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Thrillers are a genre that are produced by the global film industry worldwide. No matter where they live—in the North, South, East, or West—people love the thrilling, suspenseful, and adrenaline-pumping thrill of a well-written thriller.

Sadly, many people have never seen some of the best foreign thrillers in cinema history. On Letterboxd, a few of well-known thrillers have rated far fewer than 100,000 times. To put this into context, more than 200,000 people have already rated recently released thrillers on Letterboxd, including Saw X and David Fincher’s The Killer. Many critically acclaimed worldwide thrillers, from contemporary gems like The Chaser and The Guilty to timeless masterpieces like The Vanishing and High and Low, require additional exposure to a broad audience.

10. Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, a well-known piece of Hong Kong New Wave cinema, is a criminal thriller in which an undercover police officer joins a group of robbers who are trying to rob a jewelry store. Starring in City on Fire is Chow Yun-fat, who rose to prominence in Hong Kong cinema thanks to his parts in this and other films including A Better Tomorrow, An Autumn’s Tale, and The Killer.

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who was greatly impacted by Hong Kong cinema, found great inspiration in City on Fire for his first feature-length picture, Reservoir Dogs. City on Fire won Best Director and Best Actor out of ten nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards. City of Fire has a pitiful 12,000 ratings on Letterboxd.

9. The Chaser, a South Korean action film directed by Na Hong-jin, is about a disgraced ex-policeman who leads a prostitution ring. The ex-cop tries to find his daughters after a few of them vanish. The storyline of The Chaser was partially influenced by the murderous cannibalistic serial killer Yoo Young-chul, who killed about 20 women between 2003 and 2004.

The Chaser is a graphic movie that is not for the weak of heart; it does not hold back when showing the horrible things that serial killers do. The Chaser was a box office hit when it was first released, ending the year as the third-highest domestic grossing film in South Korea. Along with receiving positive reviews from critics, the movie took home about 30 accolades from its roughly 55 nominations. The Chaser has received only 57,000 ratings on Letterboxd.

8. One of the most popular crime movies of the 2000s was Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Many people might not be aware, nevertheless, that The Departed is a remake of the action-crime movie Infernal Affairs from Hong Kong. Infernal Affairs, co-directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, narrates the parallel stories of a police officer who joins the Triads and a Triad member who joins the police force.

At the Hong Kong Film Awards, Infernal Affairs received 16 nominations and won seven, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. Two more sequels were produced as a result of its movie office success and critical acclaim. 2010 saw Empire rank Infernal Affairs as the thirty-fifth best movie ever made in history. Infernal Affairs gets 79,000 ratings on Letterboxd, compared to nearly a million for The Departed.

7. Asger Holm, a police officer temporarily employed as an emergency services operator, is the main character of the Danish crime thriller The Guilty. The Guilty, the directorial debut of filmmaker Gustav Möller, is the pinnacle of cinematic simplicity. The whole movie is set in one place and mostly consists of Holm chatting on the phone about the tense circumstances surrounding the kidnapping of a woman.

The Guilty, which garnered 38 awards from more than 80 nominations, was praised for its outstanding lead performance by Jakob Cedergren, superb voice acting, and inventive sound design. This is a very remarkable accomplishment for a movie that was made for a pitiful budget of less than $500,000. Regretfully, the film The Guilty only has 72,000 ratings on Letterboxd, a far cry from the 324,000 ratings its shoddy Hollywood adaptation holds.

6. Knife in the Water, the psychological thriller that marks Roman Polanski’s directorial debut, centers on a married couple who pick up a hitchhiker en route to a boating excursion. When the couple invites the hitchhiker to stay on their yacht, tensions start to build and could have unintended repercussions.

Knife in the Water, which received widespread praise, took home the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Additionally, the movie received a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards and a nomination for Best Film from any Source at the BAFTA Awards. Polanski became one of the most sought-after auteurs in the world as a result of Knife in the Water’s popularity. Knife in the Water has received just 30,000 ratings on Letterboxd, despite being one of the most significant pieces of Polish cinema history.

5. Le Trou, the last movie Jacques Becker directed before he passed away a few weeks after filming was completed, is among the best jail escape thrillers ever made. Although the novel and the movie are based on José Giovanni’s book The Break, they were also inspired by a true story of a 1947 jail break at La Santé jail. Jean Keraudy, one of the non-professional performers in the cast of Le Trou, took part in the real jail break that the movie portrays.

The Nouvelle Vague was profoundly influenced by Le Trou and other Becker films, such Casque d’or and Touchez pas au grisbi. One of the top ten movies of 1960 was Le Trou, according to the renowned French journal Cahiers du cinéma, which published reviews from a number of Nouvelle Vague directors. Ironically, despite having barely 31,000 ratings, Le Trou is currently the 44th highest-rated picture on Letterboxd.

4. In the Dutch thriller The Vanishing, Rex and Saskia are a couple on holiday in France. Saskia vanishes after halting at a gas station, forcing Rex to look for his cherished companion incessantly. The Golden Egg, a novella by Tim Krabbe, is the basis for the movie.

Though The Vanishing took up the Top Foreign Films prize from the National Board of Review, maybe the biggest honor went to Stanley Kubrick regarded The Vanishing as the scariest movie ever made when he saw it. In retrospect, Time Out selected The Vanishing for its list of the best horror movies, while Empire listed it among the top 100 global motion pictures. On Letterboxd, The Vanishing has 81,000 ratings.

3. Z, a political thriller directed by Costa-Gavras, is based on Vassilis Vassilikos’ 1967 book of the same name. Fictionalized narratives of the 1963 assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis are presented in both the book and the movie. Greece was governed by a right-wing military dictatorship known as the Greek junta after the assassination.

Z was a huge hit, the first movie to be nominated for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film at the same time, with the latter title going to Z. Along with receiving nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, the film also won the Oscar for Best Film Editing. Z took home the Best Actor and Jury Prizes from the Cannes Film Festival. Time magazine named Z among the top 15 political films of all time in 2012. Z has received just 39,000 ratings on Letterboxd, making it the 149th highest-rated film overall.

2. Joint Security Area is a mystery thriller concerning the investigation of a gunshot event at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and it is based on Park Sang-yeon’s novel DMZ. Joint Security Area, directed by South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, is a classic piece of New Korean cinema. This movement is renowned for addressing social and political issues in South Korea using genre-bending aesthetics.

At the time of its release, Joint Security Area was the highest-grossing Korean film ever. It was an enormous hit. At the Grand Bell Awards, the film won five, including Best Film, out of 13 nominations. Joint Security Area was selected one of the top 17 films of the previous 17 years by Quentin Tarantino in 2009. Joint Security Area, with 55,000 Letterboxd ratings, has the fewest ratings of all Park’s major works.

1. Filmmakers are still influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s seminal crime thriller, High and Low. Toshiro Mifune plays a business executive whose son is abducted in the movie. But it turns out that the person who was actually taken was the kid of Mifune’s chauffeur. The question of whether or not Mifune will pay the ransom presents a moral conundrum.

High and Low has consistently garnered plaudits for its flawless shot composition, blocking, and narrative structure over the years. 2009 saw High and Low ranked as the thirteenth best Japanese film of all time by the esteemed Japanese film journal Kinema Junpo. The movie was also listed by Martin Scorsese as one of the important foreign films that aspiring directors should watch. With 99,000 ratings, High and Low is ranked sixth among the top movies on Letterboxd due to its high rating.