History of Thriller Films

Thriller movies were part of the cinema right from the beginning and as audiences started to get bored, directors thought of new and innovative techniques that could thrill the audience. That’s how the Thriller genre first came into existence. In the beginning a very common type of thriller movies were weekly instalments of shows, each ending with a cliff hanger scene at the end. A very iconic image still left from those movies is an evil looking man standing over a woman tied to the train tracks. It comes from a silent TV film called ‘Perils of Pauline.

When the sound came into the cinema, the thriller genre suddenly became very much a detective genre with gentlemen solving extremely complicated riddles without ever breaking their calm and never, ever forgetting about their manners. Those movies were very much the predecessor’s of the James bond type of movies that were still to come in the 50s and 60s.

During the 1940s came a reverse for the thriller genre as it was very much scaled down in order to reflect the attitudes of the people during and after WW2. The movies had an urban setting and consisted of trench-coat wearing, characters that stalked the cities at night and solved incredibly complex mysteries with ease. This movies were later dubbed as “film noir.”

The 70s was the time when the film noir genre truly prospered and some of the best examples of movies from that time are probably ‘Chinatown’ and ‘The long Goodbye.’

The newest and currently the most popular type of thriller are the action ones of which a perfect example is ‘The Bourne’ series. Those don’t concentrate so much on great character development and an unbelievably great story but rather action sequences that are often done on a huge scale, fight scenes that often incorporate elements of acrobatics in order to enhance them and finally lavish locations that are spread all around the world.