The Thrill in Thriller

How do you put the thriller in a Thriller? Conventional crime stories play upon the audience's conventional fears of lawlessness, violence, death. But the Thriller goes far deeper. It reaches into the audience's unconscious mind to arouse the gripping, irrational fear of a fate worse than death, a fate that would make you beg for oblivion. The key to this intense terror is the writer's creation of an extreme offset of power between the underdog protagonist and the ruthless spirit of evil lurking within the antagonist. The greater this imbalance, the greater the thrill in the Thriller.