Thrillers are types of genres that have you on the edge of your seat which lets the audience feel nervous for the climax. The music within the film really heightens the theme – it usually shows suspense, excitement, anticipation and anxiety. For a typical thriller film, you need all the right types of codes and conventions. For example, to create an “on-edge” feeling, you add sound of have no sound at all. This leaves the audience feeling anxious and tense because they don’t know what may happen next. This is important, because you want them to question what’s going to happen, instead of them understanding what’s happening – you have to surprise them, especially if it’s a thriller genre film.

There are typical props in which are used within a thriller film, for example: hoodies to cover the villain’s face to create mystery, this is used in the film “Scream”. Blood is a very typical prop as it connotes danger and death and therefore scares the audience and puts them on edge and leave them guessing if the character is going to die or not. Guns and knives are also strong typical props used because as it connotes death. Everybody knows that knives can kill or seriously hurt someone, therefore when a person is watching a film and sees knives; they know something bad is going to happen.

Typically for a synopsis of a thriller genre film, the pace of this tension is faster in a thriller against a mystery. The protagonist must be proactive rather than reactive. He must make things happen, go into action, not sit around with events happening around him. As with most good fiction, the hero needs to have grown and learnt and ultimately changed by the end of the novel. This character growth is what leads to the main character’s ability to get through his darkest hour, and win during the climatic ending. Typical structural elements to the plot – an inciting incident or turning point that makes the main character move from their everyday and go on their journey to solve the issue, conflict, pace, complications, a darkest hour where everything seems lost a climactic battle and denouement.

There are many different sub genres of thriller films e.g.:

Horror-thriller: Saw, Scream, Hostel, Psycho Psychological-thriller: Panic Room, Flight Plan, Shutter Island Action-thriller: Die Hard series, Casino Royale, The Terminator Comedy-thriller: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Mr & Mrs Smith, The Thin Man Crime-thriller: Seven, Silence Of The Lambs, Copycat Supernatural-thriller: The Sixth Sense, The Gift, The Dead Zone Techno-thriller: The Thirteenth Floor, I, Robot