Research and examples of influences on your film

Influences:
Thrillers heavily stimulate the viewer's moods, giving them a high level of anticipation, ultra-heightened expectation, uncertainty, surprise, anxiety and terror.

When wanting to produce a thriller we all had separate ideas in which we all wanted to contribute, we feel as though traditional thrillers do have a massive influence on the modern take on the thriller genre, however we felt that the modern films have a link to our ideas of our own film. When researching thrillers we wanted to focus on iconography and see which films produced a good adaptation of this and which could influence our final project:

Iconography:
Iconography simply means symbolic representations, which often has a conventional meaning attached to an image, object or location. For these things to be iconic they have to be easily recognisable and associated with the genre. Iconography is very important as it is part of the mise-en-scene and therefore helps to construct certain messages for the audience by using physical and sometimes obvious indications to the plot.

Iconography in thrillers often include Shadows, Street lamps, Confined spaces, Creaking floorboards and running water. These are just a few examples of which they make the audience feel almost anxious and on edge for the characters. As these features are iconic they begin to feature often in Psychological thrillers.

Looking at traditional films we found that many thrillers do include these features in which we found very interesting, this was influential looking at iconography but we wanted to include it in a subtle way so then it was different and original from other psychological thrillers.

We found Alfred Hitchcock a massive influence when looking into thrillers as he deliberately chose specific lighting, props, mise-en-scene to make the audience feel a specific way. Take the iconic shower scene in Psycho, Hitchcock used both the iconography of shadows and knives to make it a thrilling masterpiece which is also one of films most memorable scenes.

As the face of the character with the knife is unseen this creates anticipation and tension for the audience, Hitchcock is influential when researching thrillers due to the impact this scene had in the film industry and how simple the scene actually is. It was known as introducing slasher films and at the time of its release, 1960's, was ranked among the greatest films of all time, it set a new level of acceptability for violence, deviant behaviour and sexuality in American films.