The Unsettling Thriller Genre: Revisiting Narrative Convention of Pandemic Film

Abstract

Generic conventions aid audiences to comprehend a film framework, identify characters, settings and narrative trajectories. According to several film critiques, thrillers are about real life mystery, criminal conspiracy, suspense, and images of blood, as the dominant components. Films about pandemics, according to film critic, Roger Ebert, contain aspects of science and the impact on people’s lives, as well as how their very existence is suddenly threatened because of a virus outbreak. This study aims to investigate the thriller conventions narrative which stands in contrast to pandemic film conventions, as it is unmatched in thriller films from Hollywood’s industry-made canon. This study will revisit and revise four pandemic films released after the millennium by considering the decade as an inception to the global pandemic era. This paper uses textual analysis of pandemic films and also examines the narrative conventions of films in the thriller genre to find out why pandemic films are so utterly dissimilar from those conventions. This study employed Chatman’s five elements of Plot Constituents and analyses the pandemic film corpus of (Contagion, 2011, The Crazies, 2010, Carrier 2009, and The Happening 2008), which are dissimilar to thriller narrative conventions. The findings showed that all four narrative conventions in pandemic films are consistent in highlighting the issue of pollution that is linked to infectious diseases.