Character Research of Psychological thrillers:
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Convicts are often found because they tend to be associated with bad
people and considering that they have already served prison
sentence(s), they carry all the connotations of a criminal.
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However, in some circumstances such as "Green mile"
convicts can be presented physically as threatening and dangerous but
when the audience begins to know the character, this judgement can be
changed. Therefore, characters are shown to subvert the stereotype
and within our trailer, the audience will be presented with a thug
who they would potentially make judgements about. However, parts of
the trailer and the film itself would demonstrate a subversion of
their stereotype.
- Often, directors use amnesia as a device in order to help to explore these highly philosophical questions. For example, in the film ‘Shutter Island’ Teddy Daniels experiences an extreme case of amnesia and the whole narrative of the story is based upon this and leads to an ultimate climax to explore his potential mentally ill state. This is effective because it can lead to, as it did in Shutter Island, dramatic discourses within the plot of the film which can grip an audience. Another film where a psychological efficiently utilises the construct of amnesia to develop a plot would include ‘Before I Go to Sleep.’ This leads onto another point which also is relatable to Shutter Island that viewers may have to watch the film for a second or third time in order to fully comprehend what happened and understand the plot and characters. Other examples of Psychological thrillers that would fit this description include ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Inception’.
- Within a psychological thriller characters have the tendency to have a battle with themselves. This battle may be a struggle to find out who they truly are, a fight to understand the truth about an unknown section of their history, a particular family relation or even life and what the characters true purpose within the digetic world is.
- Particularly, characters of a psychological thriller may be forced to cope with the death of friends / relatives, have to fake their own death or potentially even be threatened with be killed themselves.
- Constructs which are commonly created within a psychological thriller include characters of binary opposites. An example of a relationship which would present this theme would include a ‘cat and mouse’ situation. A potential area where this could occur would be between an inspector / detective and a criminal. Here, the detective will be relentlessly searching for the criminal and often come close to catching the criminal at early stages of the film. The criminal will however, always be one step ahead of the detective and may often barely escape.
