Thriller and Suspense Films

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Thriller and Suspense Films are types of films known to promote intense excitement, suspense, a high level of anticipation, ultra-heightened expectation, uncertainty, anxiety, and nerve-wracking tension. Thriller and suspense films are virtually synonymous and interchangeable categorizations, with similar characteristics and features.

If the genre is to be defined strictly, a genuine thriller is a film that rentlessly pursues a single-minded goal - to provide thrills and keep the audience cliff-hanging at the 'edge of their seats' as the plot builds towards a climax. The tension usually arises when the main character(s) is placed in a menacing situation or mystery, or an escape or dangerous mission from which escape seems impossible. Life itself is threatened, usually because the principal character is unsuspecting or unknowingly involved in a dangerous or potentially deadly situation. Plots of thrillers involve characters which come into conflict with each other or with outside forces - the menace is sometimes abstract or shadowy.

Thrillers are often hybrids - there are suspense-thrillers, - or - thrillers,  thrillers (such as ),  thrillers (such as ), -thrillers (such as ),  thrillers (such as ), even romantic comedy-thrillers (such as ).

Another closely-related genre is the  film genre (e.g., ), also designed to elicit tension and suspense, taking the viewer through agony and fear. Suspense-thrillers come in all shapes and forms: there are murder mysteries, private eye tales, chase thrillers, women-in-danger films, courtroom and legal thrillers, erotic thrillers, surreal cult-film soap operas, and atmospheric, plot-twisting psychodramas. Thrillers keep the emphasis away from the gangster, crime, or the detective in the crime-related plot, focusing more on the suspense and danger that is generated.

Characters in thrillers include convicts, criminals, stalkers, assassins, down-on-their-luck losers, innocent victims (often on the run), prison inmates, menaced women, characters with dark pasts, psychotic individuals, terrorists, cops and escaped cons, fugitives, private eyes, drifters, duplicitious individuals, people involved in twisted relationships, world-weary men and women, psycho-fiends, and more. The themes of thrillers frequently include terrorism, political conspiracy, pursuit, or romantic triangles leading to murder.

In mid-June, 2001, the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, California made its definitive selection of the 100 greatest American "heart-pounding" and "adrenaline-inducing" films of all time, as determined by more than 1,800 actors, directors, screenwriters, historians, studio executives, critics, and others from the American film community. To be eligible, the 400 nominated films had to be U.S.-made, feature-length fiction films, whose thrills have "enlivened and enriched America's film heritage," according to the rules. AFI also asked jurors to consider "the total adrenaline-inducing impact of a film's artistry and craft," regardless of the genre. 

AFI's list of the  are presented by this site. 

Early Thrillers: 

One of the earliest 'thrillers' was Harold Lloyd's comic , with the all-American boy performing a daredevil stunt on the side of a skyscraper. The haunting and chilling German film M (1931) directed by the great Fritz Lang, starred Peter Lorre (in his first film role) as a criminal deviant - a child killer. The film's story was based on the life of serial killer Peter Kurten (known as the 'Vampire of Dusseldorf'). Edward Sutherland's crime/horror thriller Murders in the Zoo (1933) from Paramount starred Lionel Atwill as a murderous and jealous zoologist. And various horror films of the period, The Cat and the Canary (1927), director Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) with Fredric March, and The Bat Whispers (1930), provided some thrills.

Director George Cukor's classic psychological thriller  (first made in Britain in 1939 with Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynward) featured a scheming husband (Charles Boyer) plotting to make his innocent young wife (Ingrid Bergman) go insane, in order to acquire her inheritance. The film noir  told about a thrilling murder investigation (for a beautiful missing advertising executive named Laura) conducted by a police detective (Dana Andrews), with suspects including an acid-tongued columnist (Clifton Webb) and a gigolo fiancee (Vincent Price). And the eerie The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), from Oscar Wilde's masterful tale, refashioned the Faustian story of a man (Hurd Hatfield) who made a deal with Mephistopheles (George Sanders) to forever remain young.

A mute domestic servant (Dorothy McGuire) in a haunted house was terrorized by a serial murderer, thinking she was the next victim in The Spiral Staircase (1946). In a taut thriller starring Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth titled , a beautiful woman, her crippled lawyer/husband and his partner, and an Irish sailor ended up involved in a murder scheme. In Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), an invalid woman (Barbara Stanwyck) overheard a murder plot on the phone - against herself. , one of the best suspense films of all time, told the story of a writer (Joseph Cotten) in post-WW II Vienna who found out that his old friend (Orson Welles), a black marketeer, was not dead after all.

Hitchcock: The Master of Suspense Thrillers 

No list of suspense or thriller films can be complete without mention of English film-maker/director Alfred Hitchcock. He helped to shape the modern-day thriller genre, beginning with his early silent film The Lodger (1926), a suspenseful Jack-the-Ripper story, followed by his next thriller Blackmail (1929), his first sound film (but also released in a silent version). Hitchcock would make a signature cameo appearance in his feature films, beginning with his third film The Lodger (1926), although his record was spotty at first. After 1940, he appeared in every one, except for The Wrong Man (1956). [See all of Hitchcock's cameos .] Although nominated five times as Best Director (from 1940-1960), Hitchcock never won an Academy Award. 

Alfred Hitchcock is considered the acknowledged auteur master of the thriller or suspense genre, manipulating his audience's fears and desires, and taking viewers into a state of association with the representation of reality facing the character. He would often interweave a taboo or sexually-related theme into his films, such as the repressed memories of Marnie (Tippi Hedren) in Marnie (1964), the latent homosexuality in Strangers on a Train (1951), voyeurism in , obsession in , or the twisted Oedipus complex in .

Hitchcock's films often placed an innocent victim (an average, responsible person) into a strange, life-threatening or terrorizing situation, in a case of mistaken identity, misidentification or wrongful accusation (i.e., in , The Wrong Man (1956), and in ).

He also utilized various cinematic techniques (i.e., the first British 'talking picture' - Blackmail (1929), the extreme zoom shot of the key in , the glowing glass of milk in Suspicion (1941), the prolonged cross-cutting tennis match in Strangers on a Train (1951), the virtuoso set-piece of the crop duster in , the montage in the shower sequence accentuated with composer Bernard Herrmann's screeching violin score in , the dolly-zoom shots in , or the heightening of anticipation with the long pull-back shot from inside a building to the outside and across the street in Frenzy (1972)).

Visually-expressive motifs were also his specialty (i.e., the surrealistic dream sequences in Spellbound (1945), the key in , the staircase or the use of profiles and silhouettes in , the murder reflected in the victim's glasses in Strangers on a Train (1951), the concept of "pairs" and guilt transference in ), or the making of technically-challenging films (such as Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948)). [Rope was a film of many 'firsts': it was Hitchcock's first color film and his first film as an independent producer; it was his first film released by Warner Bros.; it was his first and only attempt to make a film appear as a single shot, with a series of ten-minute takes cleverly spliced together; and it was his first film with James Stewart. The basis of the film was the famed Leopold-Loeb case.]

In many of his films, there was the inevitable life and death chase concluding with a showdown at a familiar landmark (for example, London's Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942), the UN and Mount Rushmore in , Westminster Cathedral in, and the Golden Gate Bridge in ). He also reveled in tight and confined spaces, to heighten emotion (i.e., Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948), or , etc.) or restrictive train journeys (i.e., The Lady Vanishes (1937), and , etc).

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The famed director often capitalized on a 'red herring' or gimmicky plot element to catch the viewer's attention - dubbed a McGuffin (or MacGuffin), that would propel the plot along its course. Usually, the McGuffin initially appears to be of utmost importance, but functions to intentionally misdirect the audience - it then quickly fades into the background and ends up being trivial, irrevelant, or incidental to the film's story. Here is a list of various MacGuffins: 

  • : the nature of the 39 Steps, and the smuggling of secret plans (vital to the country's air defense) out of the country  ...

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