Thriller is a broad genre of literature, film and television that includes numerous and often overlapping sub-genres. Thrillers are characterized by fast pacing, frequent action, and resourceful heroes who must thwart the plans of more powerful and better equipped villains. Writer Vladimir Nabokov, in his lectures at Cornell University, said that "In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine."
Literary devices such as suspense, red herrings and cliffhangers are used extensively. "Homer's Odyssey is one of the oldest stories in the Western world and is regarded as an early prototype of the thriller." A thriller is villain driven plot, whereby he presents obstacles the hero must overcome. The genre is a fascinatingly flexible form that can undermine audience complacency through a dramatic rendering of psychological, social, familial and political tensions and encourages sheltered but sensation-hungry audiences, in Hitchcock's phrase, "to put their toe in the cold water of fear to see what it's like."
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