The narrative structure of thrillers

The narrative structure of thriller

There can be a restricted and un-restricted narration in films.

Restricted only offers a minimal amount of narration and un-restricted gives you all the information you want in narration.For our Thriller film opening we will have restricted narration which will leave our audience asking questions such as who is the person coming to get the girl and what will happen to the girl?

Binary Opposites
In a typical thriller and in most films there is always a battle between good and evil,protagonist and antagonists,this is called  a binary opposite according to Claude Levi Strauss.He was born in 1908 and died at the age of 100 and was a french anthropologist and ethnologist.He started to look at old myths and tried to identify fundamentals that were needed to create them.He believed that we understand the meaning of a word based on it's opposite and the difference in there qualities/meanings, called Binary opposites (good and evil).He then translated this theory to things like films and TV.The Binary opposites in our film opening are...

girl	boy
young	old
protagonist	antagonist
good Sane	evil Insane

Propp Narrative theory

Vladimir  Propp was a Russian critic who was born in 1895 and died in 1970.To create his Narrative and character theories Propp analyzed 100 tales.From analyzing these 100 tales he came up with 31 key functions within the tales.Not all of them would be present in every tale but they had to be in the same order of events,He also had theories on characters and said that there were 7 types of characters in these tales.They were...

Villain	The person who is against the hero
Dispatcher	The person that sends the hero off on their quest
Hero	The person fighting the evil to get the prize or princess at the end
False hero	Person that appears to be good but may really be evil and they may try to take the credit for the heroes work to get the prize
Donor	Prepares the hero for his journey or gives them a magical/useful item to help them
Princess or prize and her father	A reward for the hero winning against evil and the father will reward the hero in some way
The helper	The person that helps the hero

Barthes enigma codes

Roland Barthes was a french literary theorist born in 1915 and died in 1980. Barthes believed that all narrative structures had similar features that made them have things in common although it might not always be obvious,there were 5 enigma codes.He also thought that all texts (posters,writing or film) shows mystery to draw an audience in.The 5 enigma codes are...

The hermeneutic code	Any part of the story that is not fully explained and is used to keep the audience guessing what might happen
The proairetic code	Builds tension and is an event in the story which indicates that something might happen and tries to get the audience to guess what will happen
The semantic code	Connotations made form a media text that may represent other issues over the main issue in a media text(extended meaning)
The symbolic code	Organising the meaning of words into broader and deeper sets of meaning
The cultural code	Refers to anything that is founded on canonical works and cannot be challenged as it is assumed that it assumed to be the foundation of truth

By Hannah West