A social thriller is a film genre using elements of suspense and horror to augment instances of apparent 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, each film highlighting occurrences of racial alienation (the former which veil a plot to abduct young African-Americans). Before Peele, other film actors, directors, 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.