3 - Formative Period

Summary

Because of the wide, imprecise scope of the thriller, it would be unwieldy and impractical to attempt a comprehensive history of each individual genre - detective, film, noir, horror, police, spy, and so on - that this metagenre comprehends. Instead, the overview presented in Part II of this book concentrates on selected “hot” cycles that were especially active and especially relevant to the development of the movie thriller (e.g., not the entire detective-movie genre, but the hard-boiled cycle of the early 1940s; not the entire sciencefiction genre, but the alien-invasion cycle of the 1950s). These different cycles are dealt with not in isolation but in terms of their relationship to other thriller cycles (e.g., the hard-boiled detective movie feeds into film noir, which in turn feeds into the 1950s police film). Accordingly, Chapters 3-5 have a double focus: (1) a series of movements arising within different individual genres, (2) each strand contributing to an overall tapestry of the general development of the movie thriller.

Although the survey of the movie thriller in Part II is lengthy, it is by no means comprehensive.