Cloverfield.

Cloverfield is a horror/thriller film directed by Matt Reeves, produced by J. J. Abrams and written by Drew Goddard. It was released in 2008. The film is set in New York and is filmed as though from a handheld digital camera.

The movie starts as though the camera has been found after the story, with official numbers written over it. There is a disclaimer stating that the following footage is of a case designated "Cloverfield" and was found in the area "formerly known as Central Park. This builds tension and suspense as to what will happen because we are left unknowing. Then the camera is being used and voiced over by a character looking round his apartment in New York. The screen has a time and date stamp on to make the handheld camera seem real, the characters are also aware of the cameras presence. It then cuts to a later time (shown by the change of time in the time stamp) a character is walking with it shakily down the street. There are cuts which don’t match as this shows when the character has stopped filming. All this helps to add to authenticity of the digital camera. There is no music, apart from the diegetic music at the party. What happens is kept in suspense and not shown to us.

Hammer film productions

Hammer Film Productions is a film production company based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1934, the company is best known for the series of Gothic "Hammer Horror" films produced from the late 1950s until the 1970s. Hammer also produced science fiction, thrillers and comedies – and in later years, television series. Hammer films were cheap to produce but nonetheless appeared lavish, making use of quality British actors and cleverly designed sets. During its most successful years, Hammer dominated the horror film market, enjoying worldwide distribution and considerable financial success. This success was due, in part, to distribution partnerships with major United States studios, such as Warner Brothers.
Hammer's first significant experiment with horror came in the form of a 1955 adaptation of Nigel Kneale's BBC Television science fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment, which was directed by Val Guest. As a consequence of the contract with Robert Lippert, American actor Brian Donlevy was imported for the lead role, and the title was changed to The Quatermass Xperiment to cash in on the new X certificate for horror films. The film was an unexpectedly big hit, and led to an almost equally popular 1957 sequel Quatermass 2 – again adapted from one of Kneale's television scripts, this time by Kneale himself and with a budget double that of the original: £92,000.

In the latter part of the 1970s, Hammer made fewer films, and attempts were made to break away from the then-unfashionable Gothic horror films on which the studio had built its reputation. Neither The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974), a co-production with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers which attempted to combine Hammer's Gothic horror with the martial arts film, nor To the Devil a Daughter (1976), an adaptation of the Dennis Wheatley novel, were very successful. The company did, however, have some surprising commercial success with the 1971 film version of the ITV sitcom On the Buses, which was popular enough to produce two sequels, Holiday on the Buses (1972) and Mutiny on the Buses (1973). Hammer's last production, in 1979, was a remake of Hitchcock's 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, starring Elliot Gould and Cybill Shepherd. The film was a failure at the box office and all but bankrupted the studio.

Some horror films

Dracula
The huge box office success of The Curse of Frankenstein lead to the inevitable desire for a sequel in The Revenge of Frankenstein and an attempt to give the Hammer treatment to another horror icon. Dracula was yet another successful film character for Universal, and the copyright situation was even more complicated than Frankenstein. A full legal agreement between Hammer and Universal was not completed until 31 March 1958 – after the film had already been shot – and was 80 pages long.


John Van Eyssen as Jonathan Harker.
Meanwhile, the financial arrangement between AAP and Hammer had broken down when money promised by AAP had not arrived. Hammer began looking for alternatives, and with the success of The Curse of Frankenstein signed a deal with Columbia Pictures to distribute the sequel The Revenge of Frankenstein and two films from the defaulted AAP deal The Camp on Blood Island and The Snorkel. Hammer's financial success also meant the winding down of the parent film distribution company Exclusive, leaving Hammer to concentrate solely on filmmaking.


Alien
Alien is a 1979 science fiction/horror film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto. The film's title refers to its primary antagonist: a highly aggressive extraterrestrial creature which stalks and kills the crew of a spaceship.
Alien garnered both critical acclaim and box office success, receiving an Academy Award for Visual Effects, Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction for Ridley Scott, and Best Supporting Actress for Veronica Cartwright, and a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, along with numerous other award nominations. It has remained highly praised in subsequent decades, being inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for historical preservation as a film which is "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and being ranked by the American Film Institute as the seventh-best film in the science fiction genre.
The success of Alien launched a media franchise of novels, comic books, video games, and toys, as well as three sequel and two prequel films. It also launched Weaver's acting career by providing her with her first lead role, and the story of her character Ripley's encounters with the titular Alien creatures became the thematic thread that ran through the sequels Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), and Alien Resurrection (1997). The subsequent prequels Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007) diverged from this theme in favor of a crossover with the Predator franchise.

Characteristics & conventions

-A crime at the core of the narrative often murder but not always,.
-A complex narrative structure, with false paths, clues and resolutions.
-A narrative pattern of establishing enigmas which the viewer expect to be resolved.

Thrillers often take place wholly or partly in exotic settings such as foreign cities, deserts, Polar Regions, or high seas. The heroes in most thrillers are frequently "hard men" accustomed to danger: law enforcement officers, spies, soldiers, seamen or aviators. However, they may also be ordinary citizens drawn into danger by accident. While such heroes have traditionally been men, women lead characters have become increasingly common; for an early example see Sigourney Weaver's character Ripley, in the movie Alien, 1979.
Thrillers often overlap with mystery stories, but are distinguished by the structure of their plots. In a thriller, the hero must thwart the plans of an enemy, rather than uncover a crime that has already happened. Thrillers also occur on a much grander scale: the crimes that must be prevented are serial or mass murder, terrorism, assassination, or the overthrow of governments. Jeopardy and violent confrontations are standard plot elements. While a mystery climaxes when the mystery is solved, a thriller climaxes when the hero finally defeats the villain, saving his own life and often the lives of others. In thrillers influenced by film noir and tragedy, the compromised hero is often killed in the process.
In recent years, when thrillers have been increasingly influenced by horror or psychological-horror exposure in pop culture, an ominous or monstrous element has become common to heighten tension. The monster could be anything, even an inferior physical force made superior only by their intellect, a supernatural entity, aliens, serial killers, or even microbes or chemical agents. Some authors have made their mark by incorporating all of these elements (Richard Laymon, F. Paul Wilson) throughout their bibliographies.
Similar distinctions separate the thriller from other overlapping genres: adventure, spy, legal, war, maritime fiction, and so on. Thrillers are defined not by their subject matter but by their approach to it. Many thrillers involve spies and espionage, but not all spy stories are thrillers. The spy novels of John le Carré. for example, explicitly and intentionally reject the conventions of the thriller. Conversely, many thrillers cross over to genres that traditionally have had few or no thriller elements. Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, and Brian Callison are best known for their thrillers, but are also accomplished writers of man-against-nature sea stories.
Thrillers may be defined by the primary mood that they elicit: fearful excitement. In short, if it 'thrills', it is a thriller.