THRILLER DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION

There are many small and big key points to a thriller film which makes it a thriller. Things like a pace or movement in camera, sound and plot that invites the audience into a thriller film.

A genuine, standalone thriller is a film that provide thrills and keeps the audience gripped or hanging on the edge of their seats, as the plot builds towards a climax thrillers have been slightly influenced by the horror genre; they have more gore, violence, brutality, terror, and a lot of deaths, but the main thing about the thriller is the plot being gripping and serious, its when the story line is clever and complex and realistic.
Similar things separate the thriller from other overlapping genres like adventure, spy, and war and in some case science fiction. Thrillers are defined not only by their subject of plot but the way they approach the film. For example a gripping story could be portrayed in a more comic or slow way which makes it not a thriller.

 The opening credits of the film Seven show a sinister music and scratchy picture, using layering etc, inviting the audience into a thriller. The images we are seeing are of books and writing and old warn fingers, skin peeling, scissors and cutting paper etc, we know that this is to do with the film about to start however we don’t know what relevance it is to the film yet. We know after seeing the film that every single shot in this film sequence is relevant to the plan that is revealed in the end but it invites us into the movie with a sort of open narrative however not completely as in the film the man in question is revealed from us until the end, you never see the faces you see hands only. This sequence I believe however isn’t trying to give us a clue on the plot but to open the film with a mood that mirrors the films mood.

Seven could be sold as a mystery story where a detective finds out who the killer is of these people, however that is not how the story is shown. The murders are another type of clue towards the resolution of the story and the murderer is although kept out of shot with a closed narrative until near the end, this whole film is approached in a thriller genre. This backs up the idea of the thrillers main conventions being how they approach the story not what the story itself is about.

For example in seven the scene when they are chasing the murderer through the corridors the whole scene is set in a thriller mood, with fast moving frames, canted angles and the chase like all thriller films would show a similar sequence of fast movement and suspension with gripping music somewhere in the film.