Thriller Genre Paper

Mary Kate Gowl

Visual Literacy

Professor Hammond

3/10/10

Thriller Films

On a stormy night a girl sits alone in her house. Lights flickering, a suspicious noise comes from the basement (because its always the basement). She grabs a flashlight and ventures wearily into the darkness to investigate (queue suspenseful music). The lights continue to flicker as she descends the creaky basement stairs. She sees a figure. It is her high school sweetheart, strapped to a bomb with only five minutes left on the timer. The room goes completely dark and the only thing you hear is the ticking of the timer.

If the thriller genre is to be defined strictly, it is genuinely a film that relentlessly pursues a single-minded goal - to provide thrills and keep the audience cliff hanging at the 'edge of their seats' as the plot builds towards a climax. The tension usually arises when the main character is placed in a menacing situation or mystery, or an escape or dangerous mission from which escape seems impossible. Life itself is threatened, usually because the principal character is unsuspecting or unknowingly involved in a dangerous or potentially deadly situation. Plots of thrillers involve characters that come into conflict with each other or with outside forces - the menace is sometimes abstract or shadowy.

Thriller films are known to promote intense excitement, suspense, a high level of anticipation, ultra-heightened expectation, uncertainty, anxiety, nerve-wracking tension and of course resourceful heroes who must thwart the plans of more-powerful and better-equipped villains. Filmmakers have been combining these elements for almost as long as cinema itself.

The thriller genre did not fully emerge until the early part of the twentieth century but has relevant roots reaching back to the eighteenth century. Three literary antecedents are especially important: the Gothic novel, beginning with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765), whose horrific tales involved the reader in a new way, with an increased emphasis on suspense and sensation; the Victorian sensation novel, introduced by Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860), which adapted the sensational and impressive effects of Gothic fiction to a more contemporary, familiar context; and the early detective story, pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe (creator of C. Auguste Dupin, 1841) and Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes, 1887), whose adventures breathed an air of significant mystery into the modern world. The origins of the thriller genre can also be related to the rise of urban-industrial society in the nineteenth century, which created a new mass audience, along with new popular entertainment forms to serve that audience. One of the most important was the melodramatic theater, which placed a premium on action and visual spectacle, including suspenseful, last-minute rescues of heroes and heroines tied to railroad tracks, menaced by buzz saws, and dangled from steep cliffs.

In 1926 we were introduced to English film maker/director/legend Alfred Hitchcock. He helped shape the modern-day thriller genre, beginning with his early silent film The Lodger. Hitchcock is considered the acknowledged auteur master of the thriller or suspense genre, manipulating his audience's fears and desires, and taking viewers into a state of association with the representation of reality facing the character. He would often interweave a taboo or sexually-related theme into his films, and place an innocent victim into a strange, life-threatening or terrorizing situation, in a case of mistaken identity, misidentification or wrongful accusation (North by Northwest). He has either directed, produced, or wrote fifty-three thriller films in his career. Hitchcock was the king of the thriller movie; no one has ever been able to pull off the type of success he found as a director.

In recent years, when thrillers have been increasingly influenced by horror or psychological-horror exposure in pop culture, an ominous or monstrous element has become common to heighten tension. The monster could be anything, even an inferior physical force made superior only by their intellect (the Saw movies), a supernatural entity (The Amityville Horror), serial killers (Psycho), or even microbes or chemical agents (28 Days Later).

Since this genre provides many types of thrills there are many different sub-genres, fifteen to be exact. The most common sub-genre is the action thriller. An action thriller often features a race against the clock, lots of violence, and an antagonist. These films usually contain large amounts of guns, explosions, and large elaborate set pieces for the action to take place. These films often have elements of mystery films and crime films but these elements take a backseat to action. Notable examples are the James Bond films, The Transporter and the Jason Bourne novels and films. Another common sub-genre is the crime thriller. This particular sub-genre is a hybrid type of both crime films and thrillers that offers a suspenseful account of a successful or failed crime. These films often focus on the criminals rather than a policeman. Central topics of these films include murders, robberies, chases, shootouts, and double-crosses are central ingredients. Some examples include Seven and Reservoir Dogs.

Three hundred years later the thriller genre is still thriving and evolving. The most recent successful thriller is Martin Scorsese’ Shutter Island. The movie was released February 19, 2010 and grossed $40.2 million in that weekend. Even though the way movies are portrayed has changed, from the monotone hues of the violent shower scene in Psycho to the sex-slave kidnappings and hand-to-hand combat in Taken, the thrill and scare behind them has not. Many viewers are enticed by the thriller genre because it pulls them into a world that scares them to death. It’s a reality they can become a part of without actually being kidnapped, involved in a bank robbery, or staying at the Bates Motel. Even though the thriller genre dominates today, many films do not live up to expectations, which may suggest that the thriller must get back to basics, Psycho style, if it is to prosper. French filmmaker Jean Luc Godard once said that all you needed to make a film was a girl and a gun. I’m pretty sure he was thinking of a thriller.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOdPnIQYBq4

Works Cited

http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Romantic-Comedy-Yugoslavia/Thrillers-ORIGINS-OF-THE-MOVIE-THRILLER.html

http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Thriller_(genre)

http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/Suspense.php

http://www.filmsite.org/thrillerfilms.html

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000033/filmogenre

http://www.ucaecho.net/stories/index.php?id=752

http://www.timeout.com/film/features/show-feature/2970/