Precursors Pre-film Due to what Rubin describe as a "wide, imprecise scope", it is unwieldy to attempt a comprehensive history of individual genres, including the thriller, and suggests it better to view the style in terms of cycles. Prior to the development of films, the genre has its connections to broadly-based fiction of the 18th century. Elements of the thriller are traced to the earliest gothic novel with
Horace Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto (1765) which led to
Matthew Lewis's
The Monk (1796) and
Ann Radcliffe's
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and
The Italian (1797). Rubin noted that the extended vulnerability of the enthralled protagonists and victims in the thriller anticipated the thriller genre, a statement echoed by Robert D. Hume's 1969 essay which asserts that the Gothic novel involved a reader in a new way, with increased emphasis on suspense, sensation and emotion opposed to moral and intellectual focuses. The gothics being considered thrillers is problematic as they are set in antiquated decaying worlds and fail the tradition of being considered "modern". The second literary form that predated thrillers was the Victorian
sensation novel, starting with
Wilkie Collins'
The Woman in White (1859–1860) which stripped the gothic genre of its mysticism and brought to a contemporary time closer to everyday life. These sensation novels often were published in serialized form, sometimes concluding their installments with
cliffhangers called "climax and curtain". The third of the proto-types to the thriller was early detective and mystery fiction, such as
Edgar Allan Poe's "
The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), which is widely considered the first detective story. The detective story drew upon the previously mentioned forms, and is shown through stories such as the
Sherlock Holmes novel
The Hound of the Baskervilles. The roots of the thriller also generally associated with the rise of the urban-industrial society in the 19th century which created new and expanded mass audience, along with new forms of entertainment. This included stage play melodramas such as ''
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in which an escaped slave escapes over an ice-choked river and the rural-set melodrama Blue Jeans'' (1890) which features a heroine who unties the hero just before he is cut by an advancing buzz saw. Other forms of entertainment arrived in the 19th century at fairgrounds and amusements parks with thrill-oriented rides and attractions such as
Ferris wheels,
Shoot the Chutes, which Rubin described as offering a "departure from humdrum reality that is merely a heightened version of that same humdrum reality.".
Silent era Fairgrounds were the earliest venues for film exhibitions in peep-show arcades, which film historian Tom Gunning described as "the cinema of attractions". Film exhibitions were composed of novelty-oriented shorts that provided surprise, amazement, laughter, or sexual stimulation with no narrative. The sensation of motion in these early films was later input into a framework known as the "chase film" which came into prominence in 1903. The chase films were often produced in Britain and France and employed minimal narrative for an extended chase scene. This genre led to one of the most commercially celebrated American films of the period,
The Great Train Robbery (1903). It contained elements of the
heist film with its depictions of ingeniously planned robberies, as well as relying on the thriller's technique of accelerated motion. Chase films were limited in scope, but their emphasis on the chase sequence would extend well into the future in films such as ''
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), Vanishing Point (1971), and Speed'' (1994). The period between 1907 and 1913 solidified the film industry's increasing mastery of narrative filmmaking, predominantly with
D.W. Griffith's films, which Rubin described as "enhancing suspense, psychological depth, and spatial orientation." Griffith applied new techniques such as
cross-cutting to build suspense in films such as
The Girl and Her Trust (1912), which also supplied psychological context for the actions.
Film serials, featuring stories broken up into regularly scheduled episodes, expanded on the suspense-inducing devices of the earlier chase films. Originally published in newspapers as fictional story installments, the
Chicago Tribune came upon the idea in 1913 by running serialized stories in both newspapers and film versions. This led to
The Adventures of Kathlyn, a serial in 13 parts which was a grand success and resulted in the newspaper developing the even more successful
The Million Dollar Mystery. Serials often ended with cliffhangers, an element that led to the tendency in thrillers to break up the story into a series of self-enclosed set pieces. Film serials were later produced in Europe, with French directors such as
Louis Feuillade who went from making chase films to making serials based on novels about master criminals, such as
Fantômas (1913) and
Les Vampires (1915). Outside of France, the most significant European venue for serials was Germany, with
Fritz Lang writing serials like
The Mistress of the World (1919) and later directing films like
The Spiders (1919). Lang would make films similar to those of Feuillade, with his films based on
Dr. Mabuse that were set in a contemporary time. Lang's
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) was described by Rubin as an important part of the development of the thriller with its "duplicitous, labyrinthine network of decadent nightspots and secret dens that are linked together by murky thoroughfares, twisting back alleys and subterranean passages." Lang's later film
Spies (1928) extensively used crosscutting not only to enhance suspense and draw thematic parallels, but also to develop what Rubin described as a "paranoid vision of a world where everything seems to fit together as part of an ever-widening web of conspiracy". This type of editing was later applied to numerous
film noirs such as
Robert Siodmak's
The Killers (1946) and
Stanley Kubrick's
The Killing (1956). It was also used in
Oliver Stone's
JFK (1991) and
Bryan Singer's
The Usual Suspects. During the silent era,
German Expressionism was active from 1905 onward. These films featured distorted sets and stylized gestures which had an influence on filmmaking all over the world, including the United States. The expressionist cinematic style was particularly relevant to the thriller, combining psychology and spectacle.
1930s The early 1930s saw the rise of two film genre movements: the gothic styled horror film and the
gangster film.
Universal Pictures was the leader of the horror genre in the early 1930s with its expressionist-derived atmosphere that started with two big hits film:
Dracula (1931) and
Frankenstein (1931). Rubin noted that both films lacked the thriller's fundamental tension between the familiar and exotic or adventurous. Also in the early 1930s, the gangster film arrived with early major films including
Mervyn LeRoy's
Little Caesar (1930),
William A. Wellman's
The Public Enemy (1932) and
Howard Hawks Scarface (1932). These films centered on the rise of and fall of the criminal with Rubin noting that suspense in these films was "relatively slight", with both genres leaving an imprint on subsequent forms of the thriller with mid-1930s
G-Man films, the early detective films of the 1940s, and the gangster films of the 1950s. The gangster film itself imbued the modern urban environment with larger-than-life overtones. Rubin described the mid-1930s as when the thriller entered its "classical period" with the emergence of key genres that were previously either non-existent or minor. These included the spy film, detective film, the
film noir, the police film and the science fiction thriller. The horror films of the early 1930s with their Europeanized settings and villains led to what Rubin described as a "growing uneasiness towards Europe" Such anxieties were directly registered with spy thriller films, that were previously marginalised but grew as the tensions of the 1930s and the outbreak of
World War II. The genre grew into popularity in Great Britain in the mid-1930s with the output of the countries leading filmmaker
Alfred Hitchcock. Between 1934 and 1938, Hitchcock directed five spy thrillers:
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934),
The 39 Steps (1935),
Secret Agent (1936),
Sabotage (1936), and
The Lady Vanishes (1938). Along with Lang's output of the period, Rubin stated that Hitchcock became a "top rank" filmmaker specialising in the classical film thrillers, opposed to his prior output, which only sporadically included films that could be considered thrillers. Compared to Lang, Hitchcock approach to the spy thriller was described by Rubin as "less abstract, less epic" with "a greater emphasis on individual psychology and subjective points of view" while Lang's primary focus was on "the structure of the trap", Hitchcock's was on the "mental state of the entrapped." The first major American spy thriller of the World War II era was
Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). After relocating to the United States, Hitchcock continued his attachment to spy films with films like
Foreign Correspondent (1940) and
Saboteur (1942). Despite having these films exist beyond the cityscapes of the thriller genre, they do not deploy the adventure nature of
The Adventures of Kathlyn or
The Spiders usually lacking in exaggerated methods of transport, such as parachute drops, safaris, submarines, or even high-speed chases.
1940s Like the spy film, another genre that grew popular due to the war-generated phenomena in the early to mid-1940s saw the rise of thrillers centered around various phases of crime films such as the rise in popularity of detective films. These ranged from
B-film detectives such as
Michael Shayne,
The Falcon,
Boston Blackie, the
Crime Doctor as well as modernized
Sherlock Holmes stories having him battle Nazis. These smaller budget films led to more major productions such as
John Huston's
The Maltese Falcon (1941) while
Murder, My Sweet (1944) introduced the character
Philip Marlowe to film. Marlowe would appear again in
The Big Sleep (1946). These detective films drew upon thriller and thriller-related genres with their nocturnal atmosphere and style influenced by expressionism. They often overlapped with
film noir, a style coined by French critics in 1946 which arose in the mid-1940s. The
film noir style was not acknowledge by American filmmakers, critics or audiences until the 1970s. Early films considered as harbingers of the movement include Fritz Lang's
You Only Live Once (1937), the b-film
Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and
I Wake Up Screaming (1941) and the first universally acknowledged major
film noir:
Billy Wilder's
Double Indemnity. During the 1940s, the influence of other foreign movements such as
Italian neo-realism and American filmmaker's participation in making war documentaries and the audience's growing familiarity with these documentaries gritty and fact-based style led to Hollywood developing crime films that were shot in actual locations opposed to studio sets. These films included
The House on 92nd Street and
Call Northside 777 (1947) and the most acclaimed of these films,
The Naked City (1948) which re-created a police manhunt for a brutal killer. These films eventually began toning down their factuality to be applied to more
noir styles, such as with
Kiss of Death (1947),
The Street with No Name (1948), and
He Walked by Night (1949). Rubin found that placing these films in actual locations increased the tension of the ordinary world opposed to the limited confines of the studio sets. Further spy films were made, including
The House on 92nd Street began encompassing anti-communist themes. This was inaugurated with films like
The Iron Curtain (1948). These titles drew on 1930s gangster film conventions, with the American branch of the communist parties being depicted like a gangster organization. This cycle continued into the 1950s with
I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951),
The Red Menace (1949), and
Samuel Fuller's
Pickup on South Street (1953).
1950s Crime was the significant focus of thrillers in the 1950s. The more realistic crime films of the 1940s and film noir merged into films about police detectives thrillers. Unlike the more clean-cut police officers of the 1940s realistic films, these films often had the police officer following darker paths. These included
The Man Who Cheated Himself (1951),
The Prowler (1951),
Pushover (1954). A smaller wave of similar police thrillers had the police detective having moral weakness, but excessiveness. These included
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950),
On Dangerous Ground (1952),
The Big Heat (1953). Rubin declared
Orson Welles'
Touch of Evil (1958) as another major film of this flawed-cop style. Rubin found that these late noirs collectively represent a peak of character development and moral complexity in the film thriller that was closer to the psychology films of Alfred Hitchcock than the action or mystery-oriented forms of the police thriller. Syndicate gangster films of the era had similarities to the anti-communist spy films and alien-invasion science fiction films of the era with films like
The Enforcer (1951) while
The Phenix City Story (1955) and
The Brothers Rico which contained borderline breakdowns of the criminal world and the lawful world. The gangsters of these films do not resemble conventional criminals of the past, they dressed casually while being non-confrontational with muted violence. The 1950s also saw the movement of the
science fiction thriller, which previously was a relatively minor genre. The most prevalent was a hybrid of science fiction and horror in films like
Them! (1954) and
Tarantula (1955) while the films more attuned to the thriller occasionally saw an alien invasion theme, such as in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) which Rubin described as being between "science-fiction mundaneness and film-noir moodiness". The science fiction thrillers of the era are not set on far off planets or but featured in present-day locales such as in
It Came from Outer Space and
The Incredible Shrinking Man. The 1950s also launched what Rubin called "a run of Hitchcock masterpieces", following an uneven period of experimentation in the late 1940s. Rubin noted as Hitchcock hitting his stride with
Strangers on a Train (1951),
Rear Window (1954),
Vertigo (1958),
North by Northwest (1959) and
Psycho (1960). During this period, Anglo-American critics of the era preferred Hitchcock's lighter-hearted British classics of the 1930s, these films were declared as "more ambitious and mature works" by Rubin, which became the focus of a major re-evaluation of Hitchcock's artistic stature, which included with the first full-length books study of his work:
Hitchcock (1957), by
Eric Rohmer and
Claude Chabrol as well as the first English-language assessment, with
Robin Wood's ''Hitchcock's Films
(1965). The plots and themes of these films would be re-worked into later directors such as Jonathan Demme (Last Embrace (1979)), Brian de Palma (Dressed to Kill (1980), Body Double (1984), Obsession (1976)) and Curtis Hanson (The Bedroom Window'' (1987)).
1960s Around 1960, Rubin described that key thriller categories went through major overhauls. This led to closing what he described as "subversive debunking" that nearly closed the doors on genres like the detective film, re-contextualizing genres like the
neo-noir, and enhancing the popularity of some genres such as the spy film briefly and other genres like the police film for longer periods. The expansion of foreign-film exhibition in the United States of highly regarded thrillers was an influence on the American thriller film. Among the earliest of these was
Henri-Georges Clouzot's
The Wages of Fear (1953) and
Les Diaboliques (1955) and
Jules Dassin's
Rififi (1955) which influenced the 1960s thrillers with their sordid atmosphere. Another cross-fertilization between American and European thrillers was the
French New Wave, a movement which arose in the late 1950s. The style of these films were generally more self-conscious and intrusive than that of Hollywood films. When these films had thriller aspects, these aspects of their story had a throwaway quality. The influence of the French New Wave was seen on American thrillers such as
Mickey One (1965),
Point Blank (1967) and
Bonnie and Clyde (1967), as well as later films (
Sisters (1972),
Blue Velvet (1986) and
Reservoir Dogs (1992)). The spy film had been what Rubin described as "stagnating" for several years due to the limitations of post-war anti-communist films. The genre was dramatically revitalized by the surprise hit
Dr. No (1962), which led to increasingly expensive and lucrative sequels, as well as spearheading a 1960s spy craze in cinema and mass media.
Dr. No was conceived as a series of action set pieces (called "bumps" by the series co-producer
Albert R. Broccoli) which mixed the film's action and violence with generous doses of humor and Bond's post-bloodshed quips and sexual banter. The Bond films generally distanced themselves with apolitical villains, that toned down the cold war elements of the original novels and spy films of the past, locating their films in Jamaica, Istanbul and Miami over Cuba, Berlin or Israel. Rubin found that the Bond films important to the development of the thriller, but their own thriller dimensions was limited due to the Bond stories gravitating towards adventures, suspense sequences being moderate, and tensions kept simple compared to the films of Hitchcock or Lang. Following the success of the Bond films, the character became the standard which all other spy films of the era were defined by within their similarities or dissimilarities. These included having the spy being suave hero, colorful locations, attractive women and flamboyant decors. Many pre-1970s spy films were predominantly comedies with spy film elements, such as
Our Man Flint (1966) and
The Silencers (1966) and their sequels. Another style of spy films attempted to differentiate themselves from the Bond films, while still differentiating themselves from the patriotic and Anti-Nazi and anti-communist spy films of the past. These films deglamorized the nature of the Bond films while still remaining thrillers, such as
The Ipcress File (1965),
Funeral in Berlin (1966),
The Defector (1966) and
The Quiller Memorandum (1966). These films featured spies who seemed less invincible than James Bond and other super spies, and often featured a more paranoid edge to their plots. Police thrillers returned to popularity around the period of law-and-order issues between 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns through a general swing towards the
right in the United States due to the
Vietnam War. The police-centered were much less critical in their treatment of their justice obsessed lawmen and were showcased fighting to protect society where official institutions have failed them. The police thriller returned in 1967 with the multiple-Oscar winning film
In the Heat of the Night (1967), which was more about social issues than being a straight thriller, the films' use of racial epithets and strong-arm methods paved the way for films featuring characters like
Dirty Harry and
Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle for the upcoming police cycle. Early films in the cycle included
Madigan (1968),
The Detective (1968), ''
Coogan's Bluff (1968) and Bullitt (1968), the latter being more successful financially than any the previously mentioned thrillers. Like Bond, Bullitt
featured much of the mystique as the James Bond series, with his stylish lifestyle and being an elite specialist working with a larger organization and is granted considerable autonomy on the course of his assignments. Bullitt''s producer
Philip D'Antoni featured even more elaborate variations in his later productions such as
The French Connection (1971) and
The Seven-Ups (1973) as car chases became staple to modern police thrillers. These police thrillers also featured a harsher more conflict-riddled world closer to those of the anti-Bond spy films. These films were also harsher and more violent, mostly due to the demise of the
Hays Code. The influence of the police thriller was long lasting, leading into the popular
Die Hard and
Lethal Weapon film series and attaching itself to other genres such as science fiction (
Mad Max,
Blade Runner,
RoboCop), and comedy (
48 Hrs. and
Beverly Hills Cop).
1970s Offshoots of the police thriller is the
vigilante film, in which an avenger in an urban setting throws off the restraints of the super cop of the police thrillers to operate as a loner without a badge or uniform. The main characters usually revolve around personal revenge and desire to cleanse society of its evil doers. Examples include the
Death Wish film series,
Taxi Driver (1976) and
Ms. 45 (1981). A cycle of
action films featuring black leads that came from the police thriller, vigilante films, and
blaxploitation films arrived with the 1970s. The films predominantly feature loose-cannon private eyes such as in
Shaft (1971),
Slaughter (1972) and
Coffy (1973) or hustlers such as in
Super Fly (1972) and
The Mack (1973). The films were often derivations of earlier films such as
Cool Breeze (1972), a remake of
The Asphalt Jungle,
Hit Man (1972) a remake of
Get Carter (1971), and
Black Mama, White Mama (1973) a remake of
The Defiant Ones (1958). The cycle generally slowed down by the mid 1970s. During the 1970s, contemporary situations such as the
Watergate scandal and disillusionment about the Vietnam War led to conspiracy thrillers. A cycle of these films included
Executive Action (1973) about the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
The Parallax View (1974) about a sinister corporation linked to a series of political murders, and others like
The Conversation (1974) and
Winter Kills (1979). Unlike other films of the past, the paranoia of these films often focused on American institutions opposed to gangsterism or communists. A thriller-related movement in the 1970s was the
disaster film, which came with the great financial success of
Airport (1970), about an airplane crippled by a bomb that struggles to land in a snowstorm. Similar films about a group of survivors escape several locations, such as
The Poseidon Adventure (1972),
The Towering Inferno (1974) and
Earthquake (1974) about a group of troubled people in Los Angeles. The films often featured all-star casts and often had the disaster happening early or mid-way into the story rather than at the climax with the narrative focusing on the group of survivors. The genre ended following overt sequels, television films and parodies. The genre had a brief revival in the late 1990s through the science-fiction and disaster hybrid
Independence Day (1996), which was followed by ''
Dante's Peak (1997), Volcano (1997) and Titanic'' (1997).
1990s to present In the early 1990s, thrillers had recurring 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.
Rob Reiner's
Misery (1990), based on a book by
Stephen King, featured
Kathy Bates as an unbalanced fan who terrorizes an incapacitated author (
James Caan) who is in her care. Other films include
Curtis Hanson's
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and
Unlawful Entry (1992), starring
Ray Liotta. Detectives/FBI agents hunting down a serial killer was another popular motif in the 1990s. A famous example is
Jonathan Demme's Best Picture–winning crime thriller
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—in which young
FBI agent Clarice Starling (
Jodie Foster) engages in a psychological conflict with a
cannibalistic
psychiatrist named
Hannibal Lecter (
Anthony Hopkins) while tracking down
serial killer Buffalo Bill—and
David Fincher's crime thriller
Seven (1995), about the search for a serial killer who re-enacts the
seven deadly sins. Another notable example is
Martin Scorsese's neo-noir psychological thriller
Shutter Island (2010), in which a U.S. Marshal must investigate a psychiatric facility after one of the patients inexplicably disappears. In recent years, thrillers have often overlapped with the horror genre, having more gore/sadistic violence, brutality, terror and frightening scenes. The recent films in which this has occurred include
Disturbia (2007),
Eden Lake (2008),
The Last House on the Left (2009),
P2 (2007),
Captivity (2007),
Vacancy (2007), and
A Quiet Place (2018). Action scenes have also gotten more elaborate in the thriller genre. Films such as
Unknown (2011),
Hostage (2005), and
Cellular (2004) have crossed over into the action genre. ==Sub-genres==