The thriller genre is characterized by excitement, suspense, and high melodrama, often overlapping with other genres. It features a lone protagonist or small group against a superior foe, with death or capture always present. The genre has no format limits and has been popular since ancient times, with Robert Louis Stevenson credited with pioneering it. The hero is often an ordinary person, and the genre includes cliffhangers and multiple narrative formats. Alfred Hitchcock was the undisputed master of the thriller on film.
The thriller genre is a category of fiction that deals with stories of excitement, suspense, and high melodrama. It often overlaps with other genres of literature and film, such as crime, adventure, and espionage. Characteristics of the thriller genre often include a lone protagonist or a small group of heroes pitted against a far superior foe as they pursue an overriding quest or objective. The threat of death or capture is always present, and clever twists usually complicate matters. Thrillers appear in virtually every form of fiction and sometimes include science fiction, mystery, or horror elements.
Storytellers have always employed suspense and adventure to excite and captivate their audiences. Homer’s epic Greek poem, The Odyssey, for example, features monsters, tragic twists and turns, and narrow escapes as the hero, Odysseus, struggles to get home. The advent of print media, followed by the new storytelling technologies of the 20th century, allowed for a wide diversification of subjects, formats and genres in fiction. Among the popular narrative forms resulting from this media expansion was the thriller genre.
Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson is credited with pioneering the thriller genre, publishing his highly successful novels Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped in the 1880s. In the decades that followed, writers such as John Buchan, Bram Stoker and Agatha Christie created thrillers respectively in the traditions of espionage, horror and mystery. The undisputed master of the thriller on film was director Alfred Hitchcock, whose name was synonymous with the thriller genre for much of the 20th century. Hitchcock cleverly added elements of comedy, paranoia or horror to classics like North Northwest, Vertigo and Psycho.
The hero of a thriller is often an ordinary person, allowing for easy sympathy from the audience, although sometimes the hero is someone with specialized training, such as a detective or spy. The Bourne book and film series combine both, offering an amnesiac hero who is stalked by a mysterious and powerful organization. This type of group is often an ideal enemy. A main character who is outnumbered, unarmed, and unsure of who to trust experiences the sense of hopelessness that is a key element in the thriller genre. Serial dramas often employ cliffhangers, where a chapter or episode will end with a character trapped or otherwise in danger, with no apparent hope of escape.
The thriller genre has no format limits. Old-time short stories and radio dramas presented thrillers as effective as those found in full-length novels and big-budget films. Many thrillers have embraced multiple narrative formats, such as the 1960s TV series The Fugitive and the novel The Silence of the Lambs, both of which became blockbuster films in the 1990s. During the same period, The X Files deftly combined elements of conspiracy thrillers, science fiction and horror. In the 2000s, the TV show Lost offered cliffhangers, tragic twists and a quest to get home, just as Homer’s Odyssey had thousands of years earlier.
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