Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Typical Characteristics of a Thriller Film
A genuine, standard thriller is a film that provide thrills and keeps the audience cliff-hanging at the 'edge of their seats' as the plot builds towards a climax. The tension usually arises when the character(s) is placed in a menacing situation, mystery, or an escape from which escaping seems impossible. Life is threatened, usually because the key character is unsuspecting or unknowingly involved in a dangerous or potentially deadly situation.
Characters in thrillers include criminals, stalkers, assassins, innocent victims (often on the run), menaced women, characters with dark pasts, psychotic individuals, terrorists, cops and escaped cons, private eyes, people involved in twisted relationships, world-weary men and women, psycho-fiends, and more. The themes of thrillers frequently include terrorism, political conspiracy, pursuit, or romantic triangles leading to murder.
Thrillers mostly take place in ordinary suburbs/cities. Though sometimes, they may take place wholly or partly in exotic settings such as foreign cities, deserts, polar regions, or high seas. The heroes in most thrillers are frequently ordinary citizens unaccustomed to danger. However, more common in crime thrillers, they may also be "hard men" accustomed to danger, like, police officers and detectives. While such heroes have traditionally been men, women lead characters have become increasingly common.
Thrillers often overlap with mystery stories, but are distinguished by the structure of their plots. In a thriller, the hero must thwart the plans of an enemy, rather than uncover a crime that has already happened; while a murder mystery would be spoiled by a premature disclosure of the murderer's identity, in a thriller the identity of a murderer or other villain is typically known all along. Thrillers also occur on a much grander scale: the crimes that must be prevented are serial or mass murder, terrorism, assassination, or the overthrow of governments. Jeopardy and violent confrontations are standard plot elements. While a mystery climaxes when the mystery is solved, a thriller climaxes when the hero finally defeats the villain, saving his own life and often the lives of others. In thrillers influenced by film noir and tragedy, the compromised hero is often killed in the process.
In recent years, thrillers have been slightly influenced by the horror genre; they have more gore/sadistic violence, brutality, terror and body counts. Recent thrillers that did that are Eden Lake, The Last House on the Left, P2, Untraceable and Funny Games
Film Magazine Covers (Already on sale)
'Total Film' and 'Empire' are two different brands of film magazine covers as shown above, they are examples of the magazines on sale in the shops today. Although they are two very different brands, if we look and analyse them closely enough, we are able to see that they are similar in many ways and if it wasn't for the brand names at the top of them, you could mistake one for the other. This is due to the layout and the formation of the words and images on each magazine and how alike they both are. This suggests that they are very successful otherwise two different and competing magazines would not be so similar. The front cover is most important and paramount and is a key factor in drawing the readers in and make them want to read the rest of the contents. The more eye catching the cover the more successful the magazine.
Monday, 5 July 2010
Thriller Film Posters
The image above are examples of various thriller film posters. They are all very similar yet also very different in many ways. Firsty, the colouring and whole atmosphere is very dull and dingey, representing a sense of worry, trouble and the feeling of the unknown as the images on all of them are all very much of real, true-to-life individuals, in some sort of troubled or scary situation. None of them look happy. Even the titles of each of films are of similar sizes and placed at the lower end of the poster, they are mainly just one worded, revealing very little information. All the relevant film information is again placed at the bottom of the poser. Each of the posters give off various diffferemt elements of something interesting, bound to get the viewers or readers intrigued and longing to watch the film, generally because there is alot of suspense in thrillers and many viewers like to be kept on their toes when watching a film and to find stuff out along the way to solve the 'problem'.
The History of Film Posters
Originally, film posters were produced for the exclusive use by the theatres exhibiting the film the poster was created for, and the copies of the posters were required to be returned to the distributor after the film left the theatre. In the United States, posters were usually returned to a nation-wide operation called the National Screen Service (NSS) which printed and distributed most of the film posters for the studios between 1940 and 1984. As an economy measure, the NSS regularly recycled posters that were returned, sending them back out to be used again at another theatre. During this time, a film could stay in circulation for several years, and so many old film posters were badly worn before being retired into storage at an NSS warehouse (most often, they were thrown away when they were no longer needed or had become too worn to be used again). Those posters which were not returned were often thrown away by the theatre owner, but some film posters found their way into the hands of collectors.
Beginning in the 1980s, the American film studios began taking over direct production and distribution of their posters from the National Screen Service and the process of making and distributing film posters became decentralised in that country.
Friday, 2 July 2010
Alfred Hitchcock (The master in suspense and pschological thrillers)
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English filmmaker and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in his native United Kingdom in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood. In 1956 he became an American citizen while retaining his British citizenship.
Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades. Often regarded as the greatest British filmmaker, he came first in a 2007 poll of film critics in Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper, which said: "Unquestionably the greatest filmmaker to emerge from these islands, Hitchcock did more than any director to shape modern cinema, which would be utterly different without him. His flair was for narrative, cruelly withholding crucial information (from his characters and from us) and engaging the emotions of the audience like no one else. MovieMaker has hailed him as the most influential filmmaker of all time.
A Femme Fatale
A femme fatale is an alluring and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype or stock character of literature and art. Her ability to entrance and hypnotize her male victim was in the earliest stories seen as being literally supernatural, hence the most prosaic femme fatale today is still described as having a power akin to an enchantress, vampire, female monster or demon.
The phrase is French for "deadly woman". A femme fatale tries to achieve her hidden purpose by using feminine wiles such as beauty, charm, and sexual allure. Typically, she is exceptionally well-endowed with these qualities. In some situations, she uses lying or coercion rather than charm. She may also be (or imply to be) a victim, caught in a situation from which she cannot escape; The Lady from Shanghai (a 1947 film noir) giving one such example, which is also a film noir.
Although typically villainous, femmes fatales have also appeared as antiheroines in some stories, and some even repent and become heroines by the end of the tale. In social life, the femme fatale tortures her lover in an asymmetrical relationship, denying confirmation of her affection. She usually drives him to the point of obsession and exhaustion so that he is incapable of making rational decisions.
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