Saskia Smith AS Media Production
Charles Derry
The thoerists Charles Derry wrote the book 'The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock'.
Charles Derry classifies that there are six different sub genres of the thriller genre these are:
Muderous Passions - These include a love traingle with a man his wife and another character. Usually one of these characters gets murdered. E.g classic noir thriller Double Indeminity (Wilder, 1944, US)
Political Thriller - This plot revolces around assainating against a powerful person e.g Seven Days in May (Frankenheimer, 1964, US)
The Thriller of Aquired Identity - This is usually assosiated with the protagonist who is mistakened with a person linked with a murder. E.g
The Psychotraumatic Thriller - There is a crime or a murder and someone invovled is traumatised E.g
The Thriller of Moral Confrontation of Good vs Evil - Uusally violent and can include chases. E.g
The Triller of the Inocent on the Run- Can be similar to aquired identity and needs to return to their normal life. E.g
George N Dove
George N. Dove wrote the book Suspence in the Formula Story-Bowling Green State University Press, 1989.
In this book he talks about the four different stages taht form the characteristics to make a thriller film.
These are:
Cumulation - This concerns the development of clues, tension and questions. It creates different paths that the narrative could go down.
Postponement - The audience may expect a quick resolution, but it is prolonged.
Alternation - This makes the audience doubt their expectations, and are unsure of the outcome.
Potentiality - A problem where the outcome appears to be clear.
Claude Levi Strauss
Claude Levi Strauss was an anthropologist born in 1908 in France. He thought about the idea of 'binary opposites' and that all narratives could be reduced down to this idea. Strauss and Barthes came together and discorved that the way we understand cetain words does not depend on the meaning of that word but the understanding of the difference between the word and the opposite of that word. Therefore understanding the relationship between opposing ideas. This idea is commonly used in thriller, examples of binary opposites used in thriller are:
Good vs Evil
Dark vs Light
Peace vs War
Maculinity vs Femininity
Young vs Old
Protagonist vs Antagonist
