Research into the history of thriller films - Miss Georgiou

Thriller Genre 

Thriller is a vast genre which is used in film, literature and television programming. The characteristics of thriller genres are suspense,tension and excitement. This particular genre stimulates the audience's mood giving them an immense level of anticipation and heightened expectation. The fast pace film releases adrenaline in the audience making it extremely rousing and tense. Thrillers were immensely crowd pleasing throughout the years. For example well known thrillers in film , Television and literature would be red riding hood, jack the ripper and the godfather. All these films have the key elements which are conventional to thrillers. Directors and writers have all developed the thriller genre over the years which we will see in the description.

1920-1930
This period of film was most memorable as Alfred Hitchcock introduced a set of films which were extremely popular with the audience of the 90's. The 39 steps was the most crowd pleasing in the sense of mystery and crime. From then on films began developing into a similar style. In 1936 sabotage was released in cinema which's plot described a scotland yard detective discovering a mystery so from this we can see that Hitchcock's the 39 steps resemblance and from this he slowly began making the thriller's darker and more gory.

 The thriller genre has developed in the last 30 years, mainly because there is new technology which is more advanced and up to date.
The thriller movies created between the 1970's - 1980's were more psychological and were mainly based on the audiences fear which created a real relationship between the audience and the movie, whereas now, there is so much blood and gore, movies in the 1980's were more scary without being disgusting.

1970-1980's Movies:

2008-2012 Movies:

For example the film, 'the untouchables' (1986), keeps the audience in suspense and in tension as the film is set out in an ordinary modern setting which reinforces the thriller genre to be more 'realistic', the on screen sound helps to produce the effect of suspense and tension,which also reflects back on the audience's fear which is 'realistic'.

By comparing the film 'the untouchables' and the film 'saw' you can see a huge development between these films, as the untouchables does not show a huge amount of blood, the blood and violence is very minimum, whereas a latest film 'saw' has an extended amount of blood being portrayed, which reinforces my point on todays films having so much more blood and gore, this is a reason to why there are many different thriller sub genres.

Conspiracy Thriller

In this sub genre the protagonist must confront a large, powerful organization whose threat only he sees. Usually he must do so alone.

Crime Thriller

This sub genre focuses on crime, and is usually from the criminal’s point of view. Physical action and eluding the police take the place of gathering evidence and trying to discover the criminal.

Disaster Thriller

In this sub genre usually a natural disaster is taking place, and the antagonist is either trying to stop the disaster, the extent of the disaster, or just save themselves before time runs out and the disaster has run its course.

Psychological Thriller

Elements that are related to the mind or processes of the mind; they are mental rather than physical in nature. Sometimes the suspense comes from within one solitary character where characters must resolve conflicts with their own minds. Usually, this conflict is an effort to understand something that has happened to them. These conflicts are made more vivid with physical expressions of the conflict in the means of either physical manifestations, or physical torsions of the characters at play.

Action Thriller

An action thriller movie is mainly focusing on the action which takes part in the film but has thriller elements within the film.