Codes and Conventions

Before we even started work on our actual treatment, we decided to write a definitive list of thriller film clichés. These stereotypes were ones we instantly acknowledged from many films in the genre and as such the list soon spiralled into a "don't do any of this" list instead:

• Aliens/monsters/vampires or anything similarly supernatural
• Photographs or newspaper clippings on a wall
• Split personality disorder
• Fires, explosions, thunder & lightening (ok, maybe we would have if we could...)
• Mist, fog or blurred vision
• Cars breaking down or characters getting lost
• Masked or cloaked figured
• Hysterical crying or screaming
• "Scare chords"
• Ridiculous plot twists that make the whole film completely pointless or illogical.

Possibly the most pessimistic summary of a genre ever committed to blog, we later backtracked on some of these, realising that abandoning every cliché we could think of would leave us very little to work with, and would make our filming/plot much more difficult to do.

Although, we decided that whatever on the list we did end up using, we would try our best to approach in a new way, by either subverting or intentionally highlighting a particular aspect of its traditional usage.
For example, at the burial of his pet dog, our main character does cry, but it is instead a gradual build up from a whimper to a silent moan, which seems much more effective than the chronically overused "blast of noooo". This idea was something I now remember seeing in the pilot episode of Six Feet Under, and after a lot of searching I managed to find a clip of this scene (6 minutes into the video):



Although becoming a hysterical cry, I found that with the silence before this became much more powerful. This list also lead us to our next important question: who is our product aimed at?