Conventions of a Thriller

What is a Thriller?

A thriller is a movie genre which follow specific devices in order to bulid a certain effect on the audience.In a thriller-genre film often, the narrative will centre around a crime. Many popular thriller films revolve around a serial killer on the lose. The films try to convey alot of action in order to 'thrill' the audience. This will often involve ordinary situations where extraordinary things occur.
Often the protagonist will ahve an exploitable weakness that the antagonist will take advantage of. this may leas the protagonist to be thrust into perilous situations in order to build up suspense and action in the movie. This is shown in Alfred Hitchcocks ''Vertigo'' where, in one particular scene, the protagonist, det. John Ferguson is chasing after his lover up a bell tower, despite being being a sufferer of acrophobia. Due to his fear, he is unable to continue after her. and sees his lover plunge from the top of the tower to her death when he becomes paralysed by a serge of vertigo- this is sometimes also a characteristic of the thriller gernre, where the movie is named after a difficulty of the protagonist.

Through out the movie, the antagonist will drive the protagonist deeper and deeper in to an intricate, often sinister plot, leaving the protagonist feeling hopeless. This will continue until the climax of the film when the protagonist finds a solution or a method to defeat the antagonist.

Themes of identity often play a big role in thriller genre. They are very common plot devices and include plots revolving arounf amnesia, mistaken identity and even doppelgangers. This theme plays a major role in the thriller ''identity'', which deals with a serial killer who has been given a death sentence and a lawyer who attempts to ahve this overturned by introducing new evidence that the killer suffers from dissocative Identity Disorder, or in other words, has multiple personalities.

Thrillers will often introduce enigma in the beggining of the movie, and then complicate them throughout the story until the climax. Enigmas are essentially mysteries of the plot- this can range from the audience not knowing the true identity of a killer, such as in ''Psycho'' to the audience finding out the identity of ther murderer immediately, but then the characters in the story have to find out who they are such as in ''Dirty Harry''. This plot device is known as dramatic irony and is also used in thriller-genre films to build suspense, as the audience knows more than the characters in the story, and then is able to be fearful for them.