thriller movies essay

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The Psychological Thriller: An Overview

2014, Critical Insights: The American Thriller

My chapter in Salem Press's recent entry to its Critical Insights series, _The American Thriller_ (2014). As the title indicates, it is a history of the development of the psychological thriller in American culture.

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The following essay considers some of the consequences of Sebeok and Eco’s The Sign of Three (1983) for the broad history of the thriller, for the theory of genre, and in terms of an investigation of the relations between genre and subjectivity. It is not a fully worked-out history of the thriller and fictional detection in light of the scholarship concerned with abduction. Rather, it is a mere sketch of how such a history might look. It attempts to cast some light on the process of generic canon-building. It also poses a relation between the growth of ‘social paranoia’ in the history and cultural growth of the thriller and the general phenomenon of ‘anxiety’ which is pivotal to the biosemiotic foundations of what has been called by Sebeok (1979) and others (e.g. Wiley 1994) the ‘semiotic self’.

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The Hollywood political thriller is a film genre of unique relevance in the United States, often acting as a reflection of the fears and anxieties of its historical times. At the same time, however, the definition of its identity and boundaries still leaves room for further specification, perhaps due to the frequent consideration of the political thriller as part of the broader categories of either thriller narratives or political films. By revising the available literature and filmography and analyzing the narrative features of the classical political thriller, this article proposes a deeper definition of the genre that takes into account the nature of the broader ‘thriller’ category of films springing from a specific mode of crime fiction that focuses on a victim or threatened individual as its protagonist, depicts and conveys intense emotional states, portrays an unbalanced and highly existentialist worldview, and travels into the extraordinary while at the same time holding on to very concrete expectations of verisimilitude. The political thriller specifies this broader form of narration and links it to dramatic conflicts of political nature, investigative plots, reactive characters, historically grounded antagonists, a proximity to the sociopolitical history of the United States, and a certain iconography relating to institutional power. By establishing the main narrative traits of the political thriller, this definition hopes to lay the foundations for a better understanding of the genre, its history, and its seeming renaissance at the onset of the 21st Century.

Bowdoin Journal of Cinema

Bowdoin Journal of Cinema , Christine Rosa

American Psycho (2000) is based on Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial 1991 novel of the same name, and details the exploits of investment banker/serial killer Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale). Upon its release, notable feminists such as Gloria Steinem opposed the depicted violence towards women, and the graphic content was so disturbing that several countries established restrictions for acquiring the book. Despite the heated response to Ellis’s work, a modestly successful film version was released within the decade. This paper investigates the factors contributing to the success of the film and its enduring popularity with viewers and scholars alike, despite tackling such provocative material. Undoubtedly, female director and co-screenwriter Mary Harron deserves much of the credit for bringing the story to life with a tasteful sensibility that is crucial to the film’s transcendence beyond a mere slasher film, an aspect which distinguishes the film from its contemporaries. Her use of the ‘female gaze’ in portraying the hypermasculine world of protagonist Patrick Bateman lends the material a restrained quality and subverts the established paradigm of power in gender dynamics. Bateman, the epitome of white male privilege who navigates his world looking to dominate people he comes across, is steadily dismantled and stripped of his façade until he registers as more pitiable than frightening. The film places society under the microscope as much as the deplorable murderer at the center of its storyline, revealing the abhorrent reality of a world in which the appearance of success is more important than the conveyance of something real. In this depiction of New York City during the late 1980s, consumerism, superficiality, and societal expectations reign supreme, and Harron displays this worship of artificiality in shot after shot illuminating the lifestyle of the uber-rich. This critique of American culture endures into modern- day, and the palpable truth surrounding our collective warped sense of prioritization ensures its relevance. Like all good satires, American Psycho has valuable lessons to impart. It goes beyond condemnation of the shortcomings of society through dark comedy, however, to a genuinely thoughtful exploration of a human mind cultivated within an ethos of insincerity. What the viewers are left with is a deeply personal character study which forces them to empathize with a murderous psychopath trapped within a state of alienation and anonymity and desperate for something real. Similar to recent box office triumph Joker (2019), mental illness permeates the narrative, and although Bateman’s outbursts are extreme and exploited for comedic effect, viewers are ultimately meant to identify with the struggles which cause them. At the heart of his character exists an insecure human being who grapples with the sobering fact that no matter what he does, his life is entirely ineffectual.

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Nick Redfern

The mental flow model of the viewer’s experience of the cinema takes film genres to be forms constructed in order to evoke characteristic emotions that are intimately connected to generic themes and narrative structures. In this model, the horror film evokes the emotion ‘fear,’ producing autonomic responses of crying, shivering, and screaming in the viewer. Paranoia is frequently cited as a recurrent generic theme of the horror film, and, in some case, critics have identified a sub-genre of ‘paranoid horror’ films. However, the characteristic emotion of paranoia is not fear but ‘anxiety,’ and films that evoke such a state in the viewer demonstrate numerous differences from the horror genre. These differences are evident in the type of emotional responses experienced by the viewer and the level of their intensity, as well as in the generic themes and narrative structure of these films. Examples of these differences can be found in Hollywood-produced films such as The X-Files (1998) and Enemy of the State (1998). In light of these differences, the paranoid film can be regarded as a category distinct from the horror film.

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The most gripping and recurrent visualizations of the “monstrous ” in the media and film lay bare the tensions that underlie the contemporary construction of the “monstrous, ” which ranges in the twilit realm where divisions separating fact, fiction, and myth are porous—a gothic mode. There appear to be two monstrous figures in contemporary popular culture whose constructions blur into each other, and who most powerfully evoke not only our deepest fears and taboos, but also our most repressed fantasies and desires: the serial killer and the vampire. The social construction of these figures, in feature films that invoke the genre traditions of the documentary, melodrama, horror-psychological thriller, and romance form a significant section of this article; it is the easy slippage between cinema-verité depictions and horror-psychological thriller narrative modes that renders the gothicization of the serial killer as vampire compelling. This social construction will not only cover the ...

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