Thriller

No, not Michael Jackson. The thriller genre is something that can be any genre of movie along with thriller technique throughout it. The most common is action thriller, with the likes of No Country For Old Men, The Hurt Locker and Pitch Black. These films are all thrillers, but all classed as different hybrid genres all together.

No Country For Old Men is a crime/thriller, The Hurt Locker is mainly a war/drama/thriller and Pitch Black is a sci-fi/thriller. All these films display techniques of thriller, but the settings of all of them create a hybrid genre.

No Country For Old Men is a story about discovery, a man the remnants of a drug dealer shoot out in the southern states of america, he finds that one goon has managed to escape with a briefcase of money, but died shortly after he has escaped. The man takes the briefcase and hides it under his house, then starts being chased by a hitman, who is willing to kill anyone who needs to be killed to get to the money.

The film has a plot that drives a lot of the suspense, with there being little to know about the story other than what is given in the first twenty minutes. The hitman, played by Javier Badrem, holds most of the tension in the story, with there not being much known about him, this holds a lot of curiosity in the audience and therefore not knowing what he is capable of. The introduction of his character shows him killing an innocent man for his car, this will make the audience feel very frightened of him. Where as the man who has the briefcase, played by Josh Brolin, has more information given about him, making him have a greater emotional connection with the audience, the difference in the feelings of the audience to the two main characters creates the suspense. No Country For Old Men really sets a standard for thrillers, as there is very little dialogue, lots of silence and a lot of tense moments that kept my heart racing.

The Hurt Locker still shows a lot of scenes with suspense, the main reason why it is such a successful thriller is that it is set as a film that happens. About bomb technicians in Iraq, it is a very relative film, that creates its tension through scenes that the audience can believe could or maybe have happened.

There isn't that great of a connection between the audience and the characters but, because they are soldiers, the audience immediately feels respect towards them, as they have been fighting to protect their country and other countries. Later on in the film, there becomes a very big emotional connection to the characters, with the introduction of the main character's family and a very meaningful scene between the main character, James, and his fellow troop, Sanborn. This final conversation between them summons all the emotion that the introduction of the film is missing. There is a gradual increasing feeling towards the characters as they go through their daily lives in Iraq, with them losing people and encountering different obstacles that they have to overcome together, but sometimes not at all, with there being a lot of friction between James and Sanborn.

Pitch Black is a sci-fi thriller that gets it's thrills from an alien being that lives on a planet, where a ship has just crash landed. From the outset, the crew come across things that evoke curiousity in the audience, from when they first view the planet surface, it has two suns. Creating a constant light on the surface.

The crew find a human outpost a few miles away from their wrecked ship, but the outpost is wrecked and looks like it hasn't been used for a number of decades. They venture into one of the homes, which is completely deserted, but what is immediately focused on is a planetarium that shows that both suns will be setting for a month within the next day. They quickly find that some there is are aliens living in tunnels underneath the planet, and when both suns go down, the aliens will come out of the tunnels and devour any living thing on the surface. What is added to the start the tension is that there were convicts on board the ship. All of them died, but one, who has escaped onto the planet and starts to spy on the other survivors. The tension of Pitch Black is held in the curiousity and fear around the convict, and more so about the alien race as the film goes on.

The films show different ways of creating tension, but it mostly done by convening curiosity about something on screen, this can be done visually; by not showing the audience something, or in not stating what something is capable of, or by putting the characters in a situation that could be real, but still has many other possible outcomes.