Brief History of the Psychological Thriller

The Psychological Thriller genre has been constant, popular genre which we can see being used in some of the very early literature texts. It focuses on manipulating the audience, and the building of suspense. It has been popular with authors and film directors alike, as it captures and stimulates the audience in a way that is different to something of the horror genre, or the action genre. Psychological Thrillers, even if in a 'fantasy' setting, tend not t try and suspend the audience's belief of what is going on in the film. They have been known to commonly feature narrative points which are used to catch the audience members off guard; it builds up a high expectation, before making them feel uncertain of what they have just seen.

Examples in Literature:

• The Count Of Monte Cristo (1844) is a swashbuckling revenge thriller in which the protagonist is betrayed by his friend and is sent to a prison in southern France from which he later escapes and seeks revenge. The story uses conventions such as revenge, power and betrayal which relate to the thriller genre.
• Heart Of Darkness (1903) is a first person within a first person about a man who travels the who travels up the Congo River in search of an enigmatic Belgian trader. Layer by layer, the atrocities of the human soul and man's inhumanity to man are peeled away. This could be seen nowadays as a psychological thriller because of the psychotic theme and conventions it contains.

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Examples In Film: 

• Alfred Hitchcock's first thriller was the third silent movie The Lodger (1926) which was a Jack the Ripper story. This film was a psycho thriller because it dealt with a psychopath murderer and so had a typical story line of this genre. Hitchcock also produced thrillers such as Blackmail (1929)- his first sound film, Murder!, Number Seventeen,The Man Who New Too Much. These were all suspense films.
• The chilling German film M (1931) directed by Fritz Lang, told the story of a criminal deviant who preyed on children.
• me of thrillers was the FBI/agent hunting a serial killer and the most famous example of this was the picture winning, The Silence Of the Lambs (1991) by Jonathan Demme. This was classified as a crime thriller but it also merged into the psycho thriller sub genre  as it dealt with a psychological issues. David Fincher's Se7en (1995) is another example of a crime thriller that was famous.