Cross-media picks for Paul Schrader fans — films, series, games and books in the same vein.
These picks share a sensibility that fans of Paul Schrader will recognise: crime as symptom rather than spectacle, characters whose pasts ambush them, and a moral unease that refuses easy resolution. The mood runs intimate and austere — small people making catastrophic choices, grief that lingers, systems that grind. Whether it's a detective hunting a killer who weaponises sin, or a woman shunned for someone else's crime, the common thread is darkness examined without flinching.
Film
Star 80
A narcissistic hustler steers a woman toward fame as a Playboy Playmate, with fatal consequences.
Film
The Killing
A meticulously planned heist unravels when a conspirator's faithless wife betrays the whole scheme.
Film
Three Way
A small-time loser with secrets hijacks a kidnapping scheme, then tries to blackmail the real criminals.
Film
Deadly Attraction
One man's cascading bad choices pull everyone around him into ruin within a single year.
Film
Flesh and Bone
A man haunted by his father's crimes meets a woman directly connected to that buried past.
Film
Se7en
Two detectives hunt a serial killer whose crimes are modelled on the seven deadly sins.
Film
Torment
A hotel owner convinced of his wife's infidelity spirals into paranoid violence against every male guest.
Film
The Woodsman
A sex offender released after twelve years tries to rebuild a life his family has already abandoned.
Series
Dies Irae
Nazi officers perform a ritual sacrifice in 1945 Berlin, summoning forces that outlast the war.
Series
LOVED ONE
Through forensic medicine, the series quietly traces the love and grief that loss leaves behind.
Series
Beethoven Virus
Two musicians who abandoned their careers join a demanding conductor to build an orchestra against the odds.
Series
The First Man
Two women — one seeking revenge, one driven by desire — on a life-threatening collision course.
Series
Terror in Resonance
A terrorist attack devastates Tokyo and the only clue is a cryptic video; police scramble to decode it.
Series
Angels in America
AIDS, abandonment, and divine absence converge in a searing drama about suffering, faith, and survival.
Series
Intervention
Addiction's grip on real people and families is documented with raw, unflinching emotional honesty.
Series
Innocent Love
Shunned as the sister of an arson suspect, a woman tries to rebuild a life in a town that blames her.
Game
The Ratline
A gritty 1971 detective thriller tasks you with hunting Nazi fugitives through evidence and sharp deduction.
Game
The Suffering: Ties That Bind
A man battles the city's external evil while an inescapable inner enemy pursues him simultaneously.
Game
Amid Evil
Seven distinct episodes, each a different setting and enemy, in an over-the-top retro FPS.
Game
Close To The Sun
In 1897, a vast gilded ship holds secrets that threaten everyone who boards it.
Game
Quarantine (1994)
KEMO city has declined into a violent slum, and survival means driving through its brutal streets.
Game
Scarface: The World Is Yours
Tony Montana, stripped of everything by Sosa, claws back his empire with furious, criminal purpose.
Game
Blues and Bullets
Eliot Ness is pulled back into a city of corruption and can't stay retired from the fight for justice.
Game
Tender Loving Care
A suspense story shaped by your own psychology, blurring the line between viewer and subject.
Book
Iron cast
Two "afflicted" women run cons in a 1919 Boston gangster's club until the law closes in.
Book
Forever and five days
Two nursing-home workers who killed six patients in cold blood, told as true crime.
Book
The chill
A psychological study of female desire, the roles women play in love, and the priorities that govern them.
Book
Wild Night
An heiress drawn back to her scandal-marked, disinherited cousin finds that past wounds demand a reckoning.
Book
Led astray
A natural-born hell-raiser finds that the danger following him has finally claimed someone he loved.
Book
Ghost night
Two actors are murdered on a remote island set, their bodies posed in a macabre pirate-themed tableau.
Book
The Treatment
A couple found imprisoned and dehydrated in their own home draws DI Caffery into a predator's methodical horror.
Book
אותו הים
A widower's grief and his son's flight to Tibet trace the fractured aftermath of one family's loss.
Start with Se7en for relentless moral dread and obsessive detective work, or The Woodsman for an intimate study of guilt and attempted redemption — both feature damaged characters caught between a past they can't escape and a future that may not exist for them.
Mo Hayder's The Treatment delivers cold psychological menace through a detective unravelling a predator's crimes, while Forever and Five Days — a true account of nursing-home murders — offers a portrait of intimate evil more disturbing than any invented thriller.
Blues and Bullets puts you inside a noir detective's world of corruption and reluctant heroism, and The Ratline tasks you with hunting Nazi fugitives through evidence and deduction — both reward slow, methodical attention to moral weight.