Thomas Bridson

In this essay I will be talking about the thriller conventions that are used in the two films “The girl with the dragon tattoo” and “Phone booth”, I will also being talking about why they have used these thriller conventions.

First I will be talking about “the girl with the dragon tattoo”. In this film the camera keeps cutting between the shots of the two protagonists to show that they are both working on the same case but in their own different ways and that one of them needs certain information that the other one has and vice versa, this is good for a thriller film because it is using a lot of cuts so that when one of them is trying to work something out it cuts to the other person talking about/ looking at the thing that the other person needs so that adds a sort of humour to the film but and the same time it is still tense film because with one of them not knowing all the information and going into a bad environment without knowing everything about the person there but the other protagonist needs to get there because they know what the dangers that the other person is going into.

Another Thriller convention in the film “the girl with the dragon tattoo” is when the protagonist is tied up in the basement at the antagonist’s house, it shows the protagonist in a lit up area and the antagonist in a darker area, this can be used to show the good and evil sides of the people that the protagonist is good because he is in the lighter area and that the antagonist is bad because he is hiding in

the shadows and has tied the protagonist up, also in this scene you see that the other protagonist “Lisbeth” knows who the antagonist is and she knows that the other protagonist is in trouble so they use a lot of quick cuts from her racing to try and help the protagonist out and the protagonist and antagonist having a discussion, this is important because it makes the film seem a lot more tense because the protagonist has to help the other protagonist out assuming that something has not already happened to him.

Next I will be talking about the thriller conventions that take place in the film “phone booth”. In this film there Is a man who saw a phone booth ringing so he answered it and it turned out to be that on the other end of the call was a person who had a sniper rifle

Thomas Bridson

pointing at him and that if he left the phone booth at any point then he was going to get shot, this film has thriller conventions that you would see in a lot of horror films such as using a lot of fast cuts, it uses a lot of fast cuts when the protagonist is looking around to try and find out where the antagonist is so you see him searching all of the sky scraper to see if he could see him, in most thriller films a lot of the excitement that people get from these films is not knowing who the antagonist is so they use this so they use this so that the protagonist does not know where the antagonist is so he does not know which way to run if he was going to.

Another thriller convention in the film “phone booth” is that when everyone starts to realise what is happening and all the police get there it is a very lit up area because it is outside, this can be used to show that all these people are innocent and that the antagonist can do anything to all the people because they are hopeless in the fact that

they have nowhere to run, also when they end up finding the antagonist or where he was hiding in was a dark room this is important because it shows that he was hidden and that when he was like that he could have done anything because they had no idea where he was so he had the most power out of everyone in the entire film.

In conclusion most thriller films use the convention of using light and dark to decide who is the antagonist and who is the protagonist in the film, also thriller films use a lot of fast cuts to show a very intense scene to make it seem like a lot more is happening at that time.