A social thriller is a film genre using elements of suspense to augment instances of oppression in society. The genre gained attention by audiences and critics around the late 2010s with the releases of Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us,10 Best Social Thriller Films of All Time - MovieWeb10 Of The Greatest Horror Filmmakers Of All Time (According to Rotten Tomatoes) - Game Rant each film highlighting occurrences of racial alienation (the former which veil a plot to abduct young African-Americans). Before Peele, other film actors, directors, writers, and critics had used the term to describe an emerging genre of cinema with examples from all over the globe.
Many social thrillers focus on issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, or nationhood, often within the format of genre films more broadly categorized as a black comedy, film noir, psychological drama, and horror cinema, among others.
Early usage
"Social thriller" first appeared in film criticism to denote films using elements of suspense to heighten dramatic tension caused by social inequity. Often appearing in quotes, the term was being used as early as the 1970s to retrospectively describe political neo-noir cinema. An early example comes from cinema writer Georges Sadoul's characterization of El Wahsh ("The Monster"), an Egyptian crime film entered into the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. Sadoul sums up the film as "a social thriller based on an authentic police case about police pursuit of a drug-addicted gangster." Sadoul goes on to describe the film's documentary style and backdrop of life in the Egyptian countryside. Other early uses of the term can be found in descriptions of French New Wave films, such as The Nada Gang, Claude Chabrol's 1974 film inspired by the May 1968 events in France. In their book, French Culture Since 1945, Malcolm and Martin Cook wrote that "Chabrol's career has been almost exclusively devoted to what might be called the 'social thriller'" and go on to define the genre as, "films using a suspense format often akin to that of Hitchcock to comment on the deviousness and duplicity of French society."
Many other film critics bandied about the term in their reviews prior to the 2010s but seldom in a way that gave the social thriller its own status as a codified genre in cinema. Prior to 2017, most writers used the term only once, usually in a single review, and to characterize an individual film. In his biography on William Wyler, Axel Madsen calls the 1937 Humphrey Bogart picture Dead End a social thriller. TLA Video reviewer David Bleiler described the 1950 Sidney Poitier film No Way Out as "an exceptionally made, tense drama which succeeds both as medical soap opera and social thriller." Douglas Brode called Spencer Tracy "the alienated anti-hero of the social thriller" for his 1955 performance in Bad Day at Black Rock. Another Poitier film, 1967's In the Heat of the Night, got tagged as social thriller by Leonard Maltin, and was also cited as such on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Both Tracy and Poitier also appeared in 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a film that would later be identified as a key "non-thriller" example of the social thriller genre.
For films produced outside the U.S., more than one reviewer has named the 1961 British film Victim as a social thriller. As the first English language film on record to use the word "homosexual" in its dialogue, Victim raised controversy in the United Kingdom for its critique of Britain's anti-gay laws that would remain in place until the passing of Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalized homosexuality for men in England and Wales. Ismal Xavier called the 1962 Brazilian political train robbery film O Assalto ao Trem Pagador ("Assault on the Payroll Train") a social thriller. Taiwanese director Bai Jingrui's 1982 film Offend the Law of God has been called "an exploitation social thriller" and the 1996 Spanish film Taxi, about the rise of the racist right wing, has also been given the label.
In his Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema, author Peter Rollberg goes a bit further than the one-mention references of his peers. In describing the work of Russo-Belarusian director Aleksandr Faintsimmer, Rollberg writes, "Fainsimmer devoted himself to the traditionally underrepresented genre of the social thriller with blockbusters such as No Right to Fail (1974) and The Cafeteria on Piatnikskaia Street (1978)." Rollberg also names Leonid Filatov's 1982 film The Rooks and Vadim Derbenev's 1985 hit The Snake Catcher as landmarks of the genre in the Soviet Union.
21st century western cinema At the onset of the 2000s, critics and scholars continued to label a number of contemporary films as social thrillers. The authors of Sociology: An Introductory Textbook and Reader wrote of the 2002 British film Dirty Pretty Things as being "not a documentary but a social thriller which blends aspects of the global urban legends about child kidnapping for organs and prostitutes drugging unsuspecting barflies who wake up in a hotel bathtub minus a kidney." The New Yorker echoed this sentiment, saying, "Dirty Pretty Things is not a violent thriller. It might be called a social thriller—a creepy, tightly knit suspense film that, on the fly, reveals more about the lives of immigrants in London than the most scrupulously earnest documentary." Other films labeled as social thrillers from the first decade-and-a-half of the new millennium include 2005's British production of The Constant Gardener and the 2008 Italian film As God Commands, both based on the best-selling novels of the same names. The Wall Street Journal called 2010's The Social Network "Part morality play, part social thriller", the 2012 Canadian child abduction film The Tall Man got called a social thriller for its DVD release, and the French film festival hit Corporate was called a social thriller in 2016, several months in advance of its 2017 release.
Modern Indian cinema
Like the West, Indian cinema has a longstanding tradition of identifying some movies as "social films" or "social problem films", genres that emerged when talking pictures first came to India in the 1930s. The rise of "social thriller" as a genre garnered familiarity in India, as it did in the U.S., in its association with a major box office hit. 2016's Pink, a courtroom drama that deals with rape, was India's highest-grossing film ever to be released. Pink starred longtime Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan, who named the film a social thriller. Bachchan said of Pink that, "the context and the premise of the film shall always be of prime interest," but that "much is not spelt out because of the nature of the story and, of course, the nature of its genre—a social thriller!"
Before Pink the term social thriller was applied occasionally by Bollywood's directors and marketers and then repeated by the press to describe selected movies, such as 2014's film Fugly starring olympic boxing medalist Vijender Singh. Prior to Fugly'''s release, the press were unfamiliar with the genre, and in a film preview the India Times said that it was "the movie that's been billed as a 'social thriller' (whatever that is)." After Fugly, other social thriller tags followed suit, such as 2014's Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain about the Union Carbide Disaster, and 2016's Laal Rang about the organized crime trafficking in human blood.
South Indian film columnists may have been using the term prior to their North Indian counterparts. G. Dhananjayan called the 2009 Tamil language film Achchamundu! Achchamundu! ("There is fear! There is fear!") a social thriller, citing it as "one of the rare mainstream Tamil films with the subject on pedophiles." Tamil director Bramma G. called his 2014 debut film, Kutram Kaditha, a social thriller. The same year Jean Marcose called his Malayalam film Angels a social thriller. Film Beat's Akhila Menon used the term to describe both Puthiya Niyamam and Evidam Swargamanu in 2015. Other Tamil social thrillers include 2016's Kabali, and Aagam, of which director Vijay Anand Sriram claimed, "has a message but it will not be preachy. It's a social thriller with commercial elements in it".
Post-Pink social thrillers in Indian cinema have included Adanga Maru, Jhalki...Ek Aur Bachpan, Mulq, Pinu, Parari, Blue Whale, and Marainthirunthu, all released in 2018.
Get Out and after
Broadly categorized as a horror film, director Jordan Peele stated that his directorial debut, Get Out, was part of a lineage of social thrillers, meaning that whatever scary things manifest onscreen, society is actually the true evil. In a February 2017 interview, Peele told the Chicago Tribune, "I define 'social thriller' as thriller/horror movies where the ultimate villain is society." In March he told the New York Times that social thrillers "all deal with this human monster, this societal monster. And the villain is us." He later told New York Magazine, "I was trying to figure out what genre this movie was, and horror didn't quite do it. Psychological thriller didn't do it, and so I thought, Social thriller. The bad guy is society—these things that are innate in all of us, and provide good things, but ultimately prove that humans are always going to be barbaric, to an extent. I think I coined the term social thriller, but I definitely didn't invent it."How Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' Got Made|Vulture
To coincide with the release of Get Out, Peele curated a film series for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) called The Art of the Social Thriller. The series featured classic horror films like Rosemary's Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, Candyman, The People Under the Stairs, and the first film of Wes Craven's Scream series. Peele also included films outside of the horror genre, such as psychological thrillers Funny Games and Misery, Hitchcock's mystery thriller Rear Window, and comedy-thriller The 'Burbs. The sneak preview of Get Out was preceded by the 1967 comedy-drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the first Hollywood film to address interracial marriage and a big influence on the premise for Peele's own film. When asked about its inclusion in the series, Peele told the Village Voice, "It's not an actual thriller, it's just a great exploration of the social phenomenon of how we deal with race, putting it in a package that everyone can understand. Anybody can relate to the fear of meeting your potential in-laws for the first time... At a certain point with Get Out, I realized that I was making a sort of thriller take on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."