Thriller The Genre

Thriller (genre)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A common theme in thrillers involves innocent victims dealing with deranged adversaries, as seen in Hitchcock's film Rebecca (1940), where Mrs. Danvers tries to persuade Mrs. De Winter to

leap to her death.

 

Thriller is a broad genre of literature, film, and television programming that uses suspense, tension and excitement as the main elements.^[1] Thrillers heavily stimulate the viewer's moods giving them a high level of anticipation, ultra-heightened expectation, uncertainty, surprise, anxiety and/or terror. Thriller films tend to be adrenaline-rushing, gritty, rousing and fast-paced. Literary devices such as red herrings, plot twists and cliffhangers are used extensively. A thriller is a villain-driven plot, whereby he or she presents obstacles that the protagonist must overcome.<sup>[2][3]


Above is the Wikipedia definition of a thriller. As we are now doing an evaluation and I have been writing up previous evaluations of style models I thought it would be quite effective to look back and see how we have adhered to the genre, as this is also a question in our evaluation. Wikipedia above states that thrillers use suspense and tension, this was something blatantly seen in all style models and something we really wanted to strive to achieve. To do this we had to use music and editing, stocato to legato can transfer the piece in seconds and we used this to our advantage. Quick cuts can also alter the suspense as the pace evokes tensions. Although we subverted the "fast paced" part if you look at our piece as a whole, the climax of our piece is extremeley fast paced and would not have the effect if we didnt create the anxiety and uncertainty leading up to this to allow for surprise.</sup>