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Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the broad ranged thriller with heavy focus on characters. However, it often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre, along with the typical traits of the thriller genre. In addition to drama and mystery, many psychological thrillers contain elements of, and often overlap with, the horror genre, particularly psychological horror.

Definition[link]

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• Psychological – Elements that are related to the mind or processes of the mind; they are mental rather than physical in nature. Sometimes the suspense comes from within one solitary character where characters must resolve conflicts with their own minds. Usually, this conflict is an effort to understand something that has happened to them. These conflicts are made more vivid with physical expressions of the conflict in the means of either physical manifestations, or physical torsions of the characters at play.
• Thriller – Generally, thrillers focus on plot over character, and thus emphasize intense, physical action over the character's psyche. Psychological thrillers tend to reverse this formula to a certain degree, emphasizing the characters just as much, if not more so, than the plot.
• Psychological thriller – Characters are no longer reliant on physical strength to overcome their brutish enemies (which is often the case in typical action-thrillers), but rather are reliant on their mental resources, whether it be by battling wits with a formidable opponent or by battling for equilibrium in the character's own mind. The suspense created by psychological thrillers often comes from two or more characters preying upon one another's minds, either by playing deceptive games with the other or by merely trying to demolish the other's mental state

Literary devices and techniques[link]

• Stream of consciousness – a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes. In psychological thrillers, the narrative tries to manifest the character's psyche through word usage, descriptions, or visuals.
• First-person narrative – a literary technique in which the story is narrated by one or more of the characters, who explicitly refers to him or herself in the first person, that is, "I". This direct involvement that the characters have with the story in turn makes the reader more involved with the characters themselves, and thus able to understand the mechanics of the characters' minds. This technique is often paired with the concept of the unreliable narrator.
• Back-story – the history behind the situation extant at the start of the main story. This deepens the psychological aspect of the story since the reader is able to more fully understand the character; more specifically, what the character's motivations are and how his past has shaped his current cognitive perceptions.

Themes[link]

Many psychological thrillers have emerged over the past years, all in various media (film, literature, radio, etc.). Despite these very different forms of representation, general trends have appeared throughout the narratives. Some of these consistent themes include:

• Reality
• Perception
• Mind
• Existence/Purpose
• Identity
• Death

These major subgenres help develop the plot of a psychological thriller film, shaping the characters' personalities. eg. usually character will find the true identity/the devil side of himself/herself in psychological thriller, in which it is one of the archetypes—the loss of innocence.

Examples[link]

Screenwriters and directors of the genre[link]

• Brad Anderson – Works effectively in the psychological horror genre. He is the director of The Machinist and Session 9.
• Dario Argento – Italian director considered the master of giallo. He often creates mysteries that are very psychological in nature, with the past of characters influencing their present actions, as in 4 mosche di velluto grigio, Tenebrae, Trauma and La sindrome di Stendhal.
• Darren Aronofsky – Director of harsh paranoid thrillers such as Pi, Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan.
• Park Chanwook – Korean director who significantly explored the genre in his "vengeance trilogy" (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance).
• David Cronenberg – Canadian director who focuses on the psychological horrors of our minds. His storylines often make issues of the mind explicit, as in The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, Dead Ringers and Spider.
• Brian De Palma – Infuses eroticism with the thriller genre. Often uses the motifs of doubling and splitting in the characters minds, as in Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, Body Double and Raising Cain.
• David Fincher – Dark and ominous thrillers that focus on the psychology of men, as in Se7en, The Game, Fight Club and Zodiac.
• Mary Harron Canadian director who directed American Psycho
• Alfred Hitchcock – The master of suspense, Hitchcock often applied Freudian concepts to his thrillers, as in Rebecca, Spellbound, Vertigo, Psycho, Marnie and Rear Window.
• Richard Kelly – Director who examined many of the themes illustrated above in the film Donnie Darko.
• Stanley Kubrick - His films are characterized by a formal visual style and attention to detail – often combining elements of surrealism and expressionism that give the viewers a feeling of discomfort, such as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut and A Clockwork Orange.
• David Lynch – Surrealistic director whose mysteries are usually puzzles of the mind. Both the audience and the characters themselves must figure out what is real and what is not, especially in Inland Empire, Lost Highway, Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive.
• Christopher Nolan – British-American director whose narrative structures often reflect the mental construction of the characters, as in The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, Memento, Insomnia, Following, The Prestige and Inception
• Roman Polanski – Polish director whose thrillers focus on the alienation and isolation of the characters, as in Repulsion and Le Locataire.
• Martin Scorsese – American director who directed Shutter Island, Taxi Driver, and The Departed, among others.
• M. Night Shyamalan – Indian-American director well known for making psychological thrillers which often have a twist ending in them. He successfully executed the psychological thrillers, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs.
• Satoshi Kon – Japanese anime director whose well known for making psychological anime thrillers, as in Perfect Blue, Paranoia Agent, Millennium Actress and Paprika

Video games[link]

• Alan Wake – An Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows video game developed by Remedy Entertainment contains a main plot line that follows author Alan Wake, who is suffering from writer's block for two years and vacations in a town called Bright Falls with his wife. Once there, his wife goes missing and an evil presence stalks the town and its residents. Alan must overcome this force, but at the same time discern what is real and what is in his head. The works of Stephen King, The X-Files, Lost and Twin Peaks are listed as influences for making the game.

• Heavy Rain- A PS3 exclusive developed by Quantic Dream, putting you into four different perspectives, and giving you one task: to track down a serial killer on the loose.

• The Darkness II-An Xbox 360, PS3 and Microsoft Windows first-person shooter developed by Digital Extremes and 2K Games. The sequel to The Darkness written by Paul Jenkins and based on The Darkness which follows Jackie Estacado (voiced by Brian Bloom) as he tries to control The Darkness.

Examples in film[link]

Examples in television[link]

• Battlestar Galactica
• Damages
• Death Note
• Dexter
• Dollhouse
• Exile
• Homeland
• Mad Dogs
• Monster
• Twin Peaks
• Higurashi no Naku Koro ni
• Umineko no Naku Koro ni
• American Horror Story

Examples in literature[link]

• Emile Zola – His novel La Bete Humaine is a chilling psychological thriller that focuses on the dark recesses of human nature.
• Patricia Highsmith – Highsmith's novels usually focus on troubled young men who are either sociopathic or emotionally unstable; throughout each story the protagonist is somehow drawn into a murky murder case, and must contend with persistent policemen and suspicious friends. Her most famous character is the charming con man and serial murderer Tom Ripley who, over the course of five books, successfully kills nine people.
• Desmond Cory – Cory's popular novels have been made into successful films (The Mark of the Phoenix, Deadfall) and a television series (Circe Complex). Cory explored many different aspects of the psychological thriller, featuring a wide spectrum of characters that ranged from the jewel-thief to the terrorist.
• Rod Glenn – Glenn's novel, Sinema: The Northumberland Massacre explores the idea that a seemingly well-adjusted individual with an unremarkable upbringing can make a sane decision to commit murder. Sinema features the unusually likeable and charismatic character of Hannibal Whitman as the central anti-hero.
• Paul Parducci – His novel Wet Linda extensively explores the mental states of his characters especially the developing psychopathology of his protagonist.
• Jonathan Kellerman – Kellerman's Alex Delaware novels often deal with various matters of criminal psychology.
• Melanie Wells – Unlike her contemporaries, Wells has taken a different approach to the genre by adding supernatural elements. Her novels, such as When The Day of Evil Comes, The Soul Hunter and My Soul to Keep, feature the psychological mind games of Peter Terry - a demon who seeks to steal his victim's peace of mind and hope.
• Mary Higgins Clark – Clark's novels typically focus on a successful woman caught up in the diaboloical games of men, who are usually either psychotic or sexually perverse. The crimes in her stories often involve children in some way, and occasionally deal with child telepathy.
• Henry James – The Turn of the Screw and other horror stories he wrote.
• Nicci French – The pseudonym of husband-and-wife team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Their novels often revolve around a young female protagonist who is either targeted by or is suspected of being a psychopathic killer. The stories are quite unique in that they focus just as much, if not more so, on the victims of crime rather than the actual criminals.
• Stephen King – Although his books Carrie, Cycle of the Werewolf, Thinner and others are considered as horror novels, his book often focus on the protagonist(s) and antagonist(s), their origins, backgrounds for character and certain activities.
• Orson Scott Card – Ender's Game, though usually identified as a science fiction novel, gets more into the life of a child, rather than focusing upon the technology and means of the future.
• Pete Howells – Perspective Disentangled and others are considered to be at the literary fiction end of this market.

External links[link]

• IMDb - Psychological Thriller at the Internet Movie Database

Edward G. Robinson
1931 studio publicity photo
Born	Emanuel Goldenberg (1893-12-12)December 12, 1893 Bucharest, Romania
Died	January 26, 1973(1973-01-26) (aged 79) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1913–1973
Spouse	Gladys Lloyd (m. 1927–1956) «start: (1927)–end+1: (1957)»"Marriage: Gladys Lloyd to Edward G. Robinson" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Edward_G._Robinson) Jane Robinson (m. 1958–1973) «start: (1958)–end+1: (1974)»"Marriage: Jane Robinson to Edward G. Robinson" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Edward_G._Robinson)

Edward G. Robinson (Yiddish: עמנואל גאָלדנבערג; December 12, 1893 – January 26, 1973) was a Romanian-born American actor.^[1] A popular star during Hollywood's Golden Age, he is best remembered for his roles as gangsters, such as Rico in his star-making film Little Caesar and as Rocco in Key Largo. Other memorable roles include Barton Keyes in the film noir Double Indemnity, and as Dathan in The Ten Commandments.^[2] Robinson was selected for an Honorary Academy Award for his work in the film industry, which was posthumously awarded two months after the actor's death in 1973. He was included in the American Film Institute's list of the 25 greatest male stars in American cinema.

Early years and education[link]

Robinson was born as Emanuel Goldenberg to a Yiddish-speaking Romanian Jewish family in Bucharest, the son of Sarah (née Guttman) and Morris Goldenberg, a builder.^[3] After one of his brothers was attacked by an antisemitic mob, the family decided to emigrate to the United States. Robinson arrived in New York City on 14 February 1903. He grew up on the Lower East Side,^[4] had his Bar Mitzvah at First Roumanian-American congregation,^[5] and attended Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York. An interest in acting led to him winning an American Academy of Dramatic Arts scholarship, after which he changed his name to Edward G. Robinson (the G. signifying his original last name).

Career[link]

He began his acting career in 1913 and made his Broadway debut in 1915. He made his film debut in a minor and uncredited role in 1916; in 1923 he made his named debut as E. G. Robinson in The Bright Shawl. One of many actors who saw his career flourish in the new sound film era rather than falter, he made only three films prior to 1930 but left his stage career that year and made 14 films between 1930-1932.

Robinson in his breakout role, Little Caesar (1931)

In Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944)

Robinson was popular in the 1930s and 1940s and was able to avoid many flops during a 50-year career that included 101 films. An acclaimed performance as the gangster Caesar Enrico "Rico" Bandello in Little Caesar (1931) led to him being typecast as a "tough guy" for much of his early career in works such as Five Star Final (1931), Smart Money (1931; his only movie with James Cagney), Tiger Shark (1932), Kid Galahad (1937) with Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, and A Slight Case of Murder. Due to age, he could not qualify for military service during WWII.^[6] Instead in the 1940s, Robinson demonstrated his ability to succeed in comedic and film noir roles, including Raoul Walsh's Manpower (1941) with Marlene Dietrich and George Raft, Larceny, Inc. (1942) with Jane Wyman and Broderick Crawford, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1945) with Joan Bennett and Raymond Massey, Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945) with Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea, and Orson Welles' The Stranger (1946) with Orson Welles and Loretta Young. As a memorable tribute to his past gangster roles, he appeared for director John Huston as 'Johnny Rocco' in Key Largo (1948). Key Largo would be the last of five films he made with Humphrey Bogart and the only one in which Bogart didn't play a supporting role. Bogart had top billing but Robinson's name was placed slightly higher and to the right of Bogart's on posters and in the film itself, and his image was larger and centered in the original posters, with Bogart in the background while Robinson wrestles with Lauren Bacall in the foreground. In the film's trailer, Bogart is mentioned more often but at the trailer's very end, Robinson's name is listed above Bogart's in a cast list of the main players. The role of Rocco was quite similar to that of Duke Mantee, Bogart's breakthrough role in 1936 that the studio had initially assigned to Robinson.

Robinson was an outspoken critic of fascism and nazism, and donated more than US$ 250,000 to 850 political and charitable groups between 1939 and 1949. He was host to the Committee of 56 who gathered at his home on 9 December 1938, signing a "Declaration of Democratic Independence" which called for a boycott of all German Products.^[7] He played FBI agent Turrou in Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first American film which showed nazism as a threat to the United States in 1939, and Paul Ehrlich in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet and Paul Julius Reuter in A Dispatch from Reuter's, both Jewish Biography films of 1940. In 1942, he volunteered for military service and was sent to London.^[8]

On three occasions in 1950 and 1952, he was called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was threatened with blacklisting.^[9] Robinson took steps to clear his name, such as having a representative go through his check stubs to ensure that none had been issued to subversive organizations.^[10] He did not give names of Communist sympathizers, but he repudiated the organizations he had belonged to in the 1930s and 1940s and his own name was cleared, but he only received smaller roles and even those less frequently. He humiliated himself by publishing an article with the title "How the Reds made a Sucker Out of Me" in October 1952, but was called to testify again before the House Un-American Activities Committee in January 1954.^[11]

During this time, he appeared in numerous 'B' movies for American International Pictures and other low-budget studios while attempting to regain his prior status as a major film actor. Some of these films, such as Vice Squad (1953) proved excellent in their own right, while others, such as 1958's Tank Battalion, were critical and commercial failures. Anti-communist director Cecil B. DeMille cast him as Dathan in The Ten Commandments in 1956, freeing him to make A-list films again. Robinson's acting career was subsequently bolstered by notable roles in 1959's A Hole in the Head opposite Frank Sinatra and The Cincinnati Kid (1965), which showcased Robinson alongside Steve McQueen.

Robinson tried to talk his way into the titular part in The Godfather (1972), which was how he had won the role of Little Caesar 40 years earlier, but Francis Ford Coppola decided on Marlon Brando instead, over the initial objections of the studio. Director Peter Bogdanovich was offered the film before Coppola but turned it down, and has insisted ever since that he would have definitely cast Robinson in the part.

Robinson's last-filmed scene of his last acting role was a euthanasia sequence in the science fiction cult film Soylent Green (1973). Immediately prior to filming the scene, Robinson told his co-star, and long-time friend Charlton Heston, that he was dying from cancer and had weeks to live, at best. As the actors were to play the scene together, Robinson thought that the knowledge of his impending death would affect Heston's playing of the scene, thus the on-screen tears of Heston's character in the final print of the film are genuine. Robinson died twelve days later.

Personal life[link]

Robinson married his first wife, stage actress Gladys Lloyd, in 1927; born Gladys Lloyd Cassell, she was the former wife of Ralph L. Vestervelt and the daughter of Clement C. Cassell, an architect, sculptor, and artist. The couple had one son, Edward Goldenberg Robinson, Jr. (a.k.a. Manny Robinson, 1933–1974), as well as a daughter from Gladys Robinson's first marriage.^[12] In 1956 he was divorced from his wife, in 1958 he married 38 year old Jane Bodenheimer, a dress designer known as Jane Arden.

Robinson spoke seven languages. He built up a significant art collection. In 1956, he sold it to Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos to raise cash for his divorce settlement with Gladys Robinson; his finances had suffered due to underemployment in the early 1950s. One of his chief pastime was collecting records of the world's leading concerts. An inveterate cigar smoker, Robinson smoked cigars in many of his movie roles to accentuate his character.

A liberal Democrat, he attended the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, California^[13].

Robinson died from cancer in 1973, and is buried in a crypt in the family mausoleum at Beth-El Cemetery in the Ridgewood area of the borough of Queens in New York City.

Legacy[link]

Robinson has been the inspiration for a number of television characters. Firstly, an early version of the gangster character Rocky, featured in the Bugs Bunny cartoon Racketeer Rabbit, shared his likeness. This version of the character also appears briefly in Justice League, in the episode "Comfort and Joy", as an alien with Robinson's face and non-human body, who hovers past the screen as a background character. Similar caricatures also appeared in The CooCooNut Grove, Thugs with Dirty Mugs and Hush My Mouse. Another character based on Robinson's gangster image was The Frog from the cartoon series Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse. The voice of B.B. Eyes in The Dick Tracy Show was based on Robinson, with Mel Blanc and Jerry Hausner sharing voicing duties. Voice actor Hank Azaria has said that the voice of Simpsons character police chief Clancy Wiggum is an impression of Robinson.^[14] This has been explicitly joked about in episodes of the show. In "The Day the Violence Died" (1996), a character states that Chief Wiggum is clearly based on Robinson. In 2008's "Treehouse of Horror XIX", Wiggum and Robinson's ghost each accuse the other of being rip-offs.^{[citation needed]}

Robinson was never nominated for an Academy Award, but in 1973 he was awarded an honorary Oscar in recognition that he had "achieved greatness as a player, a patron of the arts, and a dedicated citizen ... in sum, a Renaissance man".^[15] He had been notified of the honor, but died two months before the award ceremony, thus the award was collected by his widow Jane Robinson.^[2]

Filmography[link]

References[link]

• Epstein, Lawrence Jeffrey. Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York's Lower East Side, 1880-1920, John Wiley & Sons, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7879-8622-3

Further reading[link]

• Gansberg, Alan L. (2004). Little Caesar: A Biography of Edward G. Robinson. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-4950-X. 
• Robinson, Edward G. (1973). All my yesterdays; an autobiography [by] Edward G. Robinson, with Leonard Spigelgass. Hawthorn Books. 

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Edward G. Robinson

• Edward G. Robinson at the Internet Movie Database
• Edward G. Robinson at the TCM Movie Database
• Edward G. Robinson at the Internet Broadway Database
• Photographs and literature