Incredible. Easily the best movie (at the time of this writing at least) from Spain's Alejandro Amenábar, "Thesis" tackles that taboo topic of horror filmdom -- the urban legend of "snuff movies" -- with real Hitchcockian style. One of the best thrillers of the 1990s, it sadly didn't make much of a mark in the U.S. because it's a foreign language film. It did, however, launch Amenábar's career.

Torrent plays a grad student who decides to do a thesis on film violence. She asks one of her professors to dig through the university archives for the most violent movie he can find. When he stumbles upon a hidden room in the library, he discovers a strange videotape, which he immediately takes to a screening room. He's found the next day, dead from a heart attack.

After befriending a violent movie buff, Torrent decides to investigate the death and realizes that some kind of snuff movie ring is operating out of the university. The professor died from viewing one of the films.

Released the same year as "Scream," "Thesis" shares many similarities with that American classic. In fact, it's hard to imagine that one film didn't somehow influence the other, but the fact that they came out the same year seems to rule that out. Both films deal with the subject of violence in cinema, and how much is too much. Both feature characters who are over-obsessed film lovers. Of the two, however, "Thesis" is a better thriller and delves deeply into the sexual nature of violence, a place "Scream" didn't dare tread.

Not as much a horror film as "Scream," "Thesis" also isn't as original. The snuff movie concept has been done before in films like "Mute Witness" and, of course, the cult classic "Snuff."

But "Thesis" does things with the idea that had never been done before. While the film is slow to take off, when it finally does launch into its suspenseful second act, your eyeballs are guaranteed to be glued to the subtitles.

Amenábar would later direct the very good 2001 horror film "The Others."

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