Research: Narrative Themes - Ms Begum

Narrative Themes

What are themes?

- Themes are the topics of ideas within a film to creates understanding and meaning to a movie. For example revenge and obsession are the 2 sub-genre of thrillers. This provides informations to helps the audience to understand the description and understand what the movie is about.

- The elements within the narrative that are conventional to the genre/sub-genre.

How are themes dependent on genre?

Themes are important and depends on other genres because it allows the audience to identify what is the main theme of the movie and also conventional to the thriller genre. This allows the audience to feel the emotions within the movie and feel sympathy for the characters and events that are being displayed. This also helps the audience to relate and create understanding towards the characters. If the themes are not include any relation towards the audience, this would create confusion and and will not allows the audience to empathise towards the movie as it has no relation to the genre. For example, a romance film would expect a theme where it includes love, pain, and obsession. This would helps the audience to identify and understand the concept of the movie whereas  an action film would expect a theme where it includes crime, death and revenge. This would helps the audience to understand the description and understand what the movie is about.

Common themes in thrillers

- Death:

- Obsession:


-Revenge:


- Love:

Crime:




Pain/Torture:
 

These examples are the common themes in thrillers because they have a clear structure and easily understood by the audience and they are also conventional to the genre.

 

 This is a trailer from a thriller movie called 'Warm Bodies', this is an example of thriller themes mixing with other themes from different sub-genres. The theme in this thriller movie trailer are death, love, pain and relationship. These themes are structure well in this thriller because they are easily understood by the audience and helps them to easily identify the description of the movie. This also helps to not confuse the audience mind towards the narrative and still stay conventional to the genre.

 

Conclusion

All of the information above has helped me to understand the importance of themes and how themes are dependent on genres. The themes that I'm planning to use in my thriller are Death, Revenge and Obsession. This is because these themes are common to thrillers and conventional. Also, these themes will not create confusion towards the audience.