The History of Thriller

In our lesson today we had a look at how useful our research was and made sure we had all the information we needed. My group found that we could do with some research on the history of thriller as a genre and how thriller films have differed over the years.

1920's -1930's
The first thriller film was Alfred Hitchcock's, The Lodger a suspenseful Jack the Ripper story and out of Hitchcock's major features only 6 were suspense. However, from 1935 on wards most of his films were thrillers.

1940's
Hitchcock continued to make suspense-thrillers including his favourite, Shadow of doubt' based on a true story of a serial killer. In 1994 one of the first psychological thrillers, Gaslight, was made about a husband driving his wife insane in order to gain her inheritance. Spy films of this time had post-war melodrama story lines which tended to represent Germany negatively, e.g. Cloak and Dagger'.

1950's
Glamorous film stars were added to the films in this decade, and many of the films remained very classical in terms of their conventions. Furthermore spy films continued to be related to World War II, e.g. 5 Fingers.

1960's
After the classical films, Hitchcock produced a shocking film Psycho in 1960. A number of romantic thrillers with shocking twists started to be produced too, and the James Bond films inspired a number of spy films to be created.

1970's &1980's
Thriller films started to become more violent, for example, Frenzy (1972). Psychological thrillers included themes such as guilt, paranoia and obsession  and some included killing off the main character early on to switch points of view. In addition, spy and conspiracy thrillers scattered across the two decades, many including story lines about the government. 

1990's to Present
Nowadays thrillers borrow themes and elements from those produced in past decades. However, to stop repetitiveness there are a number of recent thrillers with aspects of the horror genre, with more gore/sadistic violence, brutality  and terror. For example, Captivity made in 2007. Action scenes in thrillers have also become more elaborate especially in spy thrillers e.g. A history of violence.