Conventions of the Thriller Genre

Gianluca & Jake

What is a Thriller?

The aim of the thriller is to create suspense and excitement for the audience, it should keep the audience engaged and on the edge of their seats. The plot normally builds towards some sort of climax.

Thrillers include numerous, often overlapping sub-genres.

Thrillers are characterized by fast pacing, frequent action, and resourceful heroes who must put a stop to the plans of more powerful and better equipped villains.

Literary devices such as suspense, red herrings and cliff-hangers are used extensively.

Characteristics

Thrillers often overlap with mystery stories, but are distinguished by the structure of their plots.

Thrillers occur on a much grander scale: the crimes that must be prevented are serial or mass murder, terrorism, assassination or the overthrow of governments.

Thrillers often take place wholly or partly in exotic settings such as foreign cities, deserts, polar regions, or high seas.

Conventions of Plot The protagonist is at the mercy of the antagonist.

Cheap Surprise, this is an easy way to generate shock by a sudden unexpected action.

False Ending, this is where it appears the case has been solved, but it is not.

Make it Personal, this is where the crime/plans draws in aspect of the protagonists life or emotions to change the plot, from a professional action to a personal quest.

Theatre of the Mind, do not show everything to the audience. This will force them to image other things.

False accusations or mistaken identity, this leads to innocent characters being put in the situations where they need to figure out what is happening. This usually involves the innocent characters trying to escape, this produces an enigma.

The build up to the climax, the climax leading up to the plot makes the audience want to keep watching.

Enigma, a lot of the time the thriller genre uses enigma to capture the audiences attention, there is often a question or dilemma that the target audience can relate to that is then played around with and resolved or left unresolved.

Conventions of Character

The hero is seen as an ordinary citizen who is unaccustomed to danger. The hero must throw the plans of an enemy rather than uncover a crime that’s already happened. The villain is either a criminal, stalker, assassin or a psychotic. The villains identity is typically know from the beginning of the film. The victim is usually put in a life threatening situation and sometimes the victim knows the villain/villains however sometimes they do not.

Iconography in ThrillersMirrors

Weapons

Finger prints

Knives

CCTV cameras

Running water

Confined spaces

Shadows

Street lamps which high light the villain.

Something or someone that the victim fears

Conventions of Mise-en-SceneCamera – Establishing shot, extreme close ups and close ups, medium/long shots, that show the villain in relation to the victim. Furthermore, high angle shots are seen which make the victim more vulnerable. Low angle shots are also used to make the audience more vulnerable and injects fear into them.

Lighting – Low key lighting will help put an effect on the villain, which will make him seem scarier.

Costume – The villain is usually wearing dark clothing, whereas for the innocent victim their clothes are bright clothes with bright colours. If the victim is a woman her clothes will be more revealing and therefore putting her in the male gaze. This allows her to be sexualize and thus making her more vulnerable.

Conventions of Editing

In Thrillers we would usually see editing that would make the picture dark, this would help hide the villain. In addition we normally see a lot of changes in the camera angle.

Quick cuts

Flash backs, in some thrillers you are made to feel sorry for the protagonist with the use of flashbacks.

The merging of two shots, which causes confusion. This would be montage editing.

Conventions of Sound

When there is a lot of tension building up we usually hear orchestral non-diegetic sound, on the other hand when the pace is sped up we would hear eerie music.

When it comes to diegetic sound, we can associate the sound of heavy breathing, footsteps, creaky floor boards and slamming doors with this genre.

Our film - Conclusion

In our film we want to include the majority of the traditional conventions, however we aim to break away from some of these conventions so that we can achieve our idea. We do not want to include any traditional representations of males or females, and we certainly do not want to put the women in the male gaze. Our film will be a physiological thriller which will explain why we won’t be using the conventions of character type. Our ‘hero’ won’t defeat the villain, but he will in fact become the villain. He will not be performing conventional actions due to our production being a sophisticated independent production, and not bound by hegemonic representations which require the hero to be successful. Furthermore, we will be using the traditional conventions of editing, sound and mise-en-scene due to the success of these conventions with the audiences reaction.