What's the difference between a horror and thriller film?

Answer 1

A horror movie uses cheap tricks to make the viewer squeamish. Case in point: Saw (I, II & III). You get scared because it would be horrific to see this played out in real life. The horror genre generally uses a lot of gore, blood, guts and pain to make the viewer not want to watch it, while still needing to see how it ends...
A thriller movie is one that makes you sit on the edge of your seat. Mostly, these include homicide movies, like Se7en or What Lies Beneath... things of that nature. Thrillers generally don't capture as much members in the audience as horror movies do because once you've heard about it, it only takes one person to tell you the ending. Once you know the ending (which are usually predictable, anyways), you lose some desire to see it.

Answer 2

A thriller could be like a suspense film, like what Hitchcock made or movies like The French Connection, spy movies, adventures.
while horror delves into the 'unknown' from Frankenstein in the 30's to the slasher movies and blood and gore types we got nowadays.
Some movie makers try to tie them together but they really don't work well unless its a extremely good storyline and nowadays that doesn't happen except on very rare occasions.

Answer 3

Horror films are mainly about the paranormal. Like "The Exorcist", "Poltergeist" and "The Omen".
Thriller movies are mostly "whodunit" type of stories. There can be blood and gore,too.

Answer 4

I think that this is the difference, a horror is suppossed to scare you sh!tless and thriller are supposed to just give you plain suspence. There movie which actually cross over both catagories, like Halle Berry's Gothika.

Answer 5

A horror film is intended to induce fear in the viewer. A thriller is meant to cause excitement. Related, but distinct.

Answer 6

To me, a horror film is all about the blood and guts...whereas a thriller is just more drama and sitting on the edge of your chair, waiting to see what happens......

Hostel is horror.....

The Grudge is thriller.....

Answer 7

Good question, a Horror movie tends to horrify by presenting situations that are outside of the norm... creating nightmarish landscapes and environments, or even creatures...

Examples include Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Hostel...

Slasher movies, monster movies, and other movies like that are horror movies.

A Thriller movie is packed with thrills, like action sequences and over the top big budget scenes. For instance, Indiana Jones movies are thrillers.

Hope that helps.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082971/

go to that IMDB link and you can browse movies by category.

Answer 8

A Horror movie general doesn't really have any tension in it, it's just all blood and guts, where as a Thriller has lots of tension in it and you hardly ever see any extreme violence.

Answer 9

Horror = scary supernatural, like films about zombies, living dead and ghosts.
Thriller = scary but set in the real world, where the scary elements are police, killers, secret organizations and the likes.

So:

Woman alone at home about to get killed by a scary homicidal mass murdering maniac = thriller.

Woman alone at home about to get dragged back to hell by a scary homicidal mass murdering maniac who has come back to life after having been executed three months ago = horror.

Answer 10

A horror movie is gory and scary whereas a thriller is suspenseful and scary.