These are the typical conventions of a thriller film:
In order to help me with my research, I watched a variety of thriller films. These would include films watched in lessons and out of them. Here is a list of films I watched In order to get inspiration for our thriller piece:
- The happening
- Memento
- Donnie Darko
- The Bourne Supremacy
- Rambo: First BloodThe requirements of the opening 2 minutes of a thriller film is to engage the audience and keep them interested so that they watch the film. The film producers would look to make the opening two minutes very interested and not boring for the viewers. They would think about the setting, making it very dark with a sense of mystery. The storyline would be an important aspect to think about as it would want to be correspondent to the type of thriller. Also, having a specific target audience is important when making a thriller opening as making it for the wrong target audience would not get them interested, therefore they wouldn’t watch the rest of the film. I would say that the most important part of a thriller film is the first two minutes because that can incidentally determine whether the rest of the film is to be watched or not. A great example of a good opening first 2 minutes of a film is ‘The Happening’. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a clip from the opening but it is brilliant the way it is action packed right from the get-go. Also, the way the eerie music plays over the top of the bold blue on black style writing makes it especially effective.
The way in which the slow and fast transitions juxtapose with the pace of the action gives it a great effect and impact on the audience. It lets them know that the rest of the film is going to be action packed, especially during the part in the opening when the knife gets plunged into the neck. This mid-shot here from the film ‘The Happening’ shows you most of the detail and the forthcoming of what is going to happen. Before this, it shows a close-up on the knife making the scene seem more dramatic and tense. This is conventional because it shows typical props in a thriller film, as well as the close up showing emotion on the face. 
The mise-en-scene and location in the first two minutes are also very important within a thriller. The image to the right shows a clear indication of this. What I found interesting was the fact that the tree’s almost come in towards the people as if it was to devour them. This would speak to the audience in such ways that danger is possibly present, giving it an eerie and creepy effect. As we can see here as well the location is set in some sort of park or walkway. A park is a typically happy place for people to walk through, meaning it is an unconventional location for anything bad to happen, and if it does, it gives it that reverse impact. 
Conventions we used in our thriller:
Most good thriller films such as ‘The Dark Knight’ would use these thriller conventions within the opening two minutes of the film. They would use them to kick straight into the action of it and therefore leave the audience watching in suspense. However, not all directors take this approach. For instance, the film ‘V for Vendetta’ takes a slower approach with the first two minutes yet is still has an effect on the audience. This works well for the film as it slowly adds to the increasing tension, leading up to the action packed final scene. The opening 2 minutes are used mainly for narrative effect. This is not a wrong approach to an intro of a thriller; it is used in order to save the action for a later time in the film. The slower approach still leaves the audience watching, it is mainly used to ease into the storyline a bit.
Psychological thrillers such as ‘Memento’ tends to break the use of conventions of both of the explained above because as it was originally made to be played in a non-linear format, meaning it is played backwards. The fact that it is a psychological thriller and not an action thriller makes it difficult to add action-packed violence like ‘The dark Knight’ and ‘V for Vendetta’. Its main intention is to get into the mind of the audience and play with it a little with the narrative. For instance, the director (Christopher Nolan) would make it in a non-linear form in order to confuse the audience, at the same time get them thinking about the general storyline. He would do this by adding flashbacks, previous encounters and scenes of déjà vu. This most certainly adds a sense of mystery to it.
Our thriller is highly influenced by ‘Memento’ as we took the idea of grainy, black and white effects and flashbacks and added it into our piece. This was effective because it made it more clearly as to what was going on and it a key convention in a thriller. Our thriller definitely challenged the normal conventions being as It started with roughly 10 seconds of footage then straight into a flashback. It starts with the victim being bloody and tied up then a flashback clip of how the scene actually happened.
The still image on the left is part of the flashback and it shows how the still image on the left happened.
This is deemed to be effective as it kick-starts the audience into some action straight away and gives a sense of the storyline. We also got influences from more audience friendly thrillers such as ‘The Happening’. The way that this influenced us was because of the intense and dramatic opening sequence. Also, the music at the start uses a very minor key, with sounds of heavy string instruments, drums and non-digetic wind. We also included non-digetic sounds of wind in our Thriller because we thought it was very effective in ‘The Happening’.
