History of Thriller

The History of Thriller Genre  

Thriller genre is one of the most popular genre in the film industry and remains to be popular with it’s audience. The main aim of a thriller genre is to thrill the viewer of the film, also the films tend to be rushing, gritty, exciting, it drives the narrative, has tension, has surprises, fast-paced and most of the time have a cliff hanger. The different types of thrillers are action, psychological, crime, spy, conspiracy, disaster and political thriller. The convention of a thriller genre is that crime is the main story line, there is a complex narrative structure with clues and false paths, there is a protagonist and an antagonist, enigmas are established, extraordinary events happen and the opening scene normally shows the protagonist in danger. 

The Three Apples and also One Thousand and One Nights and these are murder mystery. 

Ancient epic poems like Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Odyssey and the Mahabharata use similar narrative techniques and conventions as modern thrillers. In the ancient poem Odyssey, the hero Odysseus makes a bare journey home after the Trojan War, battling extraordinary hardships in order to be reunited with his wife Penelope. He sees villains such as the Cyclops, a one-eyed giant, and the Sirens, whose sweet singing lures sailors to their doom. In most cases, Odysseus uses cunning instead of brute force to overcome his adversaries. Also the genre thriller comes about with thriller stories such as

Alfred Hitchcock began his career with his first silent film The Lodger (1926), a suspenseful Jack the Ripper story, followed by his next thriller Blackmail (1929), his first sound film. However, of Hitchcock's fifteen major features made between 1925 and 1935, he only made five thrillers, the two mentioned above plus  Number Seventeen, The Man Who Knew Too Much , and The 39 steps (1935). and one of the earliest spy films was Fritz Lang’s Spies (1928). Alfred Hitchcock continued with suspense-thriller by the production of Foreign Correspondent (1940), the haunting OScar-nominated Rebecca (1940). Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was Hitchcock's personal favorite and based upon the actual case of a 1920s serial killer known as The Merry Widow Murderer.

The 1970’s and 1980’s decade saw a violent start in the thriller genre, with Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's first British film in almost two decades, being given an R rating for its vicious and explicit scene and Steven Spielberg's low-budget early TV movie Duel (1971). One of the first films about a fan being disturbingly obsessed with their idol was Clint Eastwood's directorial debut film, Play Misty for Me (1971).

Spy and conspiracy films were popular through this decade. Don Siegel's The Black Windmill (1974), Alan Pakula's The Parallax View (1974) Sam Peckinpah's final film, the plot twisting spy film The Osterman Weekend (1983), The Fourth Protocol (1987), derived from a script by the original novelist Frederick Forsyth, featured Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan.
The 1990’sdecade started with Rob Reiner's Misery (1990). In one horrifying scene, she 'hobbles' his ankles so that he can't escape, a battered wife who left her aggressive husband to find a better life was vengefully pursued in Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), Curtis Hanson's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992). From all this it brought out great thriller films such Pulp Fiction (1994), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), Goodfellas (1990), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The Usual Suspects (1995) and Se7en (1995).

From the history to the present, thriller dominates the film screen. The genre today is the vehicle for filmmakers, with explosive action sequences, cool new technology and twisted plotting.