History of the Thriller genre (focusing on Psychological Thrillers)

The genre of thriller is used in literature, film and television programming with the use of suspense, tension and excitement as main elements. They heavily stimulate the viewer's moods making them feel anticipation, ultra-heightened expectation, uncertainty, surprise, anxiety and/or terror. The most common use of subgenre to thriller is mystery, crime and psychological thrillers, however there are also many other subgenres.

History in Literature

• The Little Red Riding Hood (1697) is an early example of a psycho-stalker thriller as an innocent girl is convinced by a wolf to take the long path while he reaches her grandma's house and eats (or hides) her. The ideas of the wolf's stalking and manipulation are conventions of the psychological thriller genre.
• The Count Of Monte Cristo (1844) is a swashbuckling revenge thriller in which the protagonist is betrayed by his friend and is sent to a prison in southern France from which he later escapes and seeks revenge. The story uses conventions such as revenge, power and betrayal which relate to the thriller genre.
• Heart Of Darkness (1903) is a first person within a first person about a man who travels the who travels up the Congo River in search of an enigmatic Belgian trader. Layer by layer, the atrocities of the human soul and man's inhumanity to man are peeled away. This could be seen nowadays as a psychological thriller because of the psychotic theme and conventions it contains.
• The Bourne Identity (1980) is one of the first psycho thrillers to be written in a modern stlye. It tells the story of a man with gun shot wounds who is found floating in the Mediterranean Sea, and when taken to shore he wakes up with Amnesia. In look for his identity, the conventions of ambiguity, and the unknown are shown quite clearly. These are main themes of the psycho thriller genre.

History in film

1920s-1930s

• Aflred Hitchcock's first thriller was the third silent movie The Lodger (1926) which was a Jack the Ripper story. This film was a psycho thriller because it dealt with a psycopath murderer and so had a typical story line of this genre. Hitchcock also produced thrillers such as Blackmail (1929)- his first sound film, Murder!, Number Seventeen,The Man Who New Too Much. These were all suspense films.
• The chilling german film M (1931) directed by Fritz Lang, told the story of a crminial deviant who preyed on children.
• Other British directors, such as Walter Forde, Victor Saville, George A. Cooper, and even the young Michael Powell made more thrillers in the same period; Forde made nine, Vorhaus seven between 1932 and 1935.

1940s

• Hitchcok continued to perfect his recognition in the suspense-thriller genre with films such as Foreign Correspondent (1940) and the oscar winning Rebecca (1940)  about an  unusual romance between a young woman and an emotionally distant rich widower.
• Gaslight (19440 was a psychological thriller directed by George Cukor that told the story of a husband that plotted to turn his wife insane in order to aquire her inheritance.

1950s

• HItchcock then added colour to his thrillers,when he prodcued classic such as: Strangers on a train (1951), Dial M for Murder, To cath a thiefl, Vertigo, and North by Northwest.
• Niagara (1953) by Henry Hathaway starred Marylin Monroe and tells the story of a woman who plotts to kill her husband.
• Spy films were also quite popular in this decade.

1960s

• After Hitchcocks classics in the 50s, he released a shocking and engrossing thriller called Psycho (1960) about a loner mother-fixated motel owner and taxidermist. This was an iconic film because of the famous shower scene in which a woman is stabbed brutally. This scene has been re-enacted in many modern films and it has become an icon of the thriller genre.
• Inspired by Psycho, Michael Powell produced the film Peeping Tom about a psychopath cameraman.
•  Roman Polanski's first film in English, the frightening and surrealistic Repulsion (1965) – with Catherine Deneuve as a young woman who goes increasingly mad.

1970s-80s

• In this decade, thrillers started to get more vivid and Hitcocks Frenzy (1972) was given an R rating because of the explicit strangulation scene.
• Brian De Palma usually had themes of guilt, voyeurism (obssession with spying on others having sex), paranoia and obsession in his films. Similar plot elements include killing off a main character early on, switching points of view, and dream-like sequences. His films include, the psycho-thriller Sisters (1973), a film about dual personalities, Obsession (1976) which was somewhat inspired by Vertigo, Dressed to Kill (1980), and the assassination thriller Blow Out (1981).
• The decade ended with Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm (1989), a psychological thriller with Nicole Kidman, who must fight for her life on a yacht against a crazed castaway.This film showed elements of obssession and trapped protagonists that inspired many thrillers in the 90s.

1990s

• The decade started with  Rob Reiner's Misery (1990) which tells the story of a psycho fan. 
• The theme of obsession was becoming popular and many films featured it: Unlawful Entry (1992), Single White Female (1992), Malice (1993)- starring Nicole Kidman, and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
• Another emerging theme of thrillers was the FBI/agent hunting a serial killer and the most famous example of this was the picture winning, The Silence Of the Lambs (1991) by Jonathan Demme. This was classified as a crime thriller but it also merged into the psycho thriller subgenre  as it dealt with a psychological issues. David Fincher's Se7en (1995) is another example of a crime thriller that was famous.
• Recent thrillers have a lot of influence from the horror genre and tend to use more gore. But some of the best work contains some of the original conventions that made thrillers so captivating.