More like Madness
Cross-media recommendations across film, TV, games, books & music — picked by taste.
Madness drops an escaped convicted killer into the cramped world of a man, his wife and her sister — a trio already coming apart before the intrusion begins. The stranger doesn't create the dysfunction so much as expose it. The taste it signals is for genre work where threat is intimate rather than spectacular: sealed spaces (a cottage, an institution, a shelter) turned hostile, violence that arrives through the front door, and the psychological damage of cohabitation proving as disturbing as anything an outsider brings with him.
About Madness
Madness is a 1980 Italian drama erotic thriller film directed by Fernando Di Leo and starring Joe Dallesandro. A low-budget film, it was shot in just twelve days. It was first supposed to be directed by Mario Gariazzo. The film was the last film Dallesandro shot in Italy before returning to United States. The Luis Bacalov's musical score is mainly recycled from his scores for Di Leo's Caliber 9 and Maurizio Lucidi's The Designated Victim.
From the Wikipedia article Madness_(1980_film), available under CC BY-SA.
Series like Madness
Series
The Madness
A media pundit framed for murder after stumbling on a body — an ordinary life violently overturned without warning.
Series
Widows
Three widows who find their dead husbands' heist schematics and decide to pull the job themselves.
Series
Confession
A double-jeopardy case trapping a sickly man inside a legal bind he cannot escape.
Series
Psych-Hunter
A haunted-house dealer and a psychologist partner up to investigate psychologically charged crimes.
Series
Cracked
A psych crimes unit solving chilling cases where law enforcement and psychological disturbance overlap.
Series
Evil Minds
A gifted profiler left unable to work after losing someone during a campus serial-killing case.
Games like Madness
Books to read after Madness
Book
A rage to kill
Ann Rule examines real criminal cases for insight into the violent and predatory mind.
Book
Panic
A teen dance troupe loses focus when one of their own goes missing during rehearsals.
Book
The Burning Court
An impossible death with hints of the supernatural — danger hidden inside a domestic space.
Book
Wild Night
An heiress drawn into the trouble of a scandal-marked cousin — a woman pulled into another's dangerous world.
Book
A mansion and its murder
A young woman growing up inside the imposing mansion of a powerful banking family and its secrets.
Book
A Moment's Madness
A decision born of desperation that sealed a Viking widow's fate — one moment foreclosing all escape.
More films like Madness
Film
Insanity
A man posing as a cop who forces his way into a couple's new home — the same predatory domestic invasion.
Film
A Page of Madness
A man takes a job at an asylum hoping to free his imprisoned wife — confinement and obsession in an institution.
Film
Money Madness
A murderous bank robber hiding out in a small town — violence concealed inside ordinary civilian life.
Film
Forced Entry
A disturbed man who stalks, rapes, and murders women in their homes — the same violated private space.
Film
Panic
A marriage under severe strain, a midlife crisis, and killing as a vocation — domestic tension meets lethal danger.
Film
Slaughter Hotel
A masked killer stalking an institution for wealthy disturbed women — confinement and violated safety.
Frequently asked
What should I watch after Madness (1980)?
Fans of its claustrophobic home-invasion dread would enjoy Slaughter Hotel (1971), another Italian genre piece mixing institutional menace with horror, or Forced Entry (1975), which shares the same stalker-intrudes-on-domestic-life tension.
Are there any TV shows like Madness that mix crime with psychological disturbance?
Cracked (2013) follows a police unit that specialises in crimes rooted in mental illness, and Evil Minds (2015) centres on a profiler haunted by trauma — both carry the same unsettling psychology-meets-crime energy.
Is there a book with the dark, invasive menace of Madness?
The Burning Court (1937) delivers a similarly oppressive atmosphere — an 'impossible' murder in a sealed estate, laced with hints of the supernatural — making it a strong read for fans of the film's tense, trapped-victim mood.