While thrillers traditionally are murder mystery stories or heists, stress-inducing films with twists and turns can belong to any genre. For instance, the publication Collider recently spotlighted some of the top thriller films with fantastical elements by releasing a ranking of the “7 greatest fantasy thrillers of all time.”
The list, published in July 2026, featured films like Sleepy Hollow from 1999, Ghost, released in 1990, 1994’s The Crow, and The Devil’s Backbone, which premiered in 2001. Collider put the 2019 Robert Eggers-directed black-and-white film, The Lighthouse, at the top of the list.
The film, which was co-written by Robert and his brother, Max Eggers, has a score of 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Robert Eggers Discussed Co-Writing ‘The Lighthouse’ With Max Eggers
During a 2019 Q&A panel at Landmark Theatres, alongside the film’s stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, Robert discussed writing The Lighthouse with Max. He was quick to clarify that he and his brother’s dynamic doesn’t resemble the volatile relationship between lighthouse keepers, Howard (Pattinson) and Wake (Dafoe), in the movie. He said the most “autobiographical thing” from the film was “sleeping in close quarters with flatulent colleagues” while he “was working in the dregs of the New York indie film world” at the start of his career.
In addition, he said that he and his brother threw themselves into researching “lighthouse keepers in the nineteenth-century.” He said it was relatively “easy to research lighthouses because people like lighthouses, so there’s tons of books available.” In addition, he explained that because “photography had been invented in the 19th century,” he and Max found “lots of photographic evidence to recreate the physical material world” for the movie.
Robert clarified that his and Max’s research didn’t end at lighthouses. As examples, he said that he and Max pulled from Herman Melville‘s writing, classic mythology, artists like John Darvill, Arnold Böcklin, and Sascha Schneider, as well as “the lighthouse keepers manual that Robert’s character mentions,” 1881’s Instructions to Light-Keepers, for inspiration.
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