Combining Thrilling and Killing:Use of Violence in Psychological Thrillers

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Combining Thrilling and Killing:Use of Violence in Psychological Thrillers

As we speak, there is a man holding a gun to the back of your head. The cold muzzle stings the tender skin of your scalp and blood trickles to the floor from where the handcuffs have cut into your wrists. Your heart, sensing death approaching, struggles in vain to slip through its cage of ribs and run screaming into the night, much like how the scream just behind your eyes makes your vision blur and muscles twitch spastically. But perhaps you know the man behind you. Does that make you more or less afraid? Perhaps there’s no man at all. Perhaps it’s you who’s holding that gun. Maybe that gun isn’t there either. Is such a thing possible? A loud BANG is your only answer.

Now you stand up, brush the flecks of popcorn off your shirt, and leave the theatre. Tomorrow, when you tell your friends that the movie was exciting, thrilling, and heart-stopping you’ll most likely be describing one thing - violence. Never mind the unanswered questions of identity; it’s the gun that made your heart race, the blood that made your hair stand on end. Does this mean you can’t be thrilled without violence? Certainly not. What it means is that violence does thrill. Aside from being a biological fact, it also happens to be one which filmmakers have learned to expertly exploit. When properly employed, almost any object or action can set the heart thumping and send a chill down the spine, but to do so requires greater-than-average skill on the part of writers, directors, and actors, whereas simple violence requires relatively little of these things. What motivates filmmakers to put in all that effort to replace a “cheap thrill” with a sophisticated one? Why do extremel...

... middle of paper ...

...because to us, it exists as a part of our very selves.

Works Cited

Harris, Sally. “Original Purpose of Escalating Violence in movies Backfired, Virginia Tech Film Critic Says.” Virginia Tech News and Information, Oct 1999. Mar 2004 <http://www.technews.vt.edu/Archives/1999/Oct/99420.html>.

Kelley, Richard. The Donnie Darko Book. Faber & Faber, 2003.

Klein, Andy. “Everything You Wanted to Know About Memento.” Salon.com ArtsEntertainment June 2001. Mar 2004

<http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/06/28/memento_analysis/index.html?pn=1>.

Nolan, Christopher. Memento: A Screenplay. Oct 1999.

Piluso, Robert. “Ah, Bloody Hell: Violence in Film”. Script Magazine Dec 2003. Mar2004 <http://www.scriptmag.com/earticles/earticle.php?288>.

Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited: Revised Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

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