The Thriller Genre

Thrillers

 

Thrillers are a very wide genre of film that can include sub genres such as gangster movies, spy films, sci fi, detective films, crime and more. I love thrillers because they're movies designed to keep you interested, if they don't keep you on the edge of your seat throughout then they're not doing their job right. This makes the thriller genre one that leaves very little room for error. The entire genre is built on suspense, which must be delivered else the entire movie falls apart. Thrillers, often being very cynical tend to portray society or the world as dark and unforgiving. A thriller that is a large Hollywood blockbuster usually do this too, but they often swap out the dark endings for a more upbeat optimistic conclusion to the film. Often in thrillers you'll find that important information is withheld from the audience in the movie, until near the conclusion of the film, the audience sometimes knows this, sometimes we're just given hints that something happening in the story is not quite right, which excites us more to find out what the twist is.

Fantastic examples of thrillers using this technique of long drawn out suspense would be movies like Fight Club, Oldboy or The Usual Suspects.

 

  

The preferred reading for an audience of a thriller is in the name. We want the audience to be thrilled, to feel tense, excited or anticipant. A thriller must succeed in this or it will fall short of its potential. This brings me to my next point, the fact that a good thriller creates suspense and mystery for the audience, it demands your attention throughout, it requires active spectatorship from the audience, which is one of the reasons I love this genre, because they force the watcher to think about what they are watching. Because of this thrillers are not often easy, laid back watches for the passive spectator.
For example in Oldboy and Fight Club we are thrown into the minds of the main characters, we learn things as they do, anything that they don't know, we won't know either, information is withheld until the character learns it.

 

The idea of active spectatorship means that each viewer is different and that each person will react to the material they are watching differently than the next. Audiences do not simple absorb what they watch without thinking about it.

Passive spectatorship is something that was suggested by the Hypodermic Needle theory. The idea that the audience simply sits back and accepts the media that is delivered to them without thought.

 

Some film makers attempt to turn the audience into passive spectators while watching their movies, for example a movie like Transformers, an action movie directed by Michael Bay. Transformers does not demand much thought from the audience. There are clear protagonists (the autobots) and antagonists (the decepticons). The film never stops to ask why the bad guys are doing what they're doing, they just want to destroy all humans, that's all you need to know.

If a spectator is truly passive then it is much easier for them to go away from your movie with the creators preferred reading. That being, that the movie was good and enjoyable to watch.

 

Others encourage make the audience actively spectate, make them pay attention and think about what they are viewing. Thrillers do this. For example in the movie Fight Club we are not shown a clear antagonist and protagonist. The bad guy can be a good guy and the good guy can be the bad guy. The ideologies of anarchy are presented to us very convincingly by Tyler Durden, but then the counter argument is presented to us by the Narrator. We understand what Tyler Durden believes, we see the sense in it, but the Narrator allows us to also see the madness. It presents two points of view and lets the viewer make their own decision, this is active spectatorship.