American cinema has truly changed within the last 10 years as more and more studios and directors use elaborate and stylized techniques in addition to digital effects within their films. The best thriller movies on the other hand even now need to have some old-fashioned elements so that you can be successful including excellent writing, acting, directing, and editing.
Wonderful writing seems to become something which we take for granted when we go to the see thriller movies but it’s also the hardest factor to get correct and one of the rarest things in Hollywood movies. Since most Hollywood studio films are written by committee these movies generally seem overblown, formulaic and just plain silly. The extremely best written movies are usually written by one individual with a unique vision that has hopefully not been tampered with by too quite a few hacks along the way. Under the current Hollywood system a writer has little chance of fulfilling his grand vision. Instead she or he is subjected to script meetings with talentless and arrogant studio executives who proceed to systematically kill any dream the writer occurs to have of creating a piece of art.
Art isn’t important from the minds of studio executives. Putting folks into seats for opening weekend is what matters most. Unfortunately the ultimate result of this kind of backward thinking is that you draw for the first week of release based upon hype and advertising then lose audiences with bad word of mouth. Thriller movies can’t be created by number crunching but by directors and writers with vision and creative genius.
Martin Scorcese is one present day artist that will not compromise when it comes to originality and creativity. He is one of the lucky few that get to produce movies without interference from the powers that be. One of the excellent movie thrillers was Scorcese’s remake of Cape Fear starring Robert DeNiro.
Scorcese’s latest movie could be the suspense thriller Shutter Island starring Leonardo DiCaprio and pairing him with Robert DeNiro once once again.
Great movie thrillers are like wine and get far better with age. Rear Window was one of several Hitchcock masterpieces that viewers can watch more than and more than once more and nevertheless enjoy. The Birds and Psycho are a lot more examples in the British director’s genius.
Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Best Picture winner The Silence in the Lambs nonetheless remains to this day one of the best with the best movie thrillers ever built. In 1971 Clint Eastwood produced his directing debut with the incredibly scary Play Misty for Me. One year later director John Boorman designed his Academy Award winning masterwork Deliverance starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight. One of my all-time favorite movie thrillers is John Schleshinger’s 1976 spy film Marathon Man starring a young Dustin Hoffman.
The United States doesn’t have any specific stranglehold on movie thrillers as was demonstrated from the fantastic 1990 film La Femme Nikita by French director Luc Besson. Stephen Spielberg started his career with one of the simplest and best movie thrillers Duel about a deranged trucker.
One issue all excellent movie thrillers have in common will be the element of surprise and also the ability to create audiences squirm and sit on the edge of their seat.
