"A film with an exciting plot, typically involving crime or espionage."
BFI: Thriller Genre
The article linked above was helpful to find out what a thriller is. It includes examples of thrillers from the beginning of the 20th century, through the second world war period and up until the late 1990s. Films directed by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s set the rules of thrillers and has influenced a lot of thrillers since.
"Audiences went to the cinema not simply to see but also to feel something which they would not ordinarily experience in real life."
The 39 Steps (1935)
Alfred Hitchcock, a thriller director, believed that these films should "give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups." Films that he directed during the 1930s (including 'The 39 Steps', 1935 and 'Sabotage', 1936) set the bar high for future thrillers as they created some important rules of the creation of this genre; 'whodunit' was not the most important part.
After these films WWII took place and thriller films were influenced by this. 'The Next of Kin (1942)' directed by Thorold Dickinson was a WWII propaganda film and had the message 'careless talk costs lives', which at the time was on a propaganda poster created by the government to prevent the Germans getting hold of important information by intercepting phone calls.
"The Next of Kin" (1942) film poster and a Propaganda poster from the WWII period
This research has inspired the creation of my own opening title sequence because it must be a thriller genre. I have found that audiences enjoy watching something that they would not experience in every day life so I will try to create an narrative that does this.
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