The word 'thrill' actually means 'to pierce'. Our teacher gave us the analogy of a piece of skin that has been pulled tight like a drum being used as an audience member's personal protection bubble, and the thriller is like a hot needle piercing slowly into the skin through out the film. This is what we are aiming to do when shooting our own opening sequences of thrillers.
A good thriller will have; voyeurism- the aspect of watching someone who does not know you are watching them. The voyeur can either be the audience itself or an actor in the fuilm, for example Michael Myers in the thriller 'Halloween' is the voyeur throughout the film.
A good thriller will also have the enigma aspect, the mystery, the unknown that keeps the audience's attention and is usually only explained at the very end of the film. This can also lead on to the tension factor, a good thriller needs to build tension, this can be created using either of the aspects above or through the plot itself, either way, a thriller needs some tension to be concidered a thriller!
There are many different types of thrillers; it is quite a loose genre in terms of it being able to cover all these different genres.
There are psychological thrillers, films like 'Pyscho' that penetrate the mind and i personally find these the most frightening because of the fact that they tend to linger in the mind for longer.
Then there are the action thriller's like 'James Bond' that use action as the tension builder, but here we see how this can be tied in with espionage thrillers, because as we know, James Bond is a spy and this is another type of thriller.
There are also 'Slasher' thrillers, the real blood-and-gore type films that make the audience queezy, films such as 'Friday the 13th' filled with tension leading up to a bloody kill.
These are all thrillers which shows just how versitile a genre it is, wheather we like them or not.
Horror's on the other hand are films that try to elicit the emotions of fear and absolute horror from their viewers. The main general plots tend to involve the themes of mental illness, death and the super-natural and often have a cantral villain.
There is often a thin line between horror films and comedy horror films with examples such as the 'Scary Movie' trilogy which plays on other horror films and pulls out the comedy in them.
Horror's have changed from being mainly based on classic literature and gothic/horror genre's in the earlier times such as 'Dracular' and 'Frankenstein' as opposed to being more based on post-world war 2 horrors such as 'Invasion of the Body snatchers' and 'The Exorcist'.
The main difference between a Thriller and a Horror is that Thriller's are there to entertain and excite the audience whereas a Horror is trying to frighten and terrify the audience. :)
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