My Evaluation Criteria of a Good Thriller (Horror Movie)

I haven't seen a single thriller before my entering college, which was not an obstacle in my process of fall in love with thrillers. With the famous thriller "Silent Hill" opening the wonderland of thrillers, I have seen a lot. On the base of the many thrillers I have seen, I constitute my own criteria for judging whether a thriller is a good one.

It seems necessary for me to explain a few points before I actually list my criteria. First, technically and theoretically, thrillers and horror movies do not fall into exact the same category of movies. However, since the criteria involved in this blog will be simple and direct ones, I mixed the two up to make it simple. Second, the few criteria I'm going to mention are only a few main points drawn from my whole judging system, thus, it is far from comprehensive.

My criteria are as follows.

The purpose with which the film is made is to entertain. Thrillers are nothing about entertainment, which denotes to a larger sense of entertainment other than amusing and funny. The reason why thrillers can entertain people lies in its psychological capability to control one's mind in a certain period of time. With the simple purpose of entertain, thrillers need not to be profound and of ideological significance. To be great thrillers, they just need to be totally enjoyed during the period instead of being remembered for a long time. A thriller can be intellectually challenging, but the purpose to do so is to give views relief and joy after they themselves witness the process of working out the puzzle.

The good thriller must be fascinating in plot. Some directors of thrillers try to distract the moviegoers with plain and boring plots and make their minds wandering about, in order to thrill them with a sudden appearance of something. However, this kind of trick only makes the viewers bored in most of time and uncomfortable with the way it scare people. A good thriller will have very closely connected clues and plots, which make the audience keep thinking with the development of the movie. In this way, the audiences are in a continuously excited state of mind because they are aware of the fact that something will happen soon. That's the source of joy of watching a thriller.

The main plot of a thriller should be logic. The thriller itself is a product of imagination, but that does not mean that the script writer can make up everything they want. You can write a script about a world filled with millions of devils attempting to eat you up, but no one is going to buy your story. Therefore, to be thrilling, a movie must be logically stable. Only a logically right thriller can make people scared because people will only be scared of something that make sense. The ultimate goal of a thriller is to put the viewers into the scene, which must be built on the basis of imagined world that make sense.