What makes a good thriller?

and also those actor and actresses.,

I'll choose to believe Hitch, because, he knew.

And, because it seems people missed it...

"The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story."

In other words, surprise is BAD, as in undesirable, as in NOT GOOD FOR A THRILLER.

Get it? Surprise is not good for a thriller. Surprise is the opposite of suspense. Listen to Hitchcock, he knew more than we did. He was the definitive expert on the genre.

I don't know how else to say it, so I won't try.

Also, life being full of surprises has absolutely nothing to do with what makes a good thriller. Nothing, Nil, Zip, Ziltch.

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Yeah, I agree with Hitchcock, too. Suspense is the anticipation of a surprise, and not the surprise itself.

If thrillers were about the moment of revelation, rather than the buildup to that moment, then they would only be thrilling for a split-second at a time, and would have no replay value.

Of course, the classics do have replay value, because they're not about information; they're about style and misdirection. You could almost argue that thrillers are a genre of film based almost entirely on technique, rather than the types of events which take place within them.

I agree with your assessment, Emir. Having some ugly monster jump out of the dark is what directors do when they haven't any idea for creating suspense.

Yeah, like when the group leader warns, "Whatever happens, we've got to stick together!" just before the next expendable cast member wanders off alone to retrieve his cat or search for treasure or on some other fool errand that is certain to bring him face to face with the Thing That Jumps Out of the Dark.

Ever see Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera or some of his other silent thrillers? There was even a popular song during his day, "Lon Chaney Will Get You if You Don't Watch Out." The only ode I've ever heard to a thriller character in a modern talkie is the theme song Burt Bacharach wrote for the original The Blob.

Right, and a great example that I've cited before in the film Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, tubby Costello is stalked through an otherwise empty house by Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman. Now this scene comes early in the movie, so you know Costello isn't about to be killed off, being one of the two stars with his name in the film's title. And he never even sees the Wolfman himself, never suspects he's in danger. But watching the Wolfman constantly just a claw's length behind him was thrilling!

But for all this talk about Hitchocock saying thrillers aren't about surprises, one of the shocks of Psycho was surely that the main character (or the person who appears at the start to be the main character) is killed off early on.

I think that Hitchcock's films do make use of surprise, it is just that there is a lot more to them than that, which is why we can watch them more than once, or even for the first time 40 or 50 years later when every plot twist has become popular knowledge.

how real the movie feels and suspense

Suspense and story.

Suspense while everything is dark without much of a story sucks.

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Bleacheddecay

Well, let's take a closer look at that shower murder scene in Psycho. Hitch has the woman driving in a heavy rain, she's having problems with the car (or with finding her way, I forget which), so she stops at this old, isolated, spooky-looking motel where's she's the only customer; she's checked in by this strange, rather spooky young man; she's watched in her room through holes in the wall; the young man and his "mother" are heard arguing about the girl; she's in the shower unaware as we see the bathroom door open and a figure approach through the opaque shower curtains, and then she's attacked. So there's are several moments of suspense leading up to the attack as Hitch puts that character in more and more danger.

Now the fact that he used a big name movie star to play that role was a casting surprise to some movie-goers, but that had nothing to do with the suspense Hitchcock was building on screen, leading up to a dramatic resolution. It was just a matter of casting. Had it been an unknown actress rather than Janet Leigh, the suspense still had been built to the point that you're sure that the girl is in some sort of danger, that something bad is about to happen. Maybe you don't expect her to be murdered, but by that time you're expecting something because of Hitchcock's use of suspense. We may not always correctly anticipate what is going to happen in a scene in a Hitchcock movie, but he almost always milks the utmost suspense from the situation by showing how the danger is building. He doesn't just have the killer jump out of the dark at you.

In the Abbott and Costello feature that I earlier cited, their names are in the title, they are the stars of the picture and the central characters around whom the movie's plot revolves. And it wouldn't be a comedy if the comedians are killed.

But Janet Leigh was not the star of Psycho. Tony Perkins was; he was the primary figure around whom the plot revolved. Therefore Janet Leigh's character was expendable. Leigh may have appeared to be the possible star in the opening scenes of the movie, but then she turns out to be the McGuffin (or whatever the term was that Hitch used) by which he distracts the audience until the plot twist occurs. After all, movie audiences were familar with Janet Leigh as someone who usually played nice girls, heroines, and was married to that nice Tony Curtis, so they start watching Psycho expecting to see Leigh in a similar role, only to find her playing against type as a thief and murder victim. The biggest "surprise" is that Hitchcock cast her against type, not that the person she plays gets killed.

Kinda like that Police comedy series on TV in which each week the guest star appeared as the dead body in the opening scene and was never seen again in the rest of the episode.

It's impossible for a young'n like me to say if that was the "biggest" surprise Hitch intended for his contemporary audience, but at least for me, watching for the first time in 1995 or 1996 I found it pretty shocking that the character who up to that point had been the one we know the most about, the one the camera follows from the beginning and for what, at least 15 minutes or so into the film (longer?) with a whole plot, it came across as a very big deal to completely drop that thread by bumping her off and introducing a whole new cast of characters. Anyway, my point isn't which is the "bigger" shock, but that by ranking them like that it seems like you're downplaying the one that disagrees (maybe. see my emendation below) with your definition of suspense. I know this is kind of vague, but I suspect that there's a lot of truth to the idea that suspense is largely a matter of building anticipation. For any really great thriller though I suspect that "the unexpected" is needed if it can be done well. The thing I remember most about movies like Psycho and Limbo (another one of those that switches gears) is how they really involve the audience by letting them anticipate certain things and then artfully shifting modes. If they can get you to care what's happening by building a plausible, compelling world and characters, but at the same time get you to question your expectations, I think that's much better, more engaging film-making than simple emotional manipulation.

EDIT: it strikes me that these two observations don't necessarily contradict each other. Building anticipation to heighten the mood of a given scene on the one hand, structuring your story in such a way that it's not just a straightforward series of "acts" on the other hand.

I think there needs to be a certain amount of investment in the characters. If I don't care about the characters one way or the other because of the acting or the lack of development of the character, then I fail to be thrilled. I simply don't care what happens next.


My friend went to see Awake this past weekend and she said that even though she thought the plot was solid, she couldn't get past the bad acting. She had no buy-in whatsoever to the characters.

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I think the main factor is the story .If the story is about an adventure it be so thrilling.

Not sure if you were responding to me or someone else, Linespalsy, but I sure didn't mean to try to "rank" shocks or surprises (I'm not sure I'd know how to do that) or to "downplay" an interpretation that disagrees with my own. I certainly can understand why you and others were surprised at Janet Leigh's early demise in Psycho. it just seems to me that the surprise was more as to do with who Hitch cast in that part than what happened to the character in the story. If it had been an unknown actress or a familar character actor like Barbara Bel Geddes who had small parts in other Hitchcock films, I suspect that people wouldn't have been as surprised as they were that Hitchcock bumps off a big-name star so early in the picture. As it is, when people mention Psycho, most people usually think "Janet Leigh" although she was not the star of the movie or the central character in the plot. Most folks probably don't even recall who played her sister who solves the mystery of momma or the boy friend who was in both the opening and (I think) closing scenes. The sister had as much or more onscreen time than Leigh.

Hitchcock was an infamous practical joker, and I see his casting of Janet Leigh in that part instead of perhaps as the avenging sister as his practical joke on the audience. It also was one of the gimmicks he often used to distract the audience, and it was a bold bit of casting to hire a well-known, popular star to play a small but key role and then do her in early in the film. And yes, it does surprise and even mildly "shock" the audience when seen the first time. But I still say he spends a lot of time slowly cranking up the suspense to milk all of the emotion he can from the shower scene.

Of course, as you say, the suspense and surprise are not mutually exclusive; But I think Hitchcock almost always built up the suspense before springing a surprise. Another good example is The Birds--it certainly would be shocking if a bird suddenly swoops down and pecks out someone's eye. But it's a lot more suspenseful to see 5 birds perched on playground equipment, then 10, then 20, as more birds wing in and as the people become more apprehensive, start backing away, then turn and run in terror as hundreds of birds pursue them

Hail to Alfred Hitchcock! The master of suspense.

For me it has to have suspense throughout the entire movie. It can't be one of those movies that you already know what is going to happen by the time 20 minutes into it.

Yet I can think of examples where the picture starts off where you know--or think you know--what happened and yet are still suspenseful. A great example is Double Indemnity, which opens with Fred MacMurray staggering into his insurance office at the crack of dawn, dripping blood, and starts telling his story into a dictaphone. Or Mildred Pierce, which opens with gunfire and a wounded man falling to the floor in a darkened house and calling her name before he dies. Or the original DOA with Edmund O'Brien, where he staggers into a police station to report a murder--his own. Or both versions of The Killers, both of which open with the essential facts from Hemingway's original short story where two gunmen come to a small town to kill a seemingly nondescript person. The victim is warned by a friend that the killers are on the way to where he lives, but he refuses to run, just waits for them to kill him. Or Charles Foster Kane dies whispering "Rosebud" in the opening scenes of Citizen Kane. In all six films, you have either the star of the picture or a main supporting character dead in the opening scenes, so you know what is going to happen, yet there is still plenty of suspense as the story unwinds in back-flashes.

My daughter and I watched Rear Window again the other day. Again for me, first time for her. She wanted to see the origins of Disturbia.

We really enjoyed both movies.