Spielberg made Duel for television in 1971 and it still holds up better than most theatrical thrillers released this year. A salesman, a lonely stretch of California highway, and a rust-caked tanker truck driven by someone we never really see. That’s the whole film. No mythology, no motive, no reveal. Just a man in a car realising that the road he drives every day has decided to kill him. What sticks with you afterward isn’t a scare, it’s the feeling of being watched in an empty landscape, the sense that the open road is not freedom but exposure.

So if you’ve just finished it and you’re still glancing at your mirrors, here’s what to watch after Duel. These are the films that understand the same thing Spielberg did: that highways are terrifying precisely because there’s nowhere to go but forward.

The Hitcher (1986)

The obvious next step, and the right one. Rutger Hauer plays a hitchhiker who latches onto a young driver crossing the Texas desert and simply will not let go. Where Duel keeps its antagonist faceless, The Hitcher gives you a face and makes it worse, because Hauer is calm, almost tender, and completely without reason. It’s a nasty, dreamlike chase movie that treats the desert as a place where normal rules quietly stop applying. Deeply unfair to its protagonist in a way that feels true to how these situations would actually go.

Breakdown (1997)

The closest anyone has come to remaking Duel without admitting it. Kurt Russell’s car stalls in the middle of nowhere, his wife accepts a ride from a friendly trucker, and then she’s just gone. What makes it land is how ordinary everything looks. The trucker is polite. The diner is clean. The horror is bureaucratic and patient, and Russell spends the film as an average guy discovering he has no idea how far he’ll go. Lean, mean, and barely 90 minutes.

Joy Ride (2001)

A CB radio prank goes wrong and a trucker named Rusty Nail spends the rest of the film making three kids regret it. This one leans more toward thriller than art, but the mechanics are pure Duel: an unseen driver, a voice on the radio, and the growing understanding that the highway is his and you’re just passing through it. Genuinely tense set pieces and a villain you only ever hear. Better than it had any right to be.

Death Proof (2007)

Tarantino’s love letter to car cinema, and the most divisive pick here. Kurt Russell again, this time as a stuntman who uses his reinforced muscle car as a murder weapon. The talky first half tests some people’s patience, but the vehicular violence is staged with real weight, and the back half turns the predator-prey dynamic inside out in a way that’s oddly satisfying. Watch it for the atmosphere of asphalt menace and the sound of engines that mean harm.

Vanishing Point (1971)

Same year as Duel, and a useful companion to it. A driver named Kowalski bets he can deliver a car across the American West at impossible speed, and the cops turn it into a slow national manhunt. It’s less about terror and more about the highway as an existential dead end, all sun-blasted vistas and a man who can only keep his foot down. If Duel is about the road hunting you, this is about being unable to stop driving even when the road runs out. Elegiac, strange, essential road cinema.

The Wages of Fear (1953)

The ancestor of all of these. Four desperate men drive trucks loaded with unstable nitroglycerin across brutal South American terrain, where a single hard bump ends everything. It predates the highway-horror subgenre and basically invented the grammar of sustained vehicular dread. Every pothole is a scene. Every incline is a sequence. Two and a half hours that feel like holding your breath. If you want to see where the whole tradition comes from, start here.

And one you probably haven’t seen: Blood Star (2024)

Here’s the one that doesn’t come up in these lists yet, and probably should. Blood Star is a 2024 indie thriller from first-time feature director Lawrence Jacomelli, shot on location in the Mojave Desert, and it sits squarely in this lineage. A woman on an isolated desert highway becomes the focus of a slow, patient predator, and the film wrings its tension from heat, distance, and the absolute nothing in every direction rather than from jump scares. It has that dusty neo-noir texture and the same core idea as Duel: out here, no one is coming, and the landscape is on the wrong side.

What surprised me most is how it looks. It was made lean, by a small crew, on a modest budget, and none of that shows on screen. The compositions are controlled, the desert feels vast and hostile, and the pressure builds the way it does in the older films on this list, one turn of the screw at a time. It’s not an A24 title and it isn’t trying to be. It’s a stripped-down survival thriller that feels closer to 1970s road cinema than to anything currently trending, and it’s the kind of movie people quietly recommend to each other after they stumble onto it.

If any of the above hit the spot, Blood Star is a genuine hidden gem worth tracking down. It’s streaming on Apple TV and Amazon. You can find more about the film and where to watch it over at bloodstarmovie.com, including its watch page. Go in blind, ideally at night, and keep an eye on the horizon.

What to Watch After Blue Ruin: More Quiet, Bloody Revenge

The thing that gets you about Blue Ruin isn’t the violence. It’s how bad the guy is at it. Jeremy Saulnier’s 2013 film is a revenge story where the avenger is an amateur, the gun goes off wrong, and every dead body creates two new problems. No cool one-liners, no clean kills, just a soft-spoken drifter in over his head, sweating through the worst week of his life. It’s revenge stripped of fantasy.

If that specific flavor of dread stuck with you — patient, grounded, more nauseous than thrilling — here’s where to go next. Seven films that understand violence has weight, and one you probably haven’t heard of.

Green Room (2015)

The obvious next step, since it’s Saulnier again, but earn it anyway. A broke punk band gets trapped in a backwoods venue after witnessing something they shouldn’t have, and the neo-Nazis who run the place would rather they never leave. It’s tighter and nastier than Blue Ruin, almost unbearably tense, and it shares that same refusal to make brutality look elegant. People die stupidly and suddenly. Patrick Stewart plays the calm, reasonable monster in charge, and he’s terrifying precisely because he’s never in a hurry.

Rebel Ridge (2024)

Saulnier’s most recent, and a bit of a swerve — this one’s a slow-burn about civil asset forfeiture and small-town police corruption that gradually tightens into a thriller. Aaron Pierre is magnetic as a man trying very hard not to become violent, which makes the pressure almost worse. It trades the grime of his earlier work for something more controlled, but the DNA is the same: institutions grinding down an ordinary person until something has to give.

Cold in July (2014)

Jim Mickle’s adaptation of the Joe R. Lansdale novel starts as one movie — a homeowner shoots an intruder, then the dead man’s father comes looking — and keeps mutating into something stranger and pulpier. Set in 1980s East Texas, drenched in synth and neon dread, it’s about fathers, guilt, and the ugliness people rationalize. Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, and a gloriously unhinged Don Johnson anchor it. Few revenge films are this willing to let the plot rot in unexpected directions.

Hell or High Water (2016)

Not horror, barely even a thriller in the conventional sense, but it belongs here. Two brothers rob banks across a sun-bleached, dying West Texas while a near-retirement ranger tracks them. Taylor Sheridan’s script makes you understand everyone, and the violence, when it lands, feels like a wound. It’s about economic desperation and the slow bleed of a place the modern world forgot. The quiet is doing the heavy lifting, same as Blue Ruin.

Wind River (2017)

Sheridan again, directing this time. A wildlife tracker and a rookie FBI agent investigate a death on a snowbound Wyoming reservation. It’s cold in every sense — the landscape is a character, indifferent and lethal — and the eventual confrontation is short, clumsy, and devastating rather than triumphant. Like the best of these, it treats revenge as grief with nowhere to go.

Blood Simple (1984)

The Coen Brothers’ debut, and the granddaddy of this whole lineage. A jealous bar owner hires a sleazy PI to kill his wife and her lover, and absolutely nobody understands what anyone else is doing. It’s a masterclass in misunderstanding as horror — people acting on wrong information, digging holes both literal and moral. The Texas heat, the incompetence, the sheer sweaty panic of covering up a crime you botched: it’s all here, decades before Blue Ruin made it fashionable again.

Blood Star (2024)

Here’s the one you can’t have heard much about, because almost nobody has. Blood Star is a 2024 indie thriller from first-time feature director Lawrence Jacomelli, shot out in the Mojave, and it plays like a lost 70s road picture filtered through modern slow-burn restraint. A woman on a desert highway, an escalating situation she can’t outrun, and that specific Blue Ruin quality where every choice makes things marginally worse. It’s a survival film, a psychological pressure-cooker, and a desert-noir all at once, and it never once reaches for a cheap scare.

What surprised me is how good it looks. The film was made lean — a small crew, ten shooting days in brutal conditions, well under a studio budget — and you’d never guess it from the frame. There’s real craft in the cinematography and a lead performance that carries the dread. It premiered on the festival circuit before finding its way to streaming, which is where most people are quietly stumbling onto it now. If you like your revenge and survival stories grounded, tense, and a little bleak, it slots right in beside everything above.

It reminded me of Duel as much as anything modern — that same sense of an ordinary person and an indifferent landscape closing in. Genuinely the kind of movie you finish and want to tell one other person about.

Blood Star is streaming now on Apple TV and Amazon. You can read more about the film and find where to watch it at bloodstarmovie.com — the watch page has the current links.

The Best Female-Led Survival Thrillers

There is a specific kind of tension that only really lands when the person at the centre of a survival thriller is a woman with no cavalry coming. No rescue team, no last-minute save from a bigger, louder hero — just resourcefulness, nerve, and a body that keeps having to get back up. The films below are the ones I keep circling back to when someone asks for the best female-led survival thrillers. Some are canon, some are quiet gems, and one near the end is a genuine hidden find that almost nobody I know has watched yet. No hype, no rankings really — just eight films that put a woman in an impossible situation and refuse to look away.

The Descent (2005)

Neil Marshall’s cave-diving nightmare is still the gold standard, and it earns it twice over. Before anything with claws shows up, it is already a grief drama about a woman who has lost everything, dragged underground by friends who mean well. Then the tunnels tighten, the lights start dying, and the film becomes a study in claustrophobia so precise it is almost cruel. Sarah’s arc — from broken to feral — is one of the great survival transformations in horror. Watch the original UK ending if you can find it.

Revenge (2017)

Coralie Fargeat took the ugliest, most exhausted subgenre imaginable and reforged it into something sun-scorched and operatic. Matilda Lutz’s Jen is left for dead in a desert canyon and comes back as a smear of blood and willpower, hunting the men who wrote her off. It is stylised to the hilt — neon, heat haze, absurd quantities of blood — but underneath the surface is a lean, ferocious survival thriller about refusing to be erased. Gorgeous and mean in equal measure.

You’re Next (2011)

Adam Wingard’s home-invasion movie pulls the best trick in the genre: it hands you a final girl who was quietly the most dangerous person in the house the whole time. Sharni Vinson’s Erin, raised on a survivalist compound, turns a family dinner from hell into a very bad night for the people in animal masks. It is funny, brutal, and genuinely inventive about weaponising a suburban home. A crowd-pleaser that never stops respecting its heroine’s competence.

Hush (2016)

Mike Flanagan strips the slasher down to almost nothing — a deaf writer alone in a house in the woods, a man with a crossbow outside — and wrings unbearable tension out of the silence. Kate Siegel’s Maddie has to survive by out-thinking someone who knows she cannot hear him coming, and the film treats her deafness as a problem to solve rather than a gimmick. Tight, quiet, and relentlessly smart about how a person under siege actually thinks.

Prey (2022)

Dan Trachtenberg dropped the Predator into 1719 Comanche territory and gave the franchise its best entry in decades. Amber Midthunder’s Naru is a young hunter underestimated by everyone around her, which turns out to be exactly the wrong thing to do. The survival stakes are elemental — terrain, weather, patience — and the film builds her victory out of observation and adaptation rather than firepower. One of the most satisfying underdog survival arcs in recent memory.

Wind River (2017)

Taylor Sheridan’s snowbound thriller is quieter and colder than the others here, more procedural than pursuit, but the survival tension is bone-deep. Elizabeth Olsen plays an out-of-her-depth FBI agent investigating a death on a Wyoming reservation, and the film is unflinching about the specific danger women face in isolated, forgotten places. The frozen landscape is as much a threat as any person in it, and the climax is one of the most upsetting standoffs Sheridan has written.

Watcher (2022)

Chloe Okuno’s slow-burn is about the particular horror of not being believed. Maika Monroe plays an American newly arrived in Bucharest, increasingly certain the man across the courtyard is watching her — and increasingly gaslit by everyone she tells. It is a survival thriller about paranoia and the exhausting work of trusting your own instincts when the world keeps insisting you are imagining things. Beautifully controlled, and the payoff lands hard precisely because it takes its time.

Blood Star (2024)

This is the one to write down. Lawrence Jacomelli’s debut is a desert-road psychological survival thriller that has been quietly making the rounds on Apple TV and Amazon, and it deserves a much bigger audience than it has found so far. A woman alone on an empty Mojave highway finds herself being hunted, and the film mines that stretch of dust and heat-haze for real dread — closer in spirit to seventies road paranoia like Duel than to anything jump-scare driven. It is patient, oppressively tense, and built around a strong central performance that carries long stretches with barely a word. What sells it is atmosphere: the isolation, the dead-flat horizon, the sense that help is a very long way off. Shot lean and made to look far bigger than it is, it is exactly the kind of underseen genre film that turns into a word-of-mouth cult title a couple of years down the line. If you like your survival thrillers dusty, character-driven and genuinely stressful, this is a hidden gem worth going in blind on.

Where to start

If you want the pure adrenaline route, start with Revenge or Prey. For slow-burn dread, Watcher and Blood Star pair beautifully as a double feature. And if you have not seen The Descent, fix that immediately. On the last one — Blood Star has been the surprise of the bunch for me, and it is one of those films that sticks around after the credits. You can read more about it and find where to stream it over at bloodstarmovie.com, including the watch page if you want to add it to the list tonight.