A Century of Film
Suspense Films
The Genre
What is a Suspense film, anyway? What makes it different from other genres? I think I first started thinking about that with the release of The Hunt for Red October. It was still early in my days of being serious about films but I realized it was a bit unclassifiable. It wasn’t an Action film. There was too much suspense to be a Drama. I got a film guide (called the Video Movie Guide – I had the 1990 edition and later gave that to my mother who still has it when I got the 1993 edition which I eventually got rid of, feeling I no longer needed it) not long afterwards that classified films by genre and had Action-Adventure-Thriller as one of them. I realized that was where Hunt for Red October belonged. But eventually I would decide that Mysteries really were their own sub-genre.
Almost all Mysteries could be pushed into this Genre which is why Mystery will be the next genre covered in this series (it was originally going to be first but it was easier to find a list of Mysteries and go through that than it was for Suspense, so I am watching a bunch more Mysteries before that post). But Mysteries are tied up in a specific Mystery and solving that Mystery while Suspense is often more about the feeling in the film. There is often a Mystery as well and I would not quibble with any person who keeps any of these films in Mystery. A lot of them could also be classified as Action, but Action films, for the most part, focus more on the actual action and less on the feeling of suspense (for instance, most Spy films are here, but the Bond films are in Action). Crime films could also be classified here (Crime films are often described as “crime thriller”). (more…)