Rising on the heels of the 1960s spy boom was another genre cycle featuring loose-cannon organizational heroes: the modern police thriller, ignited by such hits as Bullitt (1968), Dirty Harry (1971), and The French Connection (1971). These films built up the justice-obsessed lawman into a virtual superhero fighting to protect society where official institutions have failed. Bullitt and The French Connection popularized a prime demonstration of the supercop's power: the extended, spectacular car chase.
Although the supercop had much in common with James Bond and other superspies of the 1960s, he operated in a harsher, more conflict-ridden world, closer to that of the anti-Bond spy films. One of the most significant aspects of modern police thrillers is their hellish vision of the modern metropolis, presented in lurid and violent terms made possible by the demise of the Production Code. The modern police thriller has been a remarkably durable movement, encompassing the popular Lethal Weapon (1987–1998) and Die Hard (1988–1995) series; major 1990s variants such as Speed (1994), Seven (1995), and L.A. Confidential (1997); and a significant portion of the influential Hong Kong action cinema, whose police thrillers (especially John Woo's Ying hung boon sik [A Better Tomorrow, 1986]; Die xue shuang xiong [The Killer, 1989]; and Lashou shentan [Hard-Boiled, 1992]) counterpoint the characteristic grittiness of the genre with extravagant, operatic doses of violence and melodrama.
A thriller genre even more dramatically affected by the liberalization of censorship was the horror movie. Led by both mainstream (Rosemary's Baby, 1968; The Exorcist, 1973) and low-budget (Night of the Living Dead, 1968; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974) hits, the horror movie experienced a period of unprecedented richness and innovation that lasted into the 1980s. Two factors were especially crucial to the horror renaissance: the explicitness of the films' visceral and violent content, which earned them the label "splatter" films, and the familiarity both of their settings (most resonantly, the zombie-infested shopping mall in George A. Romero's [b. 1940] Dawn of the Dead, 1978) and of their monsters, who tended to be less grotesque and more unsettlingly human than those in previous and subsequent manifestations of the horror film.
The horror movie boom was extended by the stalker film. Epitomized by the long-running Halloween (beginning in 1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) series, the stalker film typically depicts a group of young people being systematically slaughtered by a prowling psychopath. The stalker-film cycle retained the explicit gore and familiar, non-Gothic settings of 1970s splatter films but stripped away much of their ambivalence and subversiveness, depicting a more clear-cut, externalized conflict against monsters who are distanced, superhuman, and faceless. After a period of decline, the stalker film was rejuvenated by Wes Craven's Scream series (1996–2000), which added an extra layer of hip postmodern self-referentiality to an already highly self-aware subgenre.