There is a specific ache that Badlands leaves behind. Terrence Malick took a real 1950s killing spree, handed it to Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, and filmed it like a half-remembered dream: flat prairie light, a bored girl’s voiceover, a boy who thinks he is James Dean and is really just empty. The violence is almost casual. The landscape does the mourning. If you have been chasing that feeling ever since, a whole lineage of American road cinema keeps circling the same territory. Here are seven films that live in that space, and one you probably have not heard of yet.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The ancestor of everything on this list. Arthur Penn’s film is where the young-lovers-on-a-crime-spree template got its modern shape. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are gorgeous and doomed, and the movie flirts with romance right up until the moment it turns the road into a slaughter. Malick clearly watched this closely. The banjo-scored getaways and dusty Depression backroads are the same DNA, just with the glamour dialed higher and the final reckoning far more brutal.
The Hitcher (1986)
Strip the romance out of the outlaw road movie and you get this. Robert Harmon’s lean, mean thriller puts C. Thomas Howell alone on an empty desert highway with Rutger Hauer, who plays a hitchhiker of pure, unexplained malevolence. There is no psychology to hide behind here, just a car, a road, and a predator who keeps reappearing like a bad thought. It trades Malick’s lyricism for dread, but the setting is identical: that vast, indifferent American nowhere where a person can simply vanish.
Wild at Heart (1990)
David Lynch’s contribution to the lovers-on-the-run canon is the strangest entry here and proudly so. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern tear across the South in a haze of snakeskin jackets, Elvis crooning, and lurking violence, all of it soaked in Lynch’s usual sense that something is rotting just under the surface. It is more feverish than Badlands, but the core is the same: two young people convinced their love can outrun the country’s ugliness, and a road that has other plans.
Kalifornia (1993)
An underrated one that deserves a bigger reputation. A writer and his photographer girlfriend share a cross-country ride with another couple to research serial killers for a book, not realizing one of their passengers is the real thing. Brad Pitt is genuinely unsettling as Early, all charm curdling into menace, and the film keeps tightening as the miles pass. It literalizes the Badlands dynamic, the ordinary person magnetized by a charismatic killer, and drags it into grimy, sun-bleached daylight.
True Romance (1993)
Tony Scott directing a Quentin Tarantino script, so it is slicker and more romantic than most of this list, but the bones are pure outlaw road movie. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette fall in love, end up with a suitcase of stolen cocaine, and light out for the coast with everyone in America chasing them. Where Malick was cool and detached, this one is warm and hopeful, almost stubbornly so. It is the version of the story that lets you believe the lovers might actually make it.
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Oliver Stone took the Badlands premise, ran it through a blender, and set the blender on fire. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are Mickey and Mallory, media-anointed spree killers roaring across a Southwest rendered in shifting film stocks, animation, and sitcom parody. It is loud where Malick is quiet and hysterical where he is numb, but the satire is aimed at the exact same thing: America’s helpless fascination with beautiful young people who kill.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The Coen Brothers’ masterpiece is the most restrained film here and, for many, the closest in spirit to Malick’s chilly fatalism. A man finds a bag of money in the West Texas desert and spends the rest of the film being hunted by Anton Chigurh, a killer as inexorable as weather. There is no romance and barely any music, just the wind, the scrub, and a landscape that swallows people whole. If Badlands asked what it means when violence feels random and the country just shrugs, this is the film that answers it decades later.
And one you have probably missed: Blood Star (2024)
If you have worked through the obvious picks and still want that specific blend of open highway, desert isolation, and mounting dread, Blood Star is worth tracking down. It is a 2024 indie psychological survival thriller from first-time feature director Lawrence Jacomelli, shot on location in the Mojave, and it slipped out quietly enough that most people who would love it have never heard of it. The connection to everything above is the land itself: the same endless American nowhere, the same sense that once you are on that road, nobody is coming for you.
It is not an A24 film and is not trying to be one. What it shares with Badlands and No Country is a patience with silence and heat, a willingness to let tension build off a single figure against a huge empty horizon rather than a jump scare. The cinematography punches well above what you would guess the budget was, and the desert reads as genuinely hostile rather than pretty. It leans more toward survival and pursuit than doomed romance, closer to The Hitcher on the map, but the lineage is unmistakable.
If that sounds like your kind of thing, it is streaming on Apple TV and Amazon. There is more on the film and where to watch it over at bloodstarmovie.com, including its watch page. File it next to the ones above and see if it sticks with you the way Badlands did.