Genre Research

The genre my group is portraying in our opening sequence of a film is ‘Crime thriller’. Thriller is a genre that uses suspense tension and excitement as its main elements. The primary sub genres are crime (in which we are going to convey in our opening sequence), mystery and psychological. The biggest and possibly the most popular thriller movies are the Hitchcock movies.

The main themes that are in Crime thriller movies are mainly ransoms, captivities, revenge, heists and kidnappings and murder. Some crime thriller films that involve serial killing and murder are: Seven-1995 American film directed by David Fincher, A Perfect murder-1998 American film directed by Andrew Davis and silence of the lambs-1991 American film directed by Jonathon Demme. Whereas some crime thriller films that involve heists or robberies are: The Score-2001 directed by Frank Oz, The killing-1956 directed by Stanley Kubrick and Resevoir dogs-1992 American film directed and written by Quentin Tarantino.

The general mise en scene/iconography used in crime thriller involves dark gloomy locations. The lighting is generally dark and gloomy which is very conventional as it relates with the dark themes of the storyline. The majority of the characters in the thriller films are also dressed in dark clothing. However the contrast between one dark color and one brighter color in crime thriller films is a typical convention of many thrillers and the brighter color would usually be red-which represents blood. Again the makeup worn by the characters would also be very dark, however again it could use some red blood and maybe some contact lenses e.g. white contact/red contact lenses to create the whole horror/thriller feel to the audience.

The typical setting in a crime thriller film would again usually be a dark place to again convey to the audience the dark gloomy feel of all the themes that are being portrayed to them. Some typical settings are dark empty forests, dark alleyways and empty rooms. These are all used to convey the dark and scary feeling the darkness and the emptiness are used to create suspense building up inside the audience. One of my favorite settings used in thriller films is the setting in ‘Friday the 13^th’-1990 is the lake scene towards the end as it shows the dark misty lake and the sky almost changing to an orange color to represent the mood possibly changing.

In crime/thriller films characters are usually represented in similar ways. The director usually has a naive young female character, a ‘tough’ male character, the evil murderer and other characters to make up the group. E.g the characters that already know they are going to die in film therefore they take part in the drink taking and drug taking (e.g the group in scream). The director also usually uses a police man who either nearly finds out who the murderer is or the answer to the case, or sometimes he does find out, but then get kills before he can tell anyone.

The narrative of thriller/horror films usually starts with a murder or a killing or a character dying. We are then introduced to the main character who is usually the ‘final girl’. A series of killings usually then takes place and the audience are used clueless but are given small clues to keep them guessing who the murderer is. However in some films the audience knows straight away who the killer is they are just left guessing who is going to be killed next. In films such as ‘Halloween’ the identity of the murderer is known from the beginning through the opening sequence. The murders he then commits then get progressively gorier throughout the film. All attempts to stop him fail until ‘the final girl’ puts an end to it all.