Thriller is a genre of which content is intended to evoke feelings of suspense, anticipation, and anxiety. While films like One Battle After Another and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood have this genre joined within their comedic tone, a vast majority feature serious tones. Thriller as a genre is difficult to label a movie as. Many movies revolve around build-ups with anticipation, which makes it difficult to apply that distinction.
The difficulty in defining the thriller genre leaves gaping questions as to the audiences interested in the genre. Due to its similar goals in terms of audience emotion, thrillers and horror films often share similar classification, and hence they carry similar audiences. The biggest thing of note between the two is the frequency of the R-rating and mature content, both of which coincide with male skews and adult audiences. There are very little common threads between audiences otherwise. That said, thrillers often revolve around emotions that make some audiences uneasy, so the most common of all audiences is in general fans of the genre.
Given the isolating nature of the genre, the audience for it is interested in seeing thrillers, so thrillers commonly advertise themselves with that. Best picture winner Parasite's trailers often reference reviews involving tension and getting under your skin. The same distributor, NEON, also used some films that are somewhat loosely thrillers and marketed them entirely as such with It Was Just an Accident and The Secret Agent.
Thrillers are full of technical and narrative conventions. Uncut Gems is a great example of the technical side, using close-ups, loud and sudden sounds, and energetic scores to increase the anticipation and stress of scenes. Narratively, Scream is a great example. Although it is primarily considered a horror, Scream employs many twists, personal stakes, and red herrings in ways identical to many thrillers. Thrillers may also provide commentary on tough subject matter, great examples being Prisoners and child kidnapping or Soft & Quiet and the nature of modern Nazism.
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