Thriller (genre)
Thriller is a genre of fiction with numerous, often overlapping, subgenres, including crime, horror, and detective fiction. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety.[1] This genre is well suited to film and television.
This article is about the genre in general. For the specific movie genre, see Thriller film.
A thriller generally keeps its audience on the "edge of their seats" as the plot builds towards a climax. The cover-up of important information is a common element.[2] Literary devices such as red herrings, plot twists, unreliable narrators, and cliffhangers are used extensively. A thriller is often a villain-driven plot, whereby they present obstacles that the protagonist or hero must overcome.
Some examples of thrillers are the films of Alfred Hitchcock around the mid 20th century.[3] Some popular 21st-century mainstream examples include: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window, and the British television series Utopia.
History in literature[edit]
Ancient epic poems such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Odyssey and the Mahābhārata may have used similar narrative techniques to modern thrillers. The Three Apples, a tale in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), is a murder mystery[14] with multiple plot twists[15] and detective fiction elements.[16] In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy, locked chest on the banks of the Tigris river and sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who has it broken open - only to discover inside it the dismembered body of a young woman. Harun then orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days. This whodunit mystery has also been considered a detective story, though it lacks a sleuth.[14][17]
The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) is a swashbuckling revenge thriller about a man named Edmond Dantès who is betrayed by his friends and sent to languish in the notorious Château d'If. His only companion is an old man who teaches him everything from philosophy to mathematics to swordplay. Just before the old man dies, he reveals to Dantès the secret location of a great treasure. Shortly after, Dantès engineers a daring escape and uses the treasure to reinvent himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. Thirsting for vengeance, he sets out to punish those who destroyed his life.
The first recognizable modern thriller was Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands (1903), in which two young Englishmen stumble upon a secret German armada preparing to invade their homeland.[18]
Fritz Lang's M is regarded as a groundbreaking psychological thriller, introducing innovative suspense-enhancing audiovisual techniques that have become standard and ubiquitous ever since.[19]
The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is an early thriller by John Buchan, in which an innocent man becomes the prime suspect in a murder case and finds himself on the run from both the police and enemy spies.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) by John le Carré is set in the world of Cold War espionage and helped to usher in an era of thriller fiction based around professional spies and the battle of wits between rival spymasters.
Television[edit]
There have been at least two television series called simply Thriller, one made in the U.S. in the 1960s and one made in the UK in the 1970s. Although in no way linked, both series consisted of one-off dramas, each utilising the familiar motifs of the genre.
The Twilight Zone consists of suspenseful unrelated dramas depicting characters dealing with paranormal, futuristic, supernatural, or otherwise disturbing or unusual events. Characters who find themselves dealing with these strange, sometimes inexplicable happenings are said to have crossed over into "The Twilight Zone".[20] Each story typically features a moral and a surprise ending.[21]