20 best movies like The Spiral Staircase (1945)

Dolores Claiborne was accused of killing her abusive husband twenty years ago, but the court's findings were inconclusive and she was allowed to walk free. Now she has been accused of killing her employer, Vera Donovan, and this time there is a witness who can place her at the scene of the crime. Things look bad for Dolores when her daughter Selena, a successful Manhattan magazine writer, returns to cover the story.

Thirty years ago, in the sleepy community of Waterbury, a killer known as “The Executioner” murdered Sarah Bennett's parents. Now Sarah and her husband Dylan have returned to town, only to find herself the centerpiece in a series of horrifying murders centered around the seven deadly sins.

A man working for the War Crimes Commission suspects that an important Nazi official has folded himself into a quaint Connecticut town.

A young promoter is accused of the murder of Vicky Lynn, a young actress he "discovered" as a waitress while out with ex-actor Robin Ray and gossip columnist Larry Evans.

One-armed war veteran John J. Macreedy steps off a train at the sleepy little town of Black Rock. Once there, he begins to unravel a web of lies, secrecy, and murder.

Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher with his whole life ahead of him but, after leaving his fiancee's home one night, is involved in a car crash which leaves him in a coma for 5 years. When he wakes, he discovers he has an ability to see into the past, present and future life of anyone with whom he comes into physical contact.

A seasoned police detective and his partner have just uncovered a string of unusual murders that lead them to a serial killer, who believes that he is the descendant of Judas.

A woman who survived the brutal killing of her family as a child is forced to confront the events of that day.

Based on the true events of the only case in US History where a spirit caused the death of a man.

Innocent lives hang on the whim of an elusive psychopathic murderer whose strange riddles and impossible timelines force three people into a mission to end the game before one or all of them die.

Alice is a withdrawn 12-year-old who lives with her mother and her younger sister, Karen, who gets most of the attention from her mother, leaving Alice out of the spotlight. When Karen is found brutally murdered in a church, suspicions start to turn toward Alice. But could a 12-year-old girl really be capable of such savagery?

A reclusive surveillance expert is hired to spy on a mysterious blackmailer, who just may be a serial killer.

Mourning the accidental death of his wife and having just moved to New York with his young son, laconic police psychologist Cal Jamison is reluctantly drawn into a series of grisly, ritualistic murders involving the immolation of two youths.

Six young adults struggle with their personal demons while staying at a secluded mansion during a dark and stormy night where a seemingly innocent game of 'taboo' brings out their inter-most secrets which soon leads to murder.

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds… and remembers.

When her child goes missing, a mother looks to unravel the legend of the Tall Man, an entity who allegedly abducts children.

A psychological thriller about a senior at one of America's most prestigious universities. Under enormous pressure to complete her thesis and earn a top job at one of the world's most competitive consulting firms, Katie is still coping with the sudden unexplained disappearance of her first love two years prior. As the investigation continues, Katie is forced to choose between past passions and new possibilities, even as new facts are uncovered.

Gumshoe Philip Marlowe is hired by the oafish Moose Malloy to track down his former girlfriend. He's also hired to accompany an effeminate playboy buy back some jewels. When the exchange results in the playboy's murder, Marlowe can't leave the case alone, and soon discovers it's related to Malloy's. As he gets drawn deeper into a complex web of intrigue by a mysterious blonde, the detective finds his own life in increasing jeopardy.

A masked maniac terrorizes the same small community where a murderer known as the Phantom Killer struck decades earlier.

A newspaper photographer, Jean, researches the lurid and sensational axe murder of two women in 1873 as an editorial tie-in with a brutal modern double murder. She discovers a cache of papers that appear to give an account of the murders by an eyewitness.

An autistic boy witnesses his parents' double murder. Richard Dreyfuss as a controversial therapist, seeks to probe the child's mind in order to solve the case.

A marriage that seemed perfect comes crashing down after the supposed death of Jack Saunders, husband of Adrienne Saunders. After his supposed death, strange developments begin to be discovered by Adrienne regarding Jack's past. Developments that lead her to believe she has been Deceived.

Joanna Mills has a successful career but feels her personal life is spinning out of control. She has few friends, an estranged father, and a crazy ex-boyfriend who is stalking her. Joanna begins having terrifying visions of a woman's murder, and it seems that she is the killer's next target. Determined to solve the mystery and escape her apparent fate, Joanna follows her visions to the victim's hometown and finds that some secrets just do not stay buried.

After losing an acting role and his girlfriend, Jake Scully finally catches a break: he gets offered a gig house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills. While peering through the beautiful home's telescope one night, he spies a gorgeous blonde dancing in her window. But when he witnesses the girl's murder, it leads Scully through the netherworld of the adult entertainment industry on a search for answers -- with porn actress Holly Body as his guide.

Dr. Taylor Biggs is haunted by a past that's not his own. A hallucinatory drug gives him the power to see visions of vicious crimes, visions made all that more disturbing when he discovers that the murderous memories may belong to the father he never knew . Biggs's mother, whose own failing memory makes her powerless to help him unravel his family history.

This drama follows Inspector Kurt Wallander – a middle-aged everyman – as he struggles against a rising tide of violence in the apparently sleepy backwaters in and around Ystad in Skane, southern Sweden. Based on the international best-selling books by Henning Mankell.

Locked in a school closet during Halloween 1962, young Frank witnesses the ghost of a young girl and the man who murdered her years ago. Shortly afterward he finds himself stalked by the killer and is soon drawn to an old house where a mysterious Lady In White lives. As he discovers the secret of the woman he soon finds that the killer may be someone close to him.

A serial killer, who drains his victims for blood is on the loose in London, the Police follow him to a house owned by an eccentric scientist.

Lee Blanchard and Bucky Bleichert are former boxers-turned-cops in 1940s Los Angeles and, when an aspiring young actress turns up dead, Blanchard and Bleichert must grapple with corruption, narcissism, stag films and family madness as they pursue the killer.

Fifteen-year old John Cleaver is dangerous, and he knows it. He’s obsessed with serial killers, but really doesn’t want to become one. Terrible impulses constantly tempt him, so for his own sake, and the safety of those around, he lives by rigid rules to keep himself “good” and “normal”. However, when a real monster shows up in his town he has to let his dark side out in order to stop it – but without his rules to keep him in check, he might be more dangerous than the monster he’s trying to kill.

Private investigator Matthew Scudder is hired by a drug kingpin to find out who kidnapped and murdered his wife.

Bernard Salzmann's thriller Assumed Killer tells the tale of a reporter investigating a serial killer. After she suffers an accident and becomes an amnesiac, she begins to suspect her husband may be the person responsible for the brutal slayings

Publisher, Will Atenton quits a lucrative job in New York to relocate his wife, Libby and their daughters to a quaint town in New England. However, as they settle into their home the Atentons discover that a woman and her children were murdered there, and the surviving husband is the town's prime suspect. With help from a neighbor who was close to the murdered family, Will pieces together a horrifying chain of events.

A young woman 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.

Set in Stalin-era Soviet Union, a disgraced MGB agent is dispatched to investigate a series of child murders -- a case that begins to connect with the very top of party leadership.

Matt Lee Whitlock, respected chief of police in small Banyan Key, Florida, must solve a vicious double homicide before he himself falls under suspicion. Matt Lee has to stay a few steps ahead of his own police force and everyone he's trusted in order to find out the truth.

Concentration camp survivor Victoria Kowelska finds herself involved in mystery, greed, and murder when she assumes the identity of a dead friend in order to gain passage to America.

A recently released ex-con gets involved in a fake kidnapping scheme that turns very real.

A Boston police detective investigates a series of gruesome decapitations of various college coeds commited by a helmeted, black-leather clad serial killer which leads him to suspect a well known anthropology professor as well as his female live-in assistant.

An American journalist arrives in Berlin just after the end of World War Two. He becomes involved in a murder mystery surrounding a dead GI who washes up at a lakeside mansion during the Potsdam negotiations between the Allied powers. Soon his investigation connects with his search for his married pre-war German lover.

A dabbler-in-crime and his assistant hire an ex-police reporter to recover some stolen papers.

A tight-knit team of FBI investigators, along with their District Attorney supervisor, is suddenly torn apart when they discover that one of their own teenage daughters has been brutally murdered.

After a car crash, a criminal psychologist (Halle Berry) comes to, only to find that she's a patient in the same mental institution that currently employs her. It seems she's been accused of murdering her husband -- but she has no memory of committing the crime. As she tries to regain her memory and convince her co-workers of her innocence, a vengeful spirit uses her as an earthly pawn, which further convinces everyone of her guilt.

When 4 year old Amanda McCready disappears from her home and the police make little headway in solving the case, the girl's aunt, Beatrice McCready hires two private detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. The detectives freely admit that they have little experience with this type of case, but the family wants them for two reasons - they're not cops and they know the tough neighborhood in which they all live. As the case progresses, Kenzie and Gennaro face drug dealers, gangs and pedophiles. When they are about to solve the case, they are faced with a moral dilemma that tears them apart.

Deadline is the story of the murder of an African American youth in rural Alabama that has gone uninvestigated, unsolved, and unpunished for almost twenty years. That changes when Nashville Times reporter Matt Harper (Steve Talley) meets an idealistic young blueblood bent on discovering the truth. Harper undertakes the investigation despite the opposition of his publisher, violent threats from mysterious forces, a break-up with his fiancée, and his father's cancer diagnosis.

Lt. Dave Robicheaux, a detective in New Iberia, Louisiana, is trying to link the murder of a local hooker to New Orleans mobster Julie (Baby Feet) Balboni, who is co-producer of a Civil War film. At the same time, after Elrod Sykes, the star of the film, reports finding another corpse in the Atchafalaya Swamp near the movie set, Robicheaux starts another investigation, believing the corpse to be the remains of a black man who he saw being murdered 35 years before.

A sheriff begins an investigation into the death of a local transsexual after hearing that high ranking politicians may have been involved. Although he is homophobic, his investigation causes him to be rejected by others, forcing him to seek help from the people he once despised.

A stranger in the increasingly strange city of San Francisco, Japanese crime novelist Aki is unsure of precisely what role she has to play in a real-life murder mystery involving ambiguous MacGuffins and amorphous identities. Unfolding in lonely places such as bookshops and hotel bars, Dave Boyle's moody thriller uncovers exhilarating new takes on genre conventions. Consequently, it's an alluring l'homme fatal who supplies Aki with the breadcrumb trail of clues that entices her into a labyrinthine plot of sinister dealings. In turn, the aging sheriff (veteran character actor Pepe Serna, fantastic in a rare leading role), who should rightfully be riding to her rescue, proves to be equally out of his depth. The game is afoot, the chase is exhilarating and the stakes are perilously high in this inspired neo-noir.

Radio talk show therapist Sonny Blake (Rose McGowan) moves back to her childhood home on seemingly idyllic Rosewood Lane after her alcoholic father dies. But upon arrival in the old neighborhood, Sonny discovers her neighbors are terrified of the local paperboy (Daniel Ross Owens). She thinks this is ridiculous, until she encounters the boy himself. It turns out that he is a cunning and dangerous sociopath, one who may have gruesomely killed her father - and others.

When a teenage girl says she's the victim of a secret network called The Sisterhood of Night, a quiet suburban town becomes the backdrop for a modern-day Salem witch trial.