Thrillers are made by fast pace editing, and frequent action. In a Thriller there is usually resourceful heroes which plan out ideas on how to be more powerful to stop better equipped villains. A thriller is a villain driven plot. The villain presents obstacles the hero must overcome.
VILLAINThrillers use devices such as suspense, red herrings and cliffhangers. The good use of these devices in a thriller make a good thriller because it makes the audience want to keep watching.
Suspense is a excitement which is mixed with apprehension, tension and anxiety which are developed from unpredictable and mysterious in a thriller. A example would be if a character is hanging of a ledge or tied on a railroad tracks with a train coming at full speed. Its the feeling the audience get, trying to work out how they will get out of the situation with character. It gives the audience as excitement.
This trailer for this thriller is a great example of suspense. The reason for this is because we see a man get taken away before seeing his wife. We as the audience want to know how he got into the situation and how he will get out of the situation.
What a red herring is something that may happen that makes the audience believe something that misleads us. A example would be someone being shot, we think that person that got shot is dead yet we see that he isn't dead because a blank was shot.
This is a scene from the thriller called "North By Northwest" created by Hitchcock. What we see in this scene is that Cary Grant gets shot, and we as the audience believe that his been shot, in fact we have been mislead to believe that he has been shot, yet only blanks were shot to make it look like he was shot. Only the character that was shooting and the character that was meant to have been shot know this. Us as the audience don't.
A cliffhanger is when we the audience is left questioning what will happen in the next scene, to make you want to keep watching the movie. Cliffhangers are also used at the end of movies, what this allows the audience to do is to create there own ending in there mind or if there will be a second part to the film.
In this scene from Taken, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) listens in terror as his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) is kidnapped by Albanian sex traffickers in Paris. He confronts one of the kidnappers on the phone, promising him he will stop at nothing to get his daughter back. The voice simply responds with, "Good luck." This is a cliffhanger to the audience because we don't know whats going to happen next or how Liam Neeson is going to save his daughter. This makes the audience want to keep watching the film to find out what happens next.
More Characteristics of a thriller
Thrillers tend to take place in exotic settings such as foreign cities. For example in Taken the setting is in Paris, Taken 2 is in Istanbul and the Unknown it is set in Berlin.
The heroes in most thrillers are tend to be known as "hard men", the reason for this is because they are accustomed to danger, for example a policeman. However, they could also be ordinary citizens drawn into danger by accident.
Types of Thrillers
There are loads of different kinds of thrillers. There are legal thrillers, spy thrillers, action/adventure thriller, medical thriller, police thriller, romantic thriller, historical thriller, political thriller, religious thriller, high-tech thriller, military thriller and there are loads more.
