Thriller film
– discuss] The other ten super-genres are action, crime, fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, slice of life, sports, war, and western.
[9] For Alfred Hitchcock, a director very associated with the genre, he proclaimed that the whodunnit generated "the kind of curiosity that is void of emotion, and emotion is essential ingredient of suspense" and thus for Hitchcock, "mystery is seldom suspenseful"[10] In their discussions on the political thriller, Pablo Castrillo and Pablo Echart stated in 2015 that the concept of a thriller as an overarching, broad category is "traditionally unclear" due to the varied definitions between authors, with its "boundaries often blurred, overlapped, and hybridized with other genres.
"[17] Similarly, the adventure film is predominantly set in an environment that is already exotic and primitive, and removed form the realm of mundane and modern-day urban existence.
[21] Due to what Rubin describe as a "wide, imprecise scope", it is unwieldy to attempt a comprehensive history of individual genres, including the thriller, and suggests it better to view the style in terms of cycles.
[23] Elements of the thriller are traced to the earliest gothic novel with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) which led to Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797).
[24] The second literary form that predated thrillers was the Victorian sensation novel, starting with Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859–1860) which stripped the gothic genre of its mysticism and brought to a contemporary time closer to everyday life.
[30] It contained elements of the heist film with its depictions of ingeniously planned robberies, as well as relying on the thriller's technique of accelerated motion.
[40] Lang's Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) was described by Rubin as an important part of the development of the thriller with its "duplicitous, labyrinthine network of decadent nightspots and secret dens that are linked together by murky thoroughfares, twisting back alleys and subterranean passages.
"[41] Lang's later film Spies (1928) extensively used crosscutting not only to enhance suspense and draw thematic parallels, but also to develop what Rubin described as a "paranoid vision of a world where everything seems to fit together as part of an ever-widening web of conspiracy".
[47] Universal Pictures was the leader of the horror genre in the early 1930s with its expressionist-derived atmosphere that started with two big hits film: Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931).
[55][56] These ranged from B-film detectives such as Michael Shayne, The Falcon, Boston Blackie, the Crime Doctor as well as modernized Sherlock Holmes stories having him battle Nazis.
[60] These films eventually began toning down their factuality to be applied to more noir styles, such as with Kiss of Death (1947), The Street with No Name (1948), and He Walked by Night (1949).
[60] Rubin found that placing these films in actual locations increased the tension of the ordinary world opposed to the limited confines of the studio sets.
[75] The plots and themes of these films would be re-worked into later directors such as Jonathan Demme (Last Embrace (1979)), Brian de Palma (Dressed to Kill (1980), Body Double (1984), Obsession (1976)) and Curtis Hanson (The Bedroom Window (1987)).
[80] The influence of the French New Wave was seen on American thrillers such as Mickey One (1965), Point Blank (1967) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) as well as later films (Sisters (1972), Blue Velvet (1986), Reservoir Dogs (1992)).
The genre was dramatically revitalized by the surprised hit Dr. No (1962), which led to increasingly expensive and lucrative sequels as well as spearheading a 1960s spy craze in cinema and mass media.
[88] Police thrillers returned to popularity around the period of law-and-order issues between 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns through a general swing towards the right in the United States due to the Vietnam War.
[89] Early films in the cycle included Madigan (1968), The Detective (1968), Coogan's Bluff (1968) and Bullitt (1968), the latter being more successful financially than any the previously mentioned thrillers.
Bullitt's producer Philip D'Antoni featured even more elaborate variations in his later productions such as The French Connection (1971) and The Seven-Ups (1973) as car chases became staple to modern police thrillers.
[92] The influence of the police thriller was long lasting, leading into the popular Die Hard and Lethal Weapon film series and attaching itself to other genres such as science fiction (Mad Max, Blade Runner, RoboCop), and comedy (48 Hrs.
[96] A cycle of these films included Executive Action (1973) about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, The Parallax View (1974) about a sinister corporation linked to a series of political murders, and others like The Conversation (1974) and Winter Kills (1979).
[97] A thriller-related movement in the 1970s was the disaster film, which came with the great financial success of Airport (1970), about an airplane crippled by a bomb that struggles to land in a snowstorm.
Rob Reiner's Misery (1990), based on a book by Stephen King, featured Kathy Bates as an unbalanced fan who terrorizes an incapacitated author (James Caan) who is in her care.
A famous example is Jonathan Demme's Best Picture–winning crime thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—in which young FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) engages in a psychological conflict with a cannibalistic psychiatrist named Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) while tracking down serial killer Buffalo Bill—and David Fincher's crime thriller Seven (1995), about the search for a serial killer who re-enacts the seven deadly sins.
The Chancellor Manuscript and The Aquitaine Progression by Robert Ludlum fall into this category, as do films such as Awake, Snake Eyes, The Da Vinci Code, Edge of Darkness,[107] Absolute Power, Marathon Man, In the Line of Fire, Capricorn One, and JFK.
Some examples of crime thrillers involving murderers are Seven,[109] No Country for Old Men, The French Connection, The Silence Of The Lambs, Memento, To Live and Die in L.A., Collateral, and Copycat.
The genre includes such films as Body Heat, Sea of Love, Basic Instinct,[114] Chloe, Disclosure, Dressed to Kill, Eyes Wide Shut, In the Cut, Lust, Caution, and Single White Female.
[118] The Alfred Hitchcock films Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, and Strangers on a Train, as well as David Lynch's bizarre and influential Blue Velvet, are notable examples of the type, as are The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Machinist,[119] Shutter Island, Mirrors, Insomnia, Identity, Gone Girl, Red Eye,[120] Phone Booth, Fatal Attraction, The River Wild,[121] Panic Room,[122] Misery, Cape Fear, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Funny Games.
Examples include Fallen,[128] Frequency, In Dreams,[129] Flatliners, The Skeleton Key,[130] What Lies Beneath, Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense,[131] The Gift,[132] The Dead Zone, and Horns.
Examples include WarGames, The Thirteenth Floor, I, Robot, Source Code, Eagle Eye, Supernova, Hackers, The Net, Futureworld, eXistenZ, and Virtuosity.
