Section 1: Background To The Thriller Genre

The thriller genre was first created in the 1800's as a type of novel that was considered "trash-y" the characteristics of a Thriller according to Gilbert Keith Chesterton the genre was mainly set in urban landscapes and was an attempt to find "the poetry of modern life" and finding excitement in everyday elements, making the ordinary extraordinary. Northrop Frye built upon this by going on to state that the hero is often an ordinary person forced to work with Chesterton's extraordinary world. Frye also compared thrillers to romance, of that he said that heros in romance were "superior in degree to other men and to his environment" who “moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended.” Comparing the setting of an old fairy tale romance he said that the enchanted forest was just a modern city. John Cawelti combined the views of both Chesterton and Frye, Cawelti claimed that thrillers transforms the city from "a modern commerce, industry and science into a place of enchantment & mystery" he then claimed that this is produced by introducing "the exotic" into the everyday world.

W.H. Matthews work relates to mazes and labyrinths in fiction. Matthews talked about the image of Theseus descending into an underground maze full of twists, turns, puzzles and dead-ends. He said that to design a thriller narrative you must add complex twists and turns so that the audience doesn't solve the problems too easily but it should be designed so that the audience could deduce it. Pascal Bonitzer, a French screenwriter and actor thought that Matthew's was describing "partial vision" when he advocates mazes. Pascal thought that the audience should only see so much, what the audience doesn't see is part of the system of thrillers. The narrative should pick it's way through a maze.

Noël Carroll used the Question-Answer model. He said that it is imprtant to create questions, which keeps the audience in suspense until they are answered. He said that the audience should wonder if the hero should survive, which keeps the format different for audiences. One factor for creating suspense is a battle against odds (the probability factor). The moral factor also increases suspense as it may not be morally right for the hero to survive however the audience has become attached.