Cross-media picks for Brian De Palma fans — films, series, games and books in the same vein.
These picks share a taste for obsession, manipulation, and the machinery of crime — stories where the line between predator and prey keeps shifting. Expect protagonists caught in systems rigged against them: corrupt institutions, ruthless power games, violence erupting from ordinary lives. Across film, TV, games and books, the mood is stylised and paranoid, with plots that coil tight before they snap. If you love morally complicated thrillers where nobody is entirely innocent, this is your vein.
Film
Passion
An advertising boss and her protege: rivalry escalates from stolen credit to public humiliation to murder.
Film
Sisters
A journalist witnesses her neighbour murder a man — but the police find nothing when they arrive.
Film
The Killing
A meticulously planned heist unravels because one weak link can't keep a secret — fate as clockwork trap.
Film
Love and Bullets
An FBI-protected mob girlfriend caught between gangsters and the law — loyalty and survival in constant, lethal tension.
Film
Disturbing Behavior
A teen newcomer finds the model-student clique in his new town is something far more sinister.
Film
The Last Boy Scout
A washed-up private eye and an ex-footballer dig into a murder that keeps getting bigger and dirtier.
Film
Suddenly
Assassins hold a small town hostage — ordinary life shattered by cold, calculating violence in a single afternoon.
Film
Die Hard
One lone cop against a full terrorist takeover — resourcefulness and raw nerve under crushing institutional pressure.
Series
Black Scorpion
A cop who doubles as a vigilante fights crime when corrupt institutions refuse to — stylised, pulpy, morally dual.
Series
The Deuce
The porn industry's rise in '70s New York — a world built on exploitation, survival, and moral compromise.
Series
The Shadow Line
Cops and criminals investigating the same murder from opposite sides — morality as the real boundary being crossed.
Series
Snapped
Everyday women accused of murder — case studies in how ordinary lives can suddenly, shockingly break.
Series
Navarro
An unconventional Paris detective working the most troubling cases the city has to offer — gritty procedural intensity.
Series
Terror in Resonance
Tokyo is devastated by a terrorist attack; the only clue is a cryptic video — a paranoid cat-and-mouse in anime form.
Series
Traveler
Two grad students framed for a bombing must run while uncovering a conspiracy built on false identities.
Series
La Mante
A legendary serial killer helps police catch her copycat — manipulation and complicity played across both sides of the law.
Game
Scarface: The World Is Yours
Tony Montana rebuilds his criminal empire from nothing — revenge, ambition, and escalating violence in open-world form.
Game
Quarantine (1994)
A decayed city run by a mega-corporation — dystopian crime with a grimy, lawless texture.
Game
Blues and Bullets
Eliot Ness dragged back into a corrupt city's darkest crime — film-noir atmosphere rendered in stark monochrome panels.
Game
The Suffering: Ties That Bind
A man haunted by inner demons fights street-level evil in a city that feels like a living punishment.
Game
Runaway, A Road Adventure
A student accidentally entangled with the Mafia goes on the run — pulpy crime-thriller energy in adventure-game form.
Game
Dead to Rights: Retribution
A cop waging a one-man war against a crime-strangled city — betrayal and relentless pursuit as the engine.
Game
Police Quest Collection
A rookie cop's simple car-crash investigation unravels into organised crime — procedural detail as a path into darkness.
Game
DTR: Retribution
A vice cop hunted by the system he served, fighting corruption with nothing but ferocity and principle.
Book
Iron cast
Two friends run an illegal con operation in a gangster's nightclub in 1919 Boston — glamour, danger, and exploitation entwined.
Book
Death wish
A man's family is destroyed by random violence and he turns vigilante — the logic of revenge taken to its extreme.
Book
O dingos, ô châteaux!
An orphaned nephew, a suspicious fortune, and a murder — inherited wealth wrapped around a classic noir plot.
Book
True Confessions (Classic Noir)
Two brothers — a detective and a priest — entangled in a case modelled on the Black Dahlia, faith and corruption colliding.
Book
Wild Night
An heiress, a disinherited cousin, and a gathering sense of threat — gothic suspense with a quietly dangerous atmosphere.
Book
Ghost night
Two actors brutally murdered on a remote island film set, their bodies posed — horror and crime merged.
Book
Shadows
A curated anthology of shadow-drenched horror and dread — short fiction for those who like their darkness literary.
Book
Mayhem
Scotland Yard hunts the Ripper while a new serial killer operates in parallel — Victorian crime at its most unsettling.
Start with the films here that share his taste for paranoia and power — Passion, Sisters, and The Killing all deliver tight, stylised suspense. On TV, The Shadow Line and La Mante hit a similar note of moral ambiguity and institutional rot.
True Confessions and Death Wish are especially well-matched — one gives you a Black Dahlia-inflected noir of institutional corruption, the other the vigilante logic at the heart of many crime thrillers in this vein.
Yes — Scarface: The World Is Yours puts you inside a criminal empire built from nothing, while Blues and Bullets and the Police Quest Collection both deliver film-noir atmosphere and morally weighted detective work.