metaphor to create an allegory for the ways everyday people find themselves serving a status quo that furthers the interests of the rich and powerful: What if the rich and powerful were actually aliens who have infiltrated Earth passing as human and now use subliminal messaging in entertainment and advertising to compel the rest of us to consume and conform? Wrestler turned actor “Rowdy†Roddy Piper stars as John Nada, an L.A. drifter who happens upon a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see past the deception and spot aliens in his midst. Maybe, the film suggests, there’s some truth to even the wildest conspiracy theories, and maybe those conspiracies hide behind pleasing forms. Carpenter’s film often plays the scenario for laughs, but it still works as an unmistakable call to question what’s being passed off from the truth sent from the heart of the Reagan era.
7.
Secret Honor (1984)
That post-Watergate paranoia proved so pervasive even Richard Nixon couldn’t escape it, or at least the Nixon played by Philip Baker Hall in Robert Altman’s masterful one-man-show movie. Adapting a play by Donald Freed (one of the shapers of Executive Action) and Arnold M. Stone, the film consists of nothing more than a drunken, sweating Nixon monologuing about his life, his presidency, his grievances, and those who betrayed him. Hall delivers one of the great performances, so great that it’s easy to forget the final act hinges on the revelation of a conspiracy theory that makes the title surprisingly literal. Whether or not the film believes it is sort of beside the point. Secret Honor suggests there are some forces so powerful that even the president of the United States can’t stand up to them.
6.
Blow Out (1981)
A riff on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup that finds a murder hidden within sounds rather than images, Blow Out casts John Travolta as Jack Terry, a sound technician working for a grubby Philadelphia film producer. While recording some atmospheric noise he witnesses, and records, a presidential hopeful’s fatal car accident, an event Jack comes to suspect is actually an assassination. Propulsively directed by Brian De Palma, Blow Out combines elements of the Kennedy assassination, the Chappaquiddick incident, and post-Watergate paranoia into a potent mystery that suggests even a serial killer’s seemingly random acts of violence might be part of larger plot, building to a climax that’s almost nightmarish in its despair.
5.
The Conversation (1974)
It’s only coincidental that The Conversation, the masterpiece Francis Ford Coppola squeezed in between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, appeared at the height of the Watergate scandal, but it’s apt nonetheless. Beyond the central role of recording equipment in each, both play off a sense that nothing is how it appears and that there’s always someone in the shadows pulling the strings. Gene Hackman stars as an audio surveillance expert whose latest recording — made at the behest of a powerful client known only as the Director (Robert Duvall) — may reveal plans for murder. As a story, it’s more conspiracy-theory-adjacent than a proper conspiracy-theory film, but the atmosphere of uncut ’70s paranoia and sense of a world controlled by anonymous, shadowy figures makes it an essential contribution to the cinéma de complot.
4.
Chinatown (1974)
Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) begins this Roman Polanski–directed, Robert Towne–penned noir as a cynic unaware of how much more rotten the 1930s Los Angeles he calls home is than he imagines. At the heart of the film — spoiler warning for both Chinatown and Los Angeles history — is a plot to displace farmers in order to control the city’s water supply. As history it conflates and simplifies decades of historic events. But its depiction of a place whose very existence depends on underhanded schemes hatched away from the public eye to the benefit of a few suggests that conspiracy theories and civic planning are sometimes one and the same.
3.
All the President’s Men (1976)
To recount the story of Watergate, and the Washington Post reporters who brought it to light, Alan J. Pakula returned to the tools he employed in Klute and The Parallax View. They served him as well in dealing with fact as they did in fiction. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play, respectively, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose probe of a curious break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters puts them on a journey through a shadowy world of slush funds, dirty tricks, and dubious cover stories — and eventually to the President of the United States himself. For many, Watergate didn’t come as a shock so much as a confirmation: politicians would do whatever they could do to gain and keep power, never mind what values and democratic processes they trampled along the way. The headlines of the day felt like excerpts from a disturbing, richly detailed, deeply researched thriller. Pakula’s film respects the facts — while others on this list might claim to reveal hidden truths, it’s grounded in provable facts — and his eerie, unornamented approach captures how much the nightly news and the unsettling visions he and other ’70s directors had helped create had started to blur together.
2.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
A fever dream released at the height of the Cold War, John Frankenheimer’s adaptation of Richard Condon’s plot-against-America novel draws on everything from the McCarthy-inspired demagoguery to far-out stories of American POWs being subjected to Chinese mind-control techniques during the Korean War to create a sense of political unmooring in which no one could be trusted and nothing taken at face value. Frank Sinatra stars as Bennett Marco, an ex-POW troubled by dreams of witnessing fellow soldier Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) commit murder at the behest of their communist captors. In the years since their release, Shaw has been pushed into a political role by his mother (Angela Lansbury), who’s married a fierce anti-communist senator. That places Shaw in an ideal position to serve as a pawn for sinister plans Marco has to scramble to figure out and foil.
As gripping as the story is, it’s the sense of fear and fatigue that make the movie so memorable, whether in its dreamlike brainwashing scenes or the way Sinatra plays Marco’s sweaty distress as he struggles to keep it together talking to a sympathetic stranger (Janet Leigh) on a train. It’s a snapshot of an exhausting moment in history that, when it was released a year ahead of the Kennedy assassination, no one new was about to take an even more dramatic turn.
1.
Z (1969)
Sometimes conspiracies are not only real — they hide in plain sight. Adapting a novel by Vassilis Vassilikos, Greek-French director Costa-Gavras employs the thinnest of veils for a film directly inspired by the 1963 assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis at the hands of the same right-wing forces who would take over the country via a military junta in 1967. Yves Montand stars as the Lambrakis surrogate, who is killed in public after giving a speech in support of nuclear disarmament. Despite a multitude of witnesses, the police push a story of a drunk driving accident, a cover for the assassins hired by the military to eliminate a perceived threat. That leaves a dedicated magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) a photojournalist (Jacques Perrin), and a handful of others to attempt to uncover, and publicize, the truth. One of the major inspirations for JFK, Z shows the murder from different angles, and with differing degrees of veracity, drawing from varying accounts to depict the way facts can be manipulated — and sometimes hidden away. Despite bursts of dark humor, Z also creates an unshakable sense of unease and frustration, suggesting that some forces might be more powerful than justice and that even the full airing of the truth might not stop those in power from repeating a lie until the public is forced to accept it. That makes it both a landmark of ’60s filmmaking fueled by the anger of the protest movement and a warning of things to come — one that feels as relevant now as ever.