The Thriller Genre

The genre of a film is the type of film it is, judging by the characteristics it shares with other similar films. This can be a comedy, romantic comedy, romance, thriller, psychological thriller, horror, action, historical... Films in the same genre might share a similar storyline, similar editing techniques, and similar kinds of mise-en-scene.

In the thriller genre there are also plenty of sub-genres (e.g romantic thriller, psychological thriller, horror thriller...) Though thrillers generally share similar characteristics; such as guns, chases, fear, victims and offenders; little things can make a big difference between sub-genres. For instance, crime thrillers such as The Departed or Reservoir Dogs have certain elements such as guns, criminals and police while psychological thrillers such as Black Swan tend to have surreal aspects or give a closer study of the human mind. Then of course there are films with both crime-thriller and psychological-thriller aspects, such as the film Trance.

Quentin Tarantino, my favourite thriller director

In each case, a thriller is a film that 'thrills' its audience. This is usually using fear, suspense and/or  intensity. There is usually a protagonist who is hunted, chased or threatened by a villain. The 'villain' can have different forms such as an actual person who means harm to the protagonist or maybe something more abstract like a part of the protagonist's mind, as in Black Swan.

The thriller genre was especially made famous by movie Director Alfred Hitchcock, 'the master of suspense  thrillers', who began shaping the modern-day thriller with his early silent film The Lodger (1926) about Jack the Ripper. He was famous for making a signature cameo appearance in his feature films.
He would often place an innocent victim (an average, responsible person) into a strange, life-threatening or terrorizing position, in a case of mistaken identity (e.g. The 39 Steps), misidentification or wrongful accusation.
He used various cinematic techniques and also specialise in visually-expressive motifs. One of his most famous works is Psycho (1960)famous for the shower scene which created a huge impact on its audience at the time because of the montage in the shower sequence accentuated with composer Bernard Hermann's screeching violin score. He is also well known for the dolly-zoom shots in Vertigo (1958), or the heightening of anticipation with the long pull-back shot from inside a building to the outside and corss the street in Frenzy (1972)