In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

What makes a thriller opening sequence?

Thriller movies tend to promote feelings of intense excitement, suspense, enigma uncertainty and several other emotions. In any case a thriller movie should make the viewer feel something. There are many themes a thriller can revolve around the most popular being psychological and political conspiracy. These appear to be the most popular types of thriller movies as many recent movies that have been released are based on these themes. Movies such as ‘The Strangers’ (2008) and ‘State of Play’ (2009) are two good examples of successful thriller movies. ‘The strangers’ is a psychological thriller and ‘State of Play’ is a political conspiracy thriller. There are also certain things we would expect to see in certain genres of thriller movies. We could determine what genre the movie is by looking at the characters the mise en scene and the iconography. For example in a psychological thriller movie we would expect there to be harsh lighting, a character who is attempting to harm or kill the other characters or for an emotion such as nerve wracking tension to be present.

To make a successful opening sequence it must not have too much action in it (unless perhaps the movie is an action based thriller) as the point of an opening sequence is to build up the story gradually. It should also build up a sense of enigma or suspense, this way the audience will want to continue watching. The narrative does not necessarily have be crystal clear as often confusion is solved in the movie, but the opening sequence should give the audience an idea of what direction the movie is going to take.

Our research showed us that our potential audience would rather there was not too much action in the opening sequence, that it should build up suspense and give a feeling of nerve wracking tension and that not a lot of the narrative should be revealed in the opening sequence. We took all of this into consideration whilst we researched and created our opening sequence.