What is a Thriller Film?

What is a Thriller Film?

Thriller is a type of genre in literature, film and television. This genre creates suspense, tension and excitement as the main element throughout for the audience. Thrillers build up the viewers mood making them filled with terror, anxiety, and surprise. Whereas the genre horror is more graphic and shows blood and gore, thriller is more about building up the tension and making the audience nervous. They are seen as an adrenaline and fast paste film which does create excitement while watching. A common scene in thrillers is characters dealing with phychos.

Some regular sub genres are psychological thrillers, crime thrillers and mystery thrillers. Psychological thrillers focuses on unstable emotional states of characters more than the plot or action. This will overlap with the crime and mystery genre also. An example of a pschological thriller is se7en about a deranged serial killer, this involves him choosing seven victims who represent examples of each of the seven deadly sins handing out punishment to them.
Crime thrillers focuses on crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives.
Mystery thrillers are about solving the mysterious circumstances by clues and investigations. This is detectives trying to figure out a situation by piecing together clues, seeking evidence, interragating whitnesses and tracking down a criminal.

There are a few things that help to define a thriller, which are plot twists, this keeps the audience unsure on what is going to happen which builds the tension especially if its a last minute twist. They also include a lot of action, exotic settings and heroes which add up to a typical thriller film. The plots can vary from focusing around a mystical antagonist to simply having the a clever, horrific antagonist. They could include a phycological aspect to it which would get the viewer to have to look into the back stories of the characters to figure out the plot.