Cross-media picks for Roman Polanski fans — films, series, games and books in the same vein.
The picks here share a sensibility that will feel familiar to fans of Roman Polanski: confined spaces that become traps, identities that erode under pressure, and the unsettling suspicion that ordinary life is concealing something predatory. From The Prisoner's Kafkaesque detention to Super-Cannes's gilded corporate dystopia, from Terror in Resonance's cryptic urban menace to I Married a Dead Man's identity swap gone wrong — each work turns a domestic or social surface into a psychological trap. Dread here is structural, not ornamental.
Film
What?
A young American adrift in a strange Mediterranean villa where nothing is as it appears.
Film
The Decameron
Ribald medieval tales of deception, disguise, and desire with a mischievously dark comic edge.
Film
Sabotage
A husband's hidden secret slowly poisons a marriage and puts an innocent young life at risk.
Film
B. Monkey
A woman's criminal double life collides with an unsuspecting man's safe, ordinary world.
Film
Fascination
A criminal holds two women hostage, only to find the real danger belongs to his captors.
Film
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker
Obsessive, suffocating love curdles into violence when a woman refuses to let her ward go.
Film
The Circus Burned Down, and the Clowns Have Gone
A director nearing fifty confronts creative exhaustion, failed marriages, and an ailing mother.
Film
Torment
Jealousy metastasises into full psychological collapse for a man who cannot silence his own mind.
Series
Beethoven Virus
Bruised ambitions and a tyrannical genius collide in the pressure-cooker world of a new orchestra.
Series
Terror in Resonance
Two anonymous terrorists leave cryptic clues in a decimated city, teasing police into a dark labyrinth.
Series
Texhnolyze
Three criminal factions fight for control of a subterranean city that its residents treat as a living force.
Series
Dies Irae
A wartime occult ritual summons something ancient into the modern world with catastrophic consequences.
Series
The Cesaronis
Class friction and unexpected romance in a working-class Roman neighbourhood — earthy and warm.
Series
The Prisoner
A man stripped of identity and kept prisoner by unseen forces — paranoia made architectural.
Series
Holocaust
A Jewish family's destruction under Nazism, told with unflinching intimacy across years of horror.
Series
Demons
Provincial murders in Tsarist Russia lead an investigator toward a revolutionary conspiracy hiding in plain sight.
Game
Close To The Sun
Tesla's opulent death-ship in 1897 hides a contagion — isolation and dread in every ornate corridor.
Game
Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo
A trauma-fractured writer chases a missing family through landscapes that may exist only in his mind.
Game
Kara no Shoujo
Serial murders in 1950s Tokyo draw a private detective into an investigation that is also deeply personal.
Game
The Ratline
A gritty 1971 detective thriller hunting Nazi fugitives — evidence, deduction, and moral reckoning.
Game
Black Mirror (2017)
Ancestral secrets in a Scottish manor corrode one man's grip on reality generation by generation.
Game
HORROR TALES: The Wine
A forsaken Mediterranean island where beauty and dread coexist in every abandoned corner.
Game
The Train
An hour-long life compressed into choices — intimacy and consequence in a very small space.
Game
Shadows on the Vatican Act I: Greed
A compromising briefcase, Vatican corridors, and a conspiracy that punishes those who look too closely.
Book
Wild Night
An heiress entangled with a beautiful, scandal-marked cousin — old secrets surface with lethal momentum.
Book
Iron cast
Two hemopaths run an underground illusion act in a 1919 Boston gangster club — until the law arrives.
Book
Flesh and blood
A Greek immigrant patriarch's family fractures along fault lines of sex, money, and generational revolt.
Book
The chill
A psychological study of feminine desire that probes the hidden dynamics beneath romantic roles.
Book
Super-Cannes
An elite business-park above Cannes conceals violence beneath every luxurious, surveilled surface.
Book
I married a dead man
A pregnant woman assumes a dead woman's identity — a trap that closes around her one comfort at a time.
Book
Die Teufelin. Großdruck. Roman
Scorned and discarded, a woman engineers meticulous revenge — cold, deliberate, and quietly devastating.
Book
The Celluloid Closet
A landmark study of how cinema has coded, hidden, and caricatured queer lives across film history.
Start with The Prisoner for Kafkaesque dread, Torment for psychological unravelling, and Fascination for Gothic menace — each carries that sense of a normal world quietly curdling into something dangerous.
Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard turns a gleaming European business park into a hotbed of sanctioned violence, while I Married a Dead Man traps its protagonist in a stolen identity — both share that taste for suffocating social traps.
Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo follows a trauma-shattered writer through shifting reality, and Kara no Shoujo investigates serial murders in 1950s Tokyo — both reward the same close, paranoid attention those films demand.