Sub genre Research - Thrillers

Before creating our own thriller opening, me and Olivia did some research into the different sub-genres of thrillers. Thriller is a very broad genre, with many different types of thriller and different sub-genres that are associated with the term, although the most common thrillers include:

- Psychological thriller

- Action thriller

- Crime thriller

- Spy thriller

- Horror thriller

- Mystery thriller

- Supernatural thriller

To get a better understanding of the differences between the sub-genres, I did some further research into how each of them differ, so I could also decide which one I wanted to build my idea for my opening around. 

Our decision

Olivia and I decided that our film opening would be a psychological thriller. This was because we found this sub-genre to be the most interesting and we really liked how it was presented when we watched 'The Silence of The Lambs' as a class. We thought that keeping the audience in the dark for the majority of the opening to be a good way to present our threat and would make the film more interesting to watch. Therefore, we intentionally made sure to keep the faces of our actors a mystery to the viewer to create an enigma code, and created a cheery atmosphere to the film so that we could explore the theme of a potential mental illness in our characters - therefore giving an implication for the reason why they are murderers. 

Common themes in a psychological thriller:

- Criminals

- Stalkers

- Assassins

- Private investigators

- Psychotic individuals (mental illness)

- Secret agents

- Sociopaths

- Secret agents

-Terrorists

- Cops

- Trauma

- Psychology