In preparation towards creating our thriller opening sequence, we needed to fully understand what elements are included in creating a successful thriller movie and what creates a feeling of atmosphere and suspense. We have already created mood boards suggesting typical horror conventions but to find out more about thrillers we had to do a bit of research by watching and reading, what we thought, were good examples of thriller movies/programmes and books. After this process I came to the conclusion that a thriller has many different layers and elements to it. A thriller must keep the audience on edge, making them try and work out the must have twist in the plot. However, yes the audience try and work out the ‘twist’ but the beauty of a thriller is that no matter how much you try to understand it, there are always unexpected sudden sub-plots which are there to throw the audience, once again keeping them engaged.
An essential component in creating a thriller is creating suspense for the audience by overlapping plots etc. There is normally always a main heroic character and the setting of a thriller is regularly set in an exotic country/island. There are many different types of thrillers from sci-fi to straight mysteries but they all share the same elements in creating suspense. Some can be psychological and very complex encouraging highly educated people to enjoy them and some are much more simplistic appealing to a much wider audience. To create our own thriller I think that we need to include all the different elements that I have spoken about here and try to create suspense in the small space to 2 minutes for the audience.
A good example of a thriller opening sequence would be seven. Below i have put the opening sequence of seven, to demonstrate the type of thing we will be looking at when making our own thrillers.
