"My characters are not violent or vile. They're everyday people. They have some money, but find themselves discontented with their own loneliness, their own mortality, the sameness of life." Championing a gritty, unencumbered approach to filmmaking, John Cassavetes directed his art toward a new front

Anxiety, Event, Gritty, Intense, Intimate, Open-ended, Psychological, Sincere, Sprawling

Master of the macabre, avatar of evil, intensifier of suspense, Hitchcock is the acknowledged king of the thriller genre he virtually invented. Hitchcock cheerfully poked ironic fun at the evil nesting inside the nicest of people. At the height of his career in 1950s Hollywood, his sophisticated blen

Classical, Elegant, Geometric, Hollywood gothic, Horror, Psychological, Tense

Losey's lofty artistic program was foiled by McCarthy and his anticommunist witch-hunters, who forced a bad hand and drove Losey into hiding in England, where he continued to churn out his cinematic epics undisturbed. After making films under a pseudonym for several years and releasing them in Britai

Blacklistees, Contemplative, Deconstructive, Dense, Political, Psychological

With an unerring ability both to describe evil and to place himself in its path, Polanski has created a body of work that never fails to elicit shudders and raise questions. He possesses a mordant insight into the politics of sex and violence, an inherent feel for the macabre, and an eccentric and

Erotic, Excessive, Homoerotic, Perverse, Polish new wave, Psychological