Thriller is a wide genre of media, including books, television shows, and film. Thriller as a genre has many sub genres, for example; crime, political or gore. The thriller genre is speculated to have started with Homer's Odyssey, with the first noted use of a villain driven plot; who presents obsticles for the hero to defy. A 'stand alone' thriller is a film which keeps the audience on the edge of their seats for the entire film. an early form of suspence, comes in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories 'The Black Cat' where a cat's howling forces a man to confess to the police the killing of his wife, and also 'The Tell Tale Heart' where the halloucination of a beating heart forces the narrator to confess his crime of killing an old man, the two stories both use suspence to drive to the end of the story, suspence is now common in thriller medias, such as book or film, when a producer of media wishes to keep the audience hooked in.
The main theories of thriller codes and conventions are:
1. The transformed city; where an ordinary city becomes an enchanted place, where the rules of the universe can be slightly bent, and normality is exchanged for the extraordinary. A common occurence is when the protagonist fits perfectly into city life, but is ill equipped for the change, and must in themselves change to adapt and rise to the occasion.
2. The heroic romance; where the hero or anti-hero is forced to make super-human choices, and take super-human actions.The person will normally have to find it in themselves to change, and as the character progresses they become more than they were, sometimes this can carry a moral with it.
3. The exotic; here, an artifact or prop from far away, often the east, is found outside of the main plot, and has effect on characters. The exotic does not belong in the setting, a clear representation of this is in Se7en, where Paltrow's character is the foreign object, she personally says she doesnt belong there, and is at home in a more rural setting, she is not as a character integral to the plot, but as an object, she is totally central the the climax of the film.
4. Mazes & labyrinths; where the characters can find physical or metaphorical mazes, comes from the ideas of greek mythology. The mazes in a film are important, the physical mazes reference the greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, showing there is a beast to be found, and also that there is a large chance of becoming lost in the maze, metaphorical mazes in filmsare also an homage to the myths, which at their time were the hight of entertainment, using worshiped icons, in that sense, modern day thrillers are much the same, epic battles using stars who are worshiped by their fans.
5. Partial vision; where the viewer has crucial information hidden from them, such as an identity or location, which keeps the audience guessing. The point of partial vision is to keep the audience questioning them selves, if a silhouette is seen at a murder scene, the audience will try to piece the crime together, also, if the audience knows a small amount more than the characters then they feel somewhat helpless, as they can't help them to succeed.
6 Consealment & protraction; hiding ideas from the audience, and delaying a suspected outcome, such as a killing, or a bomb going off. There is no fun in knowing what is going to happen, if you know what is going to happen, there is no point watching the film, this is why the makers include protraction, to create tension, this means that the audience has no way of telling how a situation will turn out, creating a 'can't turn away' feeling.
7. Question & answer; not knowing what is about to happen keeps the audience on the edge of their seats, if something is certain to happen, the plot becomes boring and predictable. The abillity to keep the audience guessing thoughout the film is one alwaysed used at some stage in a thriller, thrillers are by nature twisted in plot, and unpredictable, the point at which the audience knows how the film will end, is the point at which they can walk away with nothing lost, so most of the time, all will only be answered right at the end of the film, usually in a climactic scene.
List of Codes and Conventions of thrillers
- Bad weather
- Shadows
- Villains
- Red herrings
- Quick editing
- Kidnap
- Ransom
- Murder
- Torture
- Crime
- Detectives
- Supernatural
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