History of Thrillers

History of  Thrillers

Early Thrillers in the 1920/30's

• Alfred Hitchcock helped to promote the thriller genre when making a silent film called 'The Lodger' which was about Jack the Ripper.
• This is about a landlady who suspects her new lodger is the madman killing women in London.
• His next thriller was Blackmail (1929), which was hit and Britain's first sound film.
• Of Hitchcock's fifteen major features made between 1925 and 1935, only six were suspense films, but from 1935 most of his outputs were thriller.
• Notable examples of Hitchcock's early British suspense-thriller films include The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and also his first spy-chase/romantic thriller, The 39 steps (1935).



Thrillers in the 1940's:

• In the 1940s Hitchcock continued to direct suspense thrillers. 
• He produced two more thrillers, one of which won an oscar, which was Rebecca. The other film he produced was was Foreign Correspondent. 
• George Cukors psychological Thriller "Gaslight' (1944) was about a husband who plotted to make his own Wife go insane in order to inherit her inheritance. 
• The second film by George of this year was a film called "Noir" which was about a thrilling murder investigation made by police detective Dan Andrews. 
• In the 1940s there were many other thrillers released such as, The Spiral staircase in 1946 The Lady From Shanghai in 1948, Sorry Wrong Number in 1948 and also The Third Man in 1949. 

Thrillers in the 1950's

• In the 1950's Hitchcock started to add technicolour to his films.
• He also started to include glamorous stars and exotic locales.
• He reached the zenith of his career with a succession of classic films such as, Strangers on a Train (1951). Which is about two train passengers who stage a battle of wits and traded murders with each other.
• Non-Hitchcock thrillers films of the 1950s include Niagara (1953) by Henry Hathaway, with Marilyn Monroe as the trashy femme fatale who schemes to kill her unstable husband. 
• Orson Welles' unique crime thriller, Touch of Evil (1958) with a pre-Psycho Janet Leigh as a terrorised wife, Charlton Heston as a Mexican narcotics agent, and the director himself as an evil border town cop. 

Thrillers in the 1970's:

• There was a violent start to the 1970s as the film, Frenzy (1972) which was Hitchcock's first film in two decades, which was given an R rating due to its vicious and explicit strangulation scene. 
• Steven Spielberg's low budget early TV movie Duel (1971), which got a cult following, was about road rage between a hapless travelling salesman and the unseen, relentless driver of a truck. 
• The decade ended with Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm (1989), which was a psychological thriller with Nicole Kidman, who had to fight for her life on a yacht against a crazed castaway. 
• This thriller has elements of obsession and trapped protagonists who must find a way to escape the clutches of the villain. 
• These devices influenced a number of thrillers in the following years.