Key Films in the History of the Thriller Genre

History of the Thriller Genre - Films

One of the earliest thrillers as Harold Lloyd’s ‘Safety Last’ (1923) with a daredevil stunt being performed on the side of a skyscraper, from which Fritz Lang gained inspiration and directed the chilling film ‘M’ (1931) which starred Peter Lorre as a serial child killer. This was closely followed by Edward Sutherland’s crime thriller, ‘Murders in the Zoo’ (1933) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by director Rouben Mamoulian.

George Cukor developed the thriller genre with the movie ‘Gaslight’ in 1944, which featured a scheming husband played by Charles Boyer plotting to make his young and innocent wife to go insane, so he can gain her inheritance. This was closely followed by the film noir, ‘Laura’ later the same year that involved the murder of an advertising executive conducted by a female police detective who suspects an acid-tongued journalist. ‘The Third Man’ (1949) was one of the best thriller films of all time and told the story of a writer (Joseph Cotton) in post-WWII Vienna who found.

From 1950 onwards, Alfred Hitchcock was a main director in the thriller/suspense genre. A prime example of his fine work was in the movie Marnie (1964) where he interweaved the sexual theme into the movie as shown by the memories of the main character, Marnie. He also was in charge of the shocking thriller, ‘Psycho’ (1960) about a loner of a motel owner who fixated with his mother. He later directed the terrifying film, ‘The Birds’ which involves the trauma of Teppi Hedren after the invasion of foreign birds on a coastal N Carolina town.

John Frankenheier’s Black Sunday film in 1977 was also one of its time as it involved a terrorist plot line, as they use a Goodyear balloon to crash into the Super Bowl. This was closely followed by James Bridges' The China Syndrome in 1979 was a thrilling drama about a possible nuclear accident and cover-up near Los Angeles, with Jane Fonda as a television news reporter and Jack Lemmon as the nuclear power plant's whistle-blower, after discovering that the X-rays used to check key welds at the plant have been falsified.

Recently thrillers have used twisting plots and surprise endings to capture audiences, especially:

• Bryan Singer’s Usual Suspect involved Kevin Spacey as a club-footed conman with a mystery surrounding the Hungarian mobster Keyser Soze
• Also the movie ‘The Sixth Sense’ involves a twisting plot, as a young boy sees dead people, with this being a recurring theme as it also was involved in the movie, Signs of 2002, from which a farmer comes across crop circles on his farm.