Thriller (genre)
Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety.
Roots of the genre date back hundreds of years, but it began to develop as a distinct style in the 1800s and early 1900s with novels like The Count of Monte Cristo (1848) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915).
Writer Vladimir Nabokov, in his lectures at Cornell University, said: In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine.
But what gives the variety of thrillers a common ground is the intensity of emotions they create, particularly those of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and breathlessness, all designed to generate that all-important thrill.
[8] Common methods and themes in crime and action thrillers are ransoms, captivities, heists, revenge, and kidnappings.
Common elements of science-fiction thrillers are killing robots, machines or aliens, mad scientists and experiments.
[9] Characters may include criminals, stalkers, assassins, innocent victims (often on the run), menaced women, psychotic individuals, spree killers, sociopaths, agents, terrorists, police, escaped convicts, private eyes, people involved in twisted relationships, world-weary men and women, psycho-fiends, and more.
[12] Hitchcock's films often placed an innocent victim (an average, responsible person) into a strange, life-threatening or terrorizing situation, in a case of mistaken identity or wrongful accusation.
These usually tough, resourceful, but essentially ordinary heroes are pitted against villains determined to destroy them, their country, or the stability of the Free World (especially if it is set during the Cold War).
[14][17] The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) is a swashbuckling revenge thriller about a man named Edmond Dantès who is betrayed by his friends and sent to languish in the notorious Château d'If.
The first recognizable modern thriller was Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands (1903), in which two young Englishmen stumble upon a secret German armada preparing to invade their homeland.
[18] The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is an early detective thriller by John Buchan, in which an innocent man becomes the prime suspect in a murder case and finds himself on the run from both the police and enemy spies.
[19] Fritz Lang's M (1931) is regarded as a groundbreaking psychological thriller, introducing innovative suspense-enhancing audiovisual techniques that have become standard and ubiquitous ever since.
The plot falls apart due to the ineptness of the conspirators, and Gilles ends with the protaganist leaving to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
The Twilight Zone consists of suspenseful unrelated dramas depicting characters dealing with paranormal, futuristic, supernatural, or otherwise disturbing or unusual events.
