Social thriller
A social thriller is a film genre using elements of suspense and horror to augment instances of apparent oppression in society. The genre gained attention by audiences and critics around the late 2010s with the releases of Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us,[1][2] each film highlighting occurrences of racial alienation (the former which veil a plot to abduct young African-Americans). Before Peele, other film actors, directors, and critics had used the term to describe an emerging genre of cinema with examples from all over the globe.
Many social thrillers focus on issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, or nationhood, often within the format of genre films more broadly categorized as a black comedy, film noir, psychological drama, and horror cinema, among others.
Early usage
"Social thriller" first appeared in
Many other film critics bandied about the term in their reviews prior to the 2010s but seldom in a way that gave the social thriller its own status as a codified genre in cinema. Prior to 2017, most writers used the term only once, usually in a single review, and to characterize an individual film. In his biography on
For films produced outside the U.S., more than one reviewer has named the 1961 British film
In his Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema, author Peter Rollberg goes a bit further than the one-mention references of his peers. In describing the work of Russo-Belarusian director Aleksandr Faintsimmer, Rollberg writes, "Fainsimmer devoted himself to the traditionally underrepresented genre of the social thriller with blockbusters such as No Right to Fail (1974) and The Cafeteria on Piatnikskaia Street (1978)." Rollberg also names Leonid Filatov's 1982 film The Rooks and Vadim Derbenev's 1985 hit The Snake Catcher as landmarks of the genre in the Soviet Union.[18]
21st century western cinema
At the onset of the 2000s, critics and scholars continued to label a number of contemporary films as social thrillers. The authors of Sociology: An Introductory Textbook and Reader wrote of the 2002 British film Dirty Pretty Things as being "not a documentary but a social thriller which blends aspects of the global urban legends about child kidnapping for organs and prostitutes drugging unsuspecting barflies who wake up in a hotel bathtub minus a kidney."[19] The New Yorker echoed this sentiment, saying, "Dirty Pretty Things is not a violent thriller. It might be called a social thriller—a creepy, tightly knit suspense film that, on the fly, reveals more about the lives of immigrants in London than the most scrupulously earnest documentary."[20] Other films labeled as social thrillers from the first decade-and-a-half of the new millennium include 2005's British production of The Constant Gardener[21] and
the 2008 Italian film
Modern Indian cinema
Like the West, Indian cinema has a longstanding tradition of identifying some movies as "
Before Pink the term social thriller was applied occasionally by Bollywood's directors and marketers and then repeated by the press to describe selected movies, such as 2014's film
Post-Pink social thrillers in Indian cinema have included Adanga Maru, all released in 2018.
Get Out and after
Broadly categorized as a horror film,[53] director Jordan Peele stated that his directorial debut, Get Out, was part of a lineage of social thrillers, meaning that whatever scary things manifest onscreen, society is actually the true evil.[54] In a February 2017 interview, Peele told the Chicago Tribune, "I define 'social thriller' as thriller/horror movies where the ultimate villain is society."[55]
In March he told the
To coincide with the release of Get Out, Peele curated a film series for the
After Get Out's success, Peele announced that he had plans to make four more social thrillers in the next decade. In an interview with Business Insider he said, "The best and scariest monsters in the world are human beings and what we are capable of especially when we get together. I've been working on these premises about these different social demons, these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact, and each one of my movies is going to be about a different one of these social demons."[61] By the time Peel's second film, Us, was under production, it had veered away from its original inceptions as a "social" thriller and fell more squarely into the horror genre. Whereas Peele's treatment of Get Out's black protagonist and white antagonists made it a film about race, he strove to make Us not be about race. “It’s important to me that we can tell black stories without it being about race,” Peele told Rolling Stone in early 2019. “I realized I had never seen a horror movie of this kind, where there’s an African-American family at the center that just is. After you get over the initial realization that you’re watching a black family in a horror film, you’re just watching a movie. You’re just watching people. I feel like it proves a very valid and different point than Get Out, which is, not everything is about race. Get Out proved the point that everything is about race. I’ve proved both points!”[62]
By mid-2017 the press had started touting upcoming films as belonging to the genre, including international Cannes Film Festival favorites like Colombia's Matar a Jesús,[63] France's L'Atelier;[64] Brazil's Rifle,[65] and the remake of Argentina's La Patota.[66] Variety wrote that animated film Tales of the Hedgehog was both "a children’s thriller" and "a social thriller-fable" after director Alain Gagnol described it as a “suspenseful social fable.”[67] From Hollywood, the social media scandal movie Assassination Nation,[68] and Greg McLean and James Gunn's The Belko Experiment,[69] were promised as social thrillers, as was Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit as part of the social thriller canon.[70]
Musician/author
Critique
Use of social thriller as a genre term has come under scrutiny since its widened use. One critique is that niche genres such as horror are re-labeled to draw a more mainstream fanbase. In a news piece about 2017's most successful horror films, journalist Haleigh Foutch wrote that "Get Out is being billed as a 'social thriller' now that the film has dominated at the box office and conjured early awards buzz."
In other media
Literature
Outside the medium of cinema, literary critics have used the term "social thriller" as early as the first decade of the 2000s. Writing on the psychological crime novels of Ruth Rendell in 2002, Lidia Kyzlinková at Masaryk University remarked, "Rendell may be seen as having developed a kind of social thriller, in which various representations around region, class, race, gender, or age form an important part of the plot."[81] Three years later Kyzlinková subtitled another chapter on Rendell, "Social Thriller, Ethnicity and Englishness," in which she characterized works whose plots focus less on detectives or police as being "socio-psychological, or social thrillers."[82]
Also writing in 2002,
After its proliferation as a cinematic genre, the term was used to describe DC/Vertigo comic book Safe Sex.[85]
Theatre and television
As film writers began applying the term with greater frequency after its 2017 upsurge, theatre critics followed suit.
Radio and podcasting
In September 2018 The New York Times highlighted a number of fiction
List of selected social thriller films
- Dead End (1937)[7]
- No Way Out (1950)[8]
- Rear Window (1954)[57][1]
- Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)[9]
- Vertigo (1958)[1]
- Victim (1961)[13]
- Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)[91]
- In the Heat of the Night (1967)[10]
- Rosemary's Baby (1968)[91][92]
- Night of the Living Dead (1968)[91][92]
- The Nada Gang (1974)[6]
- The Stepford Wives (1975)[93]
- Taxi Driver (1976)[1]
- The Cafeteria on Piatnikskaia Street (1978)[18]
- The Shining (1980)[57][92]
- The 'Burbs (1989)[57]
- Misery (1990)[57]
- The People Under the Stairs (1991)[57]
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991)[57]
- Candyman (1992)[57][92]
- Scream (1996)[57]
- Taxi (1996)[17]
- Funny Games (1997)[57]
- Perfect Blue (1997)[92]
- Dirty Pretty Things (2002)[20]
- The Constant Gardener (2005)[21]
- Zero Dark Thirty (2012)[1]
- It Follows (2014)[92]
- Spotlight (2015)[1]
- The Belko Experiment (2016)[69]
- Detroit (2017)[70]
- Get Out (2017)[57][1][92]
- mother! (2017)[92]
- BlacKkKlansman (2018)[1]
- Sorry to Bother You (2018)[71]
- Tyrel (2018)[73]
- Joker (2019)[1]
- Knives Out (2019)[1]
- Les Miserables (2019)[77]
- Luce (2019)[74]
- Parasite (2019)[94][1]
- Us (2019)[95]
- Don't Worry Darling (2022)[96]
- Nope (2022)[97]
List of directors associated with social thrillers
See also
- Message film
- Postmodernist film
- Vulgar auteurism
- Social issues
- Message picture
- Extreme cinema
- New Hollywood
- Art horror
- Arthouse action film
- Neo-noir
- Satire (film and television)
- Race in horror films
- Indiewood
- Social science fiction
External links
References
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