Thrillers

RECENT DIRECTIONS

Another recent thriller movement marked by historical consciousness is neo-noir. Recycling and reconceiving film noir's dark themes, flamboyant stylization, and convoluted structures, the neo-noir revival was spurred in the 1980s by such films as Body Heat (1981), Blood Simple (1984), and Blue Velvet (1986), and it continued (with an extra dollop of self-consciousness akin to that of the Scream -led stalker revival) in Pulp Fiction (1994), Memento (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001), Femme Fatale (2002), and Sin City (2005). As Hollywood films of the post- Star Wars era became increasingly ruled by superheroism, the neo-noir movement helped to keep alive a more vulnerable, morally ambiguous concept of the thriller hero. The highly adaptable neo-noir movement has also flourished abroad, in such far-flung locales as Scotland ( Shallow Grave , 1994), Norway ( Insomnia , 1997), China ( Suzhou ha [ Suzhou River , 2000]), Argentina ( Plata quemada [ Burnt Money , 2001]), Iran ( Talaye sorkh [ Crimson Gold , 2003]), and Latvia ( Krisana [ Fallen , 2005]).

Related to both horror and neo-noir is a group of 1980s and 1990s films that could be called "intimate-enemy" thrillers and are often described by the phrase "the ______ from hell"—for example, the one-night stand from hell ( Fatal Attraction , 1987), the nanny from hell ( The Hand That Rocks the Cradle , 1992), the roommate from hell ( Single White Female , 1992). Anticipated by Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) and Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), these films center on the clinging, insinuating emotional bond forged by the nemesis character who bedevils the hero.

After thriving in the 1990s with a number of groundbreaking classics and commercial blockbusters (including a throwback to the suggestive, nonviolent horror thriller in 1999's The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense ), the movie thriller of the new millennium has fallen on leaner times. The box office has been increasingly dominated by fantasy and adventure in the vein of Star Wars , Harry Potter , Lord of the Rings , and The Chronicles of Narnia , while the more mundane realm of the thriller has produced fewer big hits and trend-defining innovators. The most consistent commercial success has been achieved by a series of mid-decade horror movies (such as Cabin Fever , 2003; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , 2003; Saw , 2004; Dawn of the Dead , 2004; and When a Stranger Calls , 2006), many of them remakes or derivatives of earlier hits, retailoring such venerable horror themes as epidemic disease, sudden disaster, and vulnerable isolation to address the anxieties of the post-9/11 era. It remains to be seen what new directions will revitalize this aging modern form that trades on our ambivalent desires both to escape from and to remain within the uneasy security of our increasingly downsized world.