The Watcher: The 10 Scariest Big Brother Movies

Three Days Of The Condor is frightening for one simple reason: It depicts how Big Brother and his all-seeing goons are just as prone to dissension and mismanagement as any mid-level corporation. Robert Redford plays a CIA member who comes across a plot within his organization to kill off several employees, a plan that goes haywire as Redford unravels it by the seams. Think about it: The powerful megaminds that could disrupt our lives with the flick of a wrist can’t even get their own shit together. If we’re going to be powerless against someone flipping a power-switch on our collective well-being, we’d fancy them to be competent to some degree. Which would you prefer: A killer with a swift hand who finishes the job as quickly and painlessly as possible, or one who unsurely wiggles the blade inside a cut until he gets his shit together?

Who knows, some day you might drink a bit too much and knock some disrespectful bouncer straight into a hospital, or pay a generous cable guy to illegally hook your tube up with the dirty channels. In reality, there’s no way to see into the future and know whether we’ll break any laws or not; in Philip K. Dick’s universe, though, a special division of the fuzz can do just that. Steven Spielberg directed this adaptation of a Dick short story, starring Tom Cruise as a cop who, using precognitive beings to see future events, arrests criminals before they actually commit their wrongful act(s). It’s a slightly altered presentation of a Big Brother scenario, one that puts BB into a police department and gives the idea a positive, lawful spin. Yet, since none of us know what the hell we’ll do in the future, the concept behind Minority Report is more than a little discomforting.

Even the most boring of guys deserve their own privacy. But for Jim Carrey’s character, Truman Burbank, in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, solitude is a no-go. It’s not that he’s such an interesting person, either; friendly and law-abiding, Truman walks through life obeying the rules and doing very little that should captivate the millions of viewers watching his life being simulcast as a reality TV show, without his knowledge. The thought of our every moves being seen by the same amount of suckers that religiously tune into The Real Housewives Of Cougarville is damn creepy. What goes on behind one’s bedroom’s closed doors should be his or her own business, especially when after hours programming begins on cable movie channels. God forbid some innocent little kid channel-surfed onto that.

Francis Ford Coppola directed this taut look at how, sometimes, it’s Big Brother types that experience the worst paranoia. Released in between Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, The Conversation follows a surveillance expert (Gene Hackman) who begins to worry that the couple he’s been assigned to bug will be murdered once his job is done. Overcome by his good conscience, Hackman starts flaking on his assignment, which gives his employer (Harrison Ford) the script to flip and start wire-tapping Hackman. When Big Bro is on the loose, nobody is safe—not even the dirtbags who’d invade your privacy for a few bucks.

Imagine this domino effect of bad fortune: Seeing that your wallet is full of lint, you punch those four digits into the ATM machine, but realize your accounts have been frozen. Then, after heading back home utterly confused and pissed, you discover hidden surveillance cameras all throughout the crib, which causes your wife (or live-in girlfriend) to send you packing. And the worst part is that you were totally defenseless against someone else’s complete upheaval of your world. In Tony Scott’s livewire and enthralling Enemy Of The State, all of that happens to Will Smith’s character, a lawyer who’s framed for murder by the National Security Agency. So what’s the moral of the story? The NSA, or any other magnanimous government outfit, can shut down your life with the ease of a finger swatting a fly. Makes you think twice about downloading that new Lupe Fiasco album illegally, doesn’t it?

It’s hard enough to have faith in government as is; every presidential election, it seems like people are voting between “acceptable” and “bad.” Basically, it’s a matter of picking one’s poison. The Parallax View, an intense thriller starring Warren Beatty, takes that kind of flimsy security up several notches, introducing a group known as the Parallax Corporation. Their mission: hiring assassins to terminate politicians’ lifelines. The movie’s set-up is chilling because it’s not far-fetched at all; buy any conspiracy theorist a cup of coffee and he’ll probably tell you about two or three such operations already plotting behind the scenes. Makes us glad we were too busy chasing tail to ever run for any student government positions back in the day.

Interestingly enough, when Zack Morris used this tactic to hear his crush Kelly Kupowski’s innermost secrets on Saved By The Bell, it seemed like a stroke of teenage genius. In the award-winning German drama The Lives Of Others, however, it’s disturbingly invasive. The main character, a Stasi captain living in 1984 Germany, is assigned by his superior to bug a playwright’s home and listen in on every word uttered between the scribe and his live-in wifey. In this case, a militant Big Brother is listening to everything, whether it’s a telephone call or offhand living room chatter. The Firm’s “Phone Tap” sounds like a love ballad by comparison.

Anyone familiar with Monty Python’s Flying Circus knows that cartoonist/filmmaker Terry Gilliam has one twisted mind. In addition to dreaming up strange and fantastical narratives and imagery, Gilliam also showed in 1985 that he’s a Nostradamus-like visionary with Brazil. The sci-fi classic is set in a futuristic world where machines are considered sacred properties by the government, and anyone who tampers with machinery is liable for arrest, or, even worse, catatonic imprisonment. Just think about all of the machines we use today, 26 years after Brazil was released. If Gilliam’s imagination somehow controlled our society, there could very well be armed federal agents pistol-whipping thirsty people for kicking busted soda machines, or aggravated office workers for punching screwy fax machines.

Big Brother situations can’t get much more grandiose than this. Introducing a simulated reality into the “they’re controlling and watching us” notion, Andy and Larry Wachowski’s seminal The Matrix illustrated a society that looks and feels real but isn’t at all. Computer programmer Neo (Keanu Reeves) and his neighbors are actually living in a made-up world created by machines to monitor humans and harvest their body heat as an energy source. The Matrix is the kind of intimidating movie that’s only momentarily upsetting because it’s so unrealistic. If only the film’s totalitarian machines could’ve brainwashed the Wachowski’s into forsaking their designs for a trilogy. The Matrix Revolutions is scary for all the wrong reasons.

The Thought Police—it’s what the Hip-Hop Police would’ve been called if more rappers practiced original ideas instead of following record labels’ trends. In this adaptation of the great George Orwell novel, the Thought Police oversee a dystopian society in which independent contemplation is illegal; Under their rule, keeping a diary or journal is a punishable crime. Furthermore, the Ministry of Truth’s workers rewrite history according the Ministry’s preferences, employed by Big Brother, whose face is broadcast on giant TV screens in vintage propaganda-spewing fashion. The fact that the term “Big Brother” originated with Orwell isn’t why we’ve ranked Nineteen Eighty-Four as top dog here—there’s nothing scarier than having free thought stripped away. In Orwell’s creation, we’d be tortured simply for daydreaming about freeing Charlie Sheen’s sexy ”goddesses” from the madman’s clutches and then having a celebratory three-way. So, in other words, there’d be tasers jammed into our throats right about now.