How 'Crank' relates to our thriller

What is Crank about?

A one-time freelance hit man who was just attempting to turn his life around is forced to keep his heart pumping when his vengeful former employers inject him with a lethal poison that will permanently stop his ticker if his pulse sinks beneath an active rate in a non-stop urban action extravaganza starring Jason Statham and Amy Smart. Chev Chelios (Statham) was one of the most skilled assassins in the West Coast crime syndicate. However, when he hung up his guns in the middle of a job to run off with his new girlfriend Eve (Smart), the man who was once the hunter now becomes the hunted. Awakened from his slumber by a telephone call informing him of his precarious situation, Chelios soon discovers that the only way to save Eve from certain death at the hands of his nemesis is to stay two steps ahead of his killers, keep his heart-rate high enough to stay alive, and blast through the streets of Los Angeles in search of an antidote.

How is Crank similar to our thriller?

Crank relates to our thriller as they use the same idea of a person having been injected with something deadly. They also play on the same idea that the main hero must fulfill a specific task or set of tasks in order to stay alive. Our thriller differs from Crank in that the main protagonist doesn’t have to keep his heart rate up, he just has to kill a list of people, and he is given a specific time frame in which to do it.

Real-life incidents similar to our thriller

Woman Kills Her Mother Inspired by Breaking Bad

Kuntal Patel had often fantasised about killing her mother after she had been forbidden her to marry her boyfriend Niraj. She had then contacted a poison dealer on the dark web and claimed that she needed a deadly toxin to get her mother out of the way. When the poison arrived, she claimed it was simply supposed to knock her out but it ended up killing her. She did all this because she felt like she was a Mexican drug warlord similar to the main characters of the television series Breaking Bad. Currently, she is saying that she had nothing to do with it and the only reason that she was doing it was to fulfil her fantasies. This relates to our thriller because the main antagonist Sebastian Giles is using a toxin to get Sean Finch to do what he wants which in this case is forcing him to kill the people on his list.

Russian Spy Killed by Poison Umbrella

On September 7th 1918, Russian Spy Georgi Markov was stabbed on his back thigh with a poison umbrella, which at that point was no more painful than an insect bite. However as time progressed, the area that was stabbed was clearly showing a bruise and it was continuing to get larger. Over the course of the following week he became progressively sicker until he eventually died on September 11th 1918. This incident relates to our thriller because Sean Finch has also been injected with a toxin that is set to kill him extremely painfully in 36 hours and what happened with Markov is that he had also died a painful death as a result of a toxin being injected into his bloodstream.

Feedback from our thriller idea

From presenting our idea, we have decided to make a few changes. Instead of showing the syringe as a prop in the opening sequence, we will not showcase the syringe. This will create suspense as the ending of the film could be that he didn’t actually get injected, showing the whole act was a facade and therefore the character was set up. Feedback also showed that instead of a teenage boy acting the role, we decided that the role should rather be an older, middle-aged man who seems mature and even less likely to be involved in a plot like this.

Looking at other movie openings will provide us with further inspiration. These films are Crank, The Bourne Identity and The Long Kiss Goodnight, which as a group have discovered. These are examples of action thrillers, which can be analysed in how they connect to our thriller and how we can possibly develop our idea. At the moment our thriller has a working title and we will deliberate ideas at a later stage.

Group idea for our thriller

My favourite thriller idea

Thriller ideas from news articles

This news article is about a man who died after being found lying in the road 90 minutes after a woman was murdered one street away. They both knew each other.

I could turn this into a thriller as there could be a serial killer who, by killing a person, someone the murderer knew would also die. It could begin with someone distant, but as the murderer kills more and more people, his friends and family could start to die.

From this article, I have thought that my thriller could be about a father and teenage daughter who have a close relationship, but her mother is dead. The daughter could be unaware that her father is a serial killer and is in fact the person who killed her mother. The thriller could show him killing different people and show his daughter’s gradual realisation of the truth.

This article has inspired me to think about creating my thriller about a kidnapper who continues to frame a woman she hates for her own kidnappings of people connected in some way to the woman she is blaming. The thriller could show everyone believing that she is guilty, although she promises of her innocence.

The Art of the Title Sequence