These are the movies that make psychology classes more interesting. These are movies that you see once, and spend the next few weeks thinking about it all the time. You are forced to watch them over and over again to try to pick up on the different clues as the movie goes on. Even if you know the twist ending, the movie is still interesting. A well done psych thriller is perhaps the most cerebral and the most intense and the most terrifying product the film industry ever creates. Horror movies can be scary; that is true, but horror built upon the notion that it is not real. The gore is dramatized for the sake of entertainment, and it often looks fake. With a psychological thriller, it often hits closer to reality. Everyone has a brain. Everyone has dreams and nightmares. Even if the film presents an extreme case, like leading an anarchist group to destroy the financial centers of every major city and level everyone's debt back to zero, there is the idea that this could happen.
Psychological thrillers target the feeling that you get when you wake up disoriented from a dream you thought was real. This seems to happen to me all the time. In the months where I had no roommate at school, I used to have what I diagnosed as "roommate dreams". For a few weeks, I kept having a similar dream every night for a few weeks where the Fitchburg State housing department would assign me a new roommate and I would have to deal with it. The worse imaginary roommate I got was Jay Leno. Every day, instead of going to class or working on his cars or something, he would sit in the room and monologue, but there was no audience, just me. Instead of poking fun at George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or Michael Jackson, he would make jokes about my every action. He was a real jerk. I vowed I would one day get my own show to get back at him, and NBC offered me the Tonight Show when Jay retires.... and then I woke up.
Also, sometimes I stay up so late that I do things I do not remember. Sometimes I wake up the next day and see an essay that is done that I do not remember finishing, or a blog post I do not remember posting. I usually assume I was awake and aware when I did it, but I can't help but wonder if I have my own Tyler Durden-type character doing things when I think I am asleep. For some reason, my ridiculous dreams make psychological thriller film more believable and I sometimes feel that a movie inside my head would be much more interesting that a sitcom about my life where I am seen in the third person (although if you want to make my life a sitcom, I would not be opposed).
Movies that fall into this genre include Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, and The Sixth Sense. Those are three of my favorite movies and they share similar traits. The use of first person or stream of consciousness narrative is an effective way to set the mood for a psychological thriller. Showing what the protagonist sees easily fools viewers and makes them believe that what they see is real and not a delusion. Flashbacks to previous experiences can also be a good way to shed light and give clues before revealing the huge twist ending. I was reminded of all of them when I saw Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. The most recent addition to the psychological thriller genre strikes gold once again. Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kinsley are brilliant in this movie. I will not say anymore about Shutter Island except that it is a must see movie. If you want a movie that will make you think, this is one to see.
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