Thriller film title researchRhydian Crabb

What I studied

I studied a wide range of thrillers to better understand what makes a good title for a thriller film. These included conventional crime thrillers (The Usual Suspects, LA Confidential, The Maltese Falcon, The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep), horror thrillers (The Silence of the Lambs, Sixth Sense, Se7en), and psychological thrillers (The Third Man, North by Northwest, Rear Window, Fargo).

What I found

Many of the best titles, in my opinion, give you a good idea of what sort of film you are going to see. The Sixth Sense gives you a clue that the film will be about something magical/spiritual, while The Usual Suspects tells you that you will be watching a crime thriller (because it relates to the common trope of crime thrillers ‘round up the usual suspects’).

On the whole, my research indicated that good thriller titles tend to be short, and often just one word – Memento, Inception, Fargo, Misery, Leon.

How they choose their titles

Many thriller films get their titles from the books they are based on (Marathon Man, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Third Man). This helps draw in viewers who know and love the books.

Some of them have gimmicky titles to attract the audience’s attention. One of the best examples is Reservoir Dogs. Quentin Tarantino made up this title for his first feature film. He claims that a customer asked him to recommend a film when he was working in a video store and he suggested the French film Au Revoir Les Enfants but the customer thought he said Reservoir Dogs. Another film with a gimmicky title is the horror thriller Se7en (‘Seven’).

However, if you want to attract the audience’s attention you can always go completely the other way and have a surprisingly long title – a great example of this is the psychological thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice. It gives you no clue about what kind of genre the film will be, but it manages to build up suspense before we know anything else about the film. Why does the postman always ring twice we ask ourselves? What will happen when he does?

My film

My film concept is a psychological thriller based on someone who believes they are being stalked and becomes a stalker themselves. I have therefore come up with the title ‘Double Blind’. In psychology this is an experiment where the people taking part don’t know the full picture about what’s happening. This is very relevant to my film subject, but it can also be read at other levels – there are two characters (double) and neither one knows what the other one is really up to (blind). It is also punchy and mysterious, appropriate to the genre I have selected.