[29] The Alfred Hitchcock films Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, and Strangers on a Train, as well as David Lynch's bizarre and influential Blue Velvet, are notable examples of the type, as are The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Machinist,[30] Flightplan, Shutter Island, Secret Window, Identity, Gone Girl, Red Eye,[31] Phone Booth, Fatal Attraction, The River Wild,[32] Panic Room,[33] Misery, Cape Fear, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Funny Games.[34].

Tension is created by delaying what the audience sees as inevitable, and is built through situations that are menacing or where escape seems impossible. The other ten super-genres are Action, Crime, Fantasy, Horror, Romance, Science Fiction, Slice of Life, Sports, War and Western. A famous thriller at the time of its release was Wait Until Dark (1967) by director Terence Young, with Audrey Hepburn as a victimized blind woman in her Manhattan apartment.

Examples include The Pelican Brief, Presumed Innocent, The Jury, The Client, The Lincoln Lawyer, Hostile Witness, and Silent Witness. Thriller is a genre of fiction, having numerous, often overlapping subgenres.Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. Central topics include serial killers/murders, robberies, chases, shootouts, heists, and double-crosses. The tension usually arises when the character(s) is placed in a dangerous situation, or a trap from which escaping seems impossible. Thriller film, also known as suspense film or suspense thriller, is a broad film genre that evokes excitement and suspense in the audience. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is an early thriller by John Buchan, in which an innocent man becomes the prime suspect in a murder case and finds himself on the run from both the police and enemy spies. [citation needed], Lost, which deals with the survivors of a plane crash, sees the castaways on the island forced to deal with a monstrous being that appears as a cloud of black smoke, a conspiracy of "Others" who have kidnapped or killed their fellow castaways at various points, a shadowy past of the island itself that they are trying to understand, polar bears, and the fight against these and other elements as they struggle simply to stay alive and get off of the island. Ancient epic poems such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Odyssey and the Mahābhārata may have used similar narrative techniques to modern thrillers. Director Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) featured Carl Boehm as a psychopathic cameraman. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. There have been at least two television series called simply Thriller, one made in the U.S. in the 1960s and one made in the UK in the 1970s. [5][3], One of the earliest thriller films was Harold Lloyd's comedy Safety Last! ", "Film music influences how viewers relate to movie characters", "The Twilight Zone [TV Series] [1959-1964]", "Prison Break season 1-4 recap: What happened to Michael Scofield ahead of series 5 release", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thriller_(genre)&oldid=974679679, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2018, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 24 August 2020, at 11:03. Suspense in thrillers is often intertwined with hope and anxiety, which are treated as two emotions aroused in anticipation of the conclusion - the hope that things will turn out all right for the appropriate characters in the story, and the fear that they may not.

In recent years, thrillers have often overlapped with the horror genre, having more gore/sadistic violence, brutality, terror and frightening scenes. The subgenre often deals with the subject of espionage in a realistic way (as in the adaptations of John Le Carré's novels).