Heavenly Creatures

Heavenly Creatures is a haunting thriller infused with teenage obsession directed by Peter Jackson. Starring Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey.




"The true story of a crime that shocked a nation. Two girls have an intense fantasy life; their parents, concerned the fantasy is too intense, separate them, and the girls take revenge." (plot outline from IMDB.com)

"Heavenly Creatures may be the best film I've seen so far from Peter Jackson, even after having gone through the Lord of the Rings, King Kong, even Dead-Alive. His film is loaded with so much that it's hard to classify it as one specific thing, and its psychological complexities make it something special. One way to describe the picture is that it's about the stirring friendship-cum-relationship of Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet) in 1950s New Zealand. Another way to describe it is showing the other side, the much darker side, of a coming of age story, where youth have to come to terms with realities, with horrific results. And even another way is that it's another in a big line of independent films that work on the relationship between fantasy and reality, or rather the practical need for abstractions to try and not get too close to the mundane, and then the all too hard to accept realities around the characters." (part of a review from imdb.com)

Kill Bill

Kill Bill is an action thriller written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.



Plot: "The Bride wakes up after a long coma. The baby that she carried before entering the coma is gone. The only thing on her mind is to have revenge on the assassination team that betrayed her - a team she was once part of." (imdb.com)

"The movie is obviously a case of style over substance. In essence the movie is just a basic revenge flick without too much depth or meaning. This however is exactly like how Tarantino intended it to be. "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" is simple, straightforward, completely over-the-top but above all beautifully shot and superbly directed. The movie its story comes totally secondary, as Tarantino used this movie as an experimental tool to mix several, mostly Asian cinema, styles together and blend it into one big visual experience of violence and unusual over-the-top looking sequences. His aim was style and with that this movie most certainly does not disappoint." (part of a review from imdb.com)

The Shining

The Shining written by Stephen King and directed by Stanley Kubrick is a horror thriller.






"A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil and spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future." (IMDB.com)

"Right from the beginning, as we contemplate the car going to the hotel from those stunning aerial shots, deeply inside us we know that something in the film, somehow, sometime is going to go wrong. As we obtain that severe warning, an almost inaudible voice gently whispers to us 'sit tight', a sense of unexpectedness invades us all, and it is that very same feeling that makes our hair stand on end throughout out the entire movie." (A review from the IMDB)


This film contains many of the generic thriller signifiers.
One of these is when the blood come flowing from behind the doors, blood is a thriller signifier.

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Another is when the plot comes to a climax and Jack Torrence is chasing his wife Wendy Torrence with an axe and she locks herself into a small bathroom to escape, however, Jack is cutting down the door with the axe whilst Wendy is desperatly trying to get out of the window and cant. The whole idea of being trapped in a calostraphobic space with no escape is a generic thriller signifier.