10 movies that will genuinely give you heart palpitations
Unless you’re chugging Coca-Cola like it’s the elixir of life and devouring so many milk bottle candies that your piss technically counts as a dairy product, a typical trip to the cinema shouldn’t make your heart leap out of your chest. Yet, some movies aim to do exactly this, keeping you on the edge of your seat while pushing your heart into your mouth, utterly enraptured by the chaos on screen.
Action cinema has, indeed, been aiming for such a visceral response for decades, with 1980s genre flicks like The Terminator, Die Hard and Escape from New York throwing so much bombastic drama at the screen that one’s heart cannot help but tremble at the enormity. These are slick tales, too, not just vast cinematic epics that demonstrate some of the best examples of simple, effective storytelling.
Elsewhere, other movies make you panic by translating the horrors of real-world events, putting the viewer in the perspective of someone who was forced to undergo true brutality. Or, they recreate the anxiety of life so accurately through a fictional tale that the action on screen, for all intents and purposes, feels entirely real.
Explore ten of cinema’s most anxiety-inducing movies below, collating terrifying horror flicks, award-winning dramas and authentic accounts of real-life tragedy.
10 movies to give you heart palpitations:
10. Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010)
Simple in premise but complicated in execution, Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried is a masterclass of wringing every drop of tension imaginable from a movie that unfolds in a single location, with the film aided massively by a career-best performance from Ryan Reynolds. The actor’s Paul Conroy awakens buried underground in a coffin and becomes increasingly desperate in trying to secure his survival.
Employing nausea-inducing camerawork that makes Paul’s predicament ever starker, as the minutes begin to tick away, the heart rate of both the solitary on-screen character and the viewer begins to ratchet up, and by the time the story reaches its resolution, you’ll be feeling like you’ve been buried right there alongside him.
9. Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)
Ari Aster knows how to raise the hair on the back of the neck, with Hereditary ensuring that they never settle back down from the second the unforgettable decapitation scene arrives like a punch straight to the gut. That feeling permeates throughout the rest of the story, with the travails of the Graham family giving rise to dark, demonic secrets and blood-curdling revelations that carry right through to a harrowing final scene that underlines in no uncertain terms that redemption was not on the menu Aster was serving.
Hereditary is uneasy from its first to last frame, and the end result is the kind of film that demands sleeping with the lights on, not that its expertly crafted terrors won’t continue to haunt dreams and nightmares in the aftermath anyway.
8. Utøya 22. July (Erik Poppe, 2018)
The dramatisation of a summer camp massacre was always going to be a difficult watch, but even though Erik Poppe substitutes the real-life victims with fictional characters, the film loses none of its visceral immediacy. The domestic terrorist attacks carried out by Anders Behring Breivik claimed 77 lives, and while he was the focal point of the news coverage, as everyone sought to discern why he did what he did, Utøya 22. July told the events from the perspective of its victims to shine a light on their story and what was lost.
Unfolding in real-time and following Andrea Berntzen’s Kaja from her point-of-view using long, unbroken takes, Utøya 22. July‘s urgency and authenticity place the viewer squarely in the midst of the action, creating a level of investment and immersion that buries beneath the skin and refuses to let go.
7. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
The haunted house horror in space classic that gave rise to a slew of imitators, Ridley Scott’s Alien accomplished what its many successors completely forewent in the name of jump scares by ensuring the tension was at boiling point long before its iconic intergalactic antagonist was glimpsed in full view. Adhering to the template established by spooky cinema since the advent of the moving image, the dwindling band of survivors, with one exception, is a tale as old as time, but the combination of Scott’s composition and Sigourney Weaver’s performance elevated Alien to legendary levels.
No matter how many times you’ve seen it, the chest-burster scene retains its edge, while sweaty palms and shaky knees are the order of the day as Ellen Ripley skulks around the Nostromo as silently as possible.
6. The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)
Caving isn’t for everyone, and even for the people who decide it’s a good idea in Neil Marshall’s classic of British horror, they end up being plunged into a fight for their lives when they intrude on the habitat of grotesque mutants with a taste for blood. The cave diving scenes alone are anxiety-inducing enough, but when Marshall allows all hell to break loose, The Descent becomes something else entirely. If pausing to catch a breath is something the characters don’t have time for, then the exact same applies to anybody watching, with panic steadily rising the longer the protagonists spend in the midst of their ordeal.
Signups for spelunking trips might well have dipped noticeably following The Descent, and even now, the mere memory of the blood-curdling nightmare is enough to have sworn at least one traumatised generation from ever venturing underground.
5. Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)
Sometimes, even in the world of cinema, nothing is scarier than the facts of reality. Indeed, one of the most anxious and daunting periods of modern history came during the years of the Second World War, from 1939 to 1945. Steven Spielberg’s 1998 masterpiece, Saving Private Ryan, is one of the very best films to depict the horrors of the war, with the iconic opening sequence being a particularly heart-fluttering moment.
While the entire film is a terrifying depiction of WWII, it is the opening scene, in which thousands of men storm Omaha beach, that truly encapsulates the guttural fear of such a moment. When Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller is staring across the beach, seeing his fellow troops being slaughtered, there are few moments in the history of cinema that compare to such horror.
4. Climax (Gaspar Noé, 2018)
The Argentine-Italian filmmaker Gaspar Noé has never had any intention of making his movies enjoyable to watch, using every one of his projects as an opportunity to test and prod his viewers into submission. There are few better examples than 2018’s Climax, an intense dance-inspired movie that tells the story of a group of talented, young performers who steadily go insane after someone spikes the punch with copious amounts of LSD.
Using a variety of techno beats with a dangerously high BPM count, if the music of Noé’s film doesn’t get your heart racing, you can be sure its nightmarish visuals will, transporting you to a world of pure horror where one’s mind kills reality and takes you on a psychedelic trip of its own accord.
3. Boiling Point (Philip Barantini, 2021)
If you work in the service or hospitality industries, watching the British indie movie Boiling Point is like subjecting yourself to a VR experience of a particularly stressful day of work, where nothing goes right, and the customers are all rancid rotters. Indeed, such a day might occur on a daily basis. Helmed by Philip Barantini and starring the great Stephen Graham, the film is a real-time, one-shot night in the life of a busy London restaurant.
The result is something utterly absorbing and utterly heart-pounding, placing the viewer directly in the kitchen as if they were a poor Kitchen Porter scrubbing tirelessly at a patch of pesky potato on a colander. If you’re looking for an easy mid-week watch, this is most certainly not the one.
2. Rec. (Paco Plaza, Jaume Balagueró, 2007)
One could certainly make a case for the Spanish horror movie Rec from directors Paco Plaza and Jaume Balagueró as being the greatest horror movie of the 21st century. An intense horror that fits into the niche sub-genre of virus-related terror, the film sees a film crew enter a Spanish apartment building, which later becomes quarantined thanks to the demonic infection that is ravaging the inhabitants.
Filmed entirely in first person, Rec was one of the last found-footage horror movies to be made at the height of the craze and is, no doubt, one of the very best of its kind. Quiet, careful and utterly incessant, Rec feels just a little too authentic, resulting in chaos for your heartbeat.
1. Uncut Gems (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2019)
A24 has helped produce and distribute some of the 21st century’s greatest movies, but the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems may be their very best. A film that feels as though it was born from the frenetic beat of New York’s drum, Uncut Gems tails Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner, a manic jewellery salesman, as he pays off his debts through high-stakes gambling and risky deals with prickly fellas.
One of modern cinema’s best and most frustrating protagonists, Ratner is in constant dogged pursuit of the American dream, with only his own hubris preventing him from reaching the top. Despite his constant cycle of success and failure, you can’t help but root for the plucky contender, with his desperate efforts and baffling conflicts being a simmering source of anxiety.
