Best Thriller Movies of 1978

Matthew Bennell notices that several of his friends are complaining that their close relatives are in some way different. When questioned later they themselves seem changed, as they deny everything or make lame excuses. As the invaders increase in number they become more open and Bennell, who has by now witnessed an attempted 'replacement', realises that he and his friends must escape or suffer the same fate.

The Driver specializes in driving getaway cars for robberies. His exceptional talent has prevented him from being caught yet. After another successful flight from the police a self-assured detective makes it his primary goal to catch the Driver. He promises pardons to a gang if they help to convict him in a set-up robbery. The Driver seeks help from The Player to mislead the detective.

A British multinational company seeks to overthrow a vicious dictator in central Africa. It hires a band of (largely aged) mercenaries in London and sends them in to save the virtuous but imprisoned opposition leader who is also critically ill and due for execution. Just when the team has performed a perfect rescue, the multinational does a deal with the vicious dictator leaving the mercenary band to escape under their own steam and exact revenge.

A ventriloquist is at the mercy of his vicious dummy while he tries to renew a romance with his high school sweetheart.

Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman discovers a sinister and bizarre plot to rekindle the Third Reich.

Police chief Brody must protect the citizens of Amity after a second monstrous shark begins terrorizing the waters.

In Victorian England, a master criminal makes elaborate plans to steal a shipment of gold from a moving train.

A young female doctor discovers something sinister going on in her hospital. Relatively healthy patients are having 'complications' during simple operations and ending up in comas. The patients are then shipped off to an institute that looks after them. The young doctor suspects there is more to this than meets the eye.

Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau is dead. At least that is what the world—and Charles Dreyfus—believe when a dead body is discovered in Clouseau's car after being shot off the road. Naturally, Clouseau knows differently and, taking advantage of not being alive, sets out to discover why an attempt was made on his life.

A shy San Francisco librarian and a bumbling cop fall in love as they solve a crime involving albinos, dwarves, and the Catholic Church.

World War II, 1943. Mallory and Miller, the heroes who destroyed the guns of Navarone, are sent to Yugoslavia in search of a ghost from the past.

A government agent is determined to come to his son's rescue, when a sinister official kidnaps him to harness his extremely powerful psychic abilities.

Since the sudden and highly suspicious death of his parents, 12-year-old Damien has been in the charge of his wealthy aunt and uncle. Widely feared to be the Antichrist, Damien relentlessly plots to seize control of his uncle's business empire—and the world. Anyone attempting to unravel the secrets of Damien's sinister past or fiendish future meets with a swift and cruel demise.

Laura Mars is a renowned New York City fashion photographer who features sensual and violent images in her controversial work. Suddenly, she gains the ability to see visions from a serial killer's perspective — and it happens to be her friends and associates that he is stalking.

When flesh-eating piranhas are accidently released into a summer resort's rivers, the guests become their next meal.

A French detective in London reconstructs the life of a man lying in hospital with severe injuries with the help of journals and a psychiatrist. He realises that the man had powerful telekinetic abilities.

After a young writer is brutally gang-raped and left for dead by four men, she systematically hunts them down one by one to exact a terrible vengeance.

Toronto, Canada. A few days before Christmas, Miles Cullen, a bored teller working at a bank branch located in a shopping mall, accidentally learns that the place is about to be robbed when he finds a disconcerting note on one of the counters.

Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.

A wanna-be concert pianist spends his days making a living by collecting debts for his Mafioso father, a lifestyle that could eventually ruin his dreams of a musical career.

The USS Neptune, a nuclear submarine, is sunk off the coast of Connecticut after a collision with a Norwegian cargo ship. The navy must attempt a potentially dangerous rescue in the hope of saving the lives of the crew.

John, a disillusioned Vietnam War journalist, turns to heroin smuggling. He cons Ray, an equally burnt out veteran into delivering the drugs stateside to his wife. Everything soon falls apart and Ray ends up on the run with John's wife trying to evade crooked narcotics agents.

At a Catholic boys' school, domineering disciplinarian Father Goddard rules over his pupils with an iron hand. When one of his teenage charges confesses to murder, the dogmatic but deeply repressed Goddard finds his faith challenged and his life spiralling dangerously out of control. Also starring Billy Connolly (in his first feature-film role), Dominic Guard ,Kes star Dai Bradley, and the inimitable Brian Glover, and written by the great Anthony Shaffer, Absolution is one of British cinema’s most underrated chillers, not least for a towering central performance by Burton.

A young woman moves to a high-rise apartment building where the previous tenant committed suicide. Soon, she begins to be tormented by an unknown man who seems to know her every move.

A spoof of the entire 1940s detective genre. San Francisco private detective, Lou Pekinpaugh is accused of murdering his partner at the instigation of his mistress—his partner's wife.

After being harassed by a couple of punks, a young woman picks up an old lady standing at the roadside in the rain.

Mystery abounds when it is discovered that, one by one, the greatest Chefs in Europe are being killed. The intriguing part of the murders is that each chef is killed in the same manner that their own special dish is prepared in. Food critics and the (many) self-proclaimed greatest Chefs in Europe demand the mystery be solved.

A comatose hospital patient harasses and kills though his powers of telekinesis to claim his private nurse as his own.

Private detective Moses Wine is hired by his former college girlfriend to investigate a political smear campaign and he sets out to find out who is responsible, with deadly results.

Just released from prison, a young woman arrives in town to "start a new life", but soon begins stalking a married construction worker for no apparent reason, turning his life inside out and eventually terrorizing him and his wife.

Private eye Philip Marlowe (Robert Mitchum) investigates a case of blackmail involving the two wild daughters of a rich general, a pornographer and a gangster. This neo-noir remake of the iconic 1946 Bogart film transfers the setting of Raymond Chandler's novel from 1940s California to 1970s London.

A singer holes up at a sinister estate to write new songs for his act. The ghost of his murdered wife begins to haunt him, then the person who actually killed her shows up at the mansion.

A golem made of mud terrorizes a couple on a remote Maine island.

Teenage girl is plagued by harassing phone calls. Her fear mounts when she's babysitting at a neighbor's home one evening and the caller rings her at that number.

The plot is set on a group of bank robbers, who are both violent and successful, strangely getting away each time with an amount around the £60,000 mark, and often leaving behind cash in excess of this sum. The robbers are willing to kill their own team, to get away. As Jack Regan himself puts it after the first raid in the film: "I've never seen so many dead people". Armed with gold-plated Purdey shotguns, they evaded Regan and the Flying Squad for quite some time, before Regan finds encouragement from his Detective Chief Superintendent who was sent down for corruption because Jack wouldn't testify in court for him.

Shortly after moving into a dark, brooding mansion, a psychologist and his co-workers are terrorized by a horrible evil being.

Scientist Dr. Bradford Crane and army general Thalius Slater join forces to fight an almost invisible enemy threatening America; killer bees that have deadly venom and attack without reason. Disaster movie-master Irwin Allen's film contains spectacular special effects, including a train crash caused by the eponymous swarm.

A group of potential heirs gather in a forbidding old house to learn which of them will inherit a fortune. Later, they learn that a flesh-rending maniac is loose.

The former leader of a commando rescue attempt into Vietnam tries to discover why his squad members are being murdered, one-by-one, after the war is over.

After leaving prison, Tolek plans to get revenge on his former girlfriend.

A swinging divorcée is prejudged by a police detective and accused of killing her child.

Masked intruders take the family of a bank manager hostage in order to rob his bank.

A film cataloguing some of the world's largest catastrophes.

A thriller, released 1st November 1978, based on the non-fiction book Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook by Edward N. Luttwak.

A group of crooks plan a heist to steal twenty million dollars from a Security Firm counting house.

A careening tanker truck rips through the fence of a wild animal park, unleashing an untamed force of nature on an unsuspecting community. Bison, zebras, camels, antelopes and ostriches stampede down the highway. Elephants and rhinos crush cars. A panther terrorizes a family's pet dog. A tiger turns a fleeing bystander into helpless prey. A lion prowls near a home. A local amusement park becomes an arena for a vicious bear-vs.-tiger clash. As park rangers and local cops scramble to recapture the escaped animals, two trigger-happy good ol' boys decide to go big-game hunting. Carol Lynley, who fought her way through an upside-down luxury liner in THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, returns to the disaster-pic genre as a dedicated veterinarian thrust into the forefront of the people vs. beasts panic. Also in the cast: Philip Michael Thomas before he shot to fame in MIAMI VICE.

Two strange sisters live in a crumbling mansion, where they keep a pet ape, which belonged to their late father, locked in a cage. While one of the sisters seems to be keeping her head on straight, as it were, the other appears to be sinking further and further into barbarism and insanity.

An insurance investigator comes to a small town to investigate the death of a man insured by his company. The local residents believe his death was caused by his being run over by a ghost train. However, the investigator is sure there is a more rational explanation...

An elementary school teacher tries to rebuild her life with her son, which is the result of a rape in a distant city. The child tries to grow in a common way, but his mother overprotects him with terrible consecuences