Every aspiring actor and filmmaker should understand the thriller genre. Without an understanding of a genre’s conventions, aims, and renowned works and practitioners, creating such cinematic or televisual experiences yourself will be a struggle.
Overlap with horror and action makes the thriller genre slippery to define, and it also contains multiple subgenres – legal thrillers, supernatural thrillers, crime thrillers, and so on. Still, we tend to know a thriller when we see one thanks to the common artistic aims and conventions that make the genre so distinct. Let’s take a closer look at what makes thrillers so thrilling.
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The best way to define a thriller is by considering what it is trying to make its audience feel. As a general rule, a thriller provokes excitement and anticipation through suspense and the unknown.
“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible,” said Alfred Hitchcock, the legendary director of thrillers such as Vertigo, Rear Window, and North by Northwest. That’s a good place to start thinking about thrillers – they share common conventions, but they’re best defined by the moods they elicit.
Anticipation could revolve around anything from a complex web of political intrigue to a supernatural being. Thrillers are so seamlessly combined with other genres that variations abound, including:
- Psychological thriller
- Action thriller
- Crime thriller
- Political thriller
- Supernatural thriller
- Spy thriller
- Legal thriller
- Science fiction thriller
Common thriller genre conventions
Suspense
“There is no suspense in inevitability,” said Damon Lindelof, co-creator of The Leftovers and Lost.
He’s right: Suspense is rooted in uncertainty, and it’s crucial for thrillers to create excitement, apprehension, and mystery that keeps audiences engaged.
“In the nature of psychological thrillers, you want a situation to be such that you keep the audience guessing,” says director Kelvin Tong (Confinement, Rule Number 1). “I think the longer you can do that in a very plausible fashion, you increase the tension of a film.”
Whether revolving around the true nature of a murder suspect’s multiple personality disorder (as in Primal Fear), the identity of a double agent (as in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), or the unknown fate of an abducted daughter (as in Taken), what’s concealed matters as much as what’s shown.
Isolation
Protagonists in the thriller genre frequently experience a form of isolation. Think about work by acclaimed thriller director David Fincher. His violent fringe groups (Fight Club), serial killers (Mindhunter), antiestablishment wunderkinds (The Social Network), and recluses (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) are all in some sense isolated from the wider world.
Similarly, Jack Torrance in The Shining is isolated physically from the world and emotionally from his family, and Richard Kimble in The Fugitive is a hunted outcast. Thrillers often follow people placed outside the norm by occupation (homicide detectives, private investigators, or criminals) or medical conditions (sociopaths or psychopaths).
Some thrillers use isolation to reflect unpleasant societal truths, as Bong Joon Ho did in Parasite. Although initially invited into the home of the wealthy Park family, there are myriad invisible boundaries keeping the Kim family from that world.
“Korea, on the surface, seems like a very rich and glamorous country, but the relative wealth between rich and poor is widening,” Ho told the Guardian. “There are homeless people sleeping rough around Seoul’s central station…people who are in society’s blind spots.”
Plot twists
Thrillers are replete with twists, red herrings, and unreliable narrators – anything that can surprise the viewer and subvert expectations. “There are twists, turns, and a tonal pivot that reinvents itself every 10 or 15 minutes,” writer and director Drew Hancock told Far Out magazine about his science fiction thriller, Companion.
Gone Girl, The Sixth Sense, and 12 Monkeys are just a few thrillers famous for hinting at – while ultimately concealing – key information until their resolution.
Psychological depth
Much of a thriller’s drama stems from within a character’s (often troubled) mind. Themes of paranoia, addiction, abuse, and trauma are common, as are depictions of mental illness and personality disorders.
That lets actors dive into character psychology and inform performances with a full understanding of inner motivations.
Anthony Hopkins’ eerily compelling portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs is a famous example. “I could understand Lecter,” Hopkins told People magazine. “I could understand the mystery of the man, the loner, the isolated voice in the dark, the man at the top of the stairs who’s not really there.”
Rosamund Pike dove equally deep for Gone Girl, reading psychology books, watching documentaries, and even consulting a handwriting expert. “I developed a handwriting that would suit Amy’s personality and mutability – what she was trying to project versus what she is,” Pike told Entertainment Weekly.
The thriller genre is grounded in reality to elicit tension, whereas horror uses disturbing images and the abnormal, unexplained, or downright impossible to evoke fear and disgust.
“In a thriller – even though it may have supernatural overtones – everything has to line up right,” says Philip Eisner, who wrote horror films such as Event Horizon and thrillers such as Sweet Girl. “Everything has to be true.”
Thrillers generally:
- Have more developed, realistic antagonists. Compare the evil but possible psychopathic rapist Max Cady from Cape Fear, for example, to the supernaturally unstoppable Michael Myers from Halloween.
- Have faster pacing and more frequent plot twists, while horror builds tension and fear more gradually.
- Demand intellectual engagement from viewers to solve or anticipate outcomes, while horror relies on visceral reactions provoked by primal fears.
- Can include violence, but with the focus more on realism and psychological impact than shocking blood and guts. “If I’m going to make movies with violence,” Fincher told the Screenwriters Network, “the violence is going to be real.”
Don’t use “thriller” and “action” interchangeably. Thrillers may employ action film conventions, but they focus more on realism and tension.
Audiences still root for their protagonists, but thriller heroes aren’t the exemplars of strength or bravery seen in action movies, and they usually endure both psychological and physical challenges. In the same vein, action sequences occurring in thrillers will be more grounded in reality than the spectacular, physics-defying stunts in something like Mad Max: Fury Road or a Fast and Furious flick.
The Bourne Identity is a good case in point. Bourne possesses an action hero’s physical abilities, but memory loss makes him vulnerable and centres his journey on emotional and psychological struggles. Director Doug Liman included action sequences, but he used handheld cameras to make fights seem more real and discouraged camera operators from closely reading scripts so they’d follow rather than anticipate.
“I want to give the audience real experiences,” Liman told Den of Geek. “To make movies that transport you not only to a different place and time, but also put you in the car that Jason Bourne’s racing through the streets of Europe.”
- Psychological thrillers: Memento, The Silence of the Lambs, and Disclaimer.
- Action thrillers: Gangs of London, The Bourne Identity, and Léon: The Professional.
- Crime thrillers: Zodiac, Chinatown, and Prisoners.
- Political thrillers: All the President’s Men, The Diplomat, and Scandal.
- Supernatural thrillers: The Sixth Sense, The Devil's Advocate, and Fallen.
- Spy thrillers: The Agency, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Argo.
- Legal thrillers: Dark Waters, How to Get Away With Murder, and Primal Fear.
- Science fiction thrillers: Severance, Minority Report, and Donnie Darko.
