Ideas for Thriller Opening

Ideas

Our group drafted up 4 different rough ideas for our Thriller Opening. Each in the form of a spider diagram. Here are the scanned images of the notes we made for 2 of our ideas. We slimmed it down to our favourite 2 ideas and added notes.

Popular Thriller Openings

To get an idea of what makes a good opening to a thriller we looked at a few of the best thrillers, as ranked on IMDb. Out of the top ten we chose a few of our personal favourites to use as examples and to look closer at the openings to see what makes them good and how they engross the audience straight from the start, using various media techniques, like character enigmas.

Here are the openings to the films we chose:

The opening to The Dark Knight is very crucial to the film as it sets up the main antoginst of the film. The opening itselfs shows characterists of the Joker in the not only by his actions but the content of the scene that we see reflects the character and have similar qualitys (mysterious, physcological, clever, etc). We think this is the best opener to a thriller as we as an audience feel instantly grabbed by the scene, like a good thriller opening should. Other than the content of the scene, we also noticed the affects good music can have on creating the mise en scene. For example in this scene the music helps to create the heavy tension between the characters performing the robbery. We think that any good thriller needs a good opening to instantly grasp the audience and get ingaged with the story, The Dark Knight is no different.

Here are some other thriller openings…

[Silence of the Lambs]

[Pulp Fiction]

[The Godfather]