Thriller — Volume 2: Genre as a costume
Five films that promise one genre and deliver another, without breaking the contract.
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The volume
Each of these films wears a costume the audience recognizes from a distance: a haunted house, a ghost story, a robbery with the police closing in, an investigation on a sealed island, a manhunt with a case full of money. None of them throws the costume away and none of them keeps it to the end. Under each one there is another story, and it is nearly always domestic: a family coming apart inside an empty hotel, a boy nobody believes, a man who cannot carry what happened in his own house, an old lawman who no longer recognizes the trade of a lifetime. The disguise is not the twist at the end: it is the road by which that second story manages to arrive, and it is also why it arrives so hard. The volume to read in order to understand what a genre promises and how another one gets delivered without breaking the contract.
The five films, and why they are here
The Shining
How the equipment of the haunted house is used to make watchable what a family never lets anyone see.
The Sixth Sense
Clues in plain sight from the beginning: a twist that pays twice, as a puzzle and as the portrait of a house.
Psycho
The riskiest move available: changing story halfway, and changing the person the audience is rooting for.
Shutter Island
A genre apparatus assembled piece by piece and then handed back to the man who had built it around himself.
No Country for Old Men
Removing the final confrontation and putting what the film has to say exactly in the space left empty.
Inside the volume
- Introduction to the genre: the essay that binds the volume's five titles together and says what to watch for.
- Five analytical chapters, one per film, from the dramatic premise to the legacy of the work.
- Comparative glossary: thirteen or fourteen craft concepts, tested against these five titles.
- Over two hundred pages, in PDF and EPUB, in your account library.