Serial Killer Thriller - Thriller Convention

No Country For Old Men - Opening
We are shown a quick glimpse of the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh in the opening scene of No Country for Old Men. He has recently been captured and is standing in a police station with a deputy, who is totally unaware of how vicious Chigurh is. Within minutes, the deputy is dead. We knew that this would happen because the person narrating was telling us the things Chigurh was capable of.


The directors of the movie have made it a really effective thriller as it has some of the main conventions a thriller needs like a narrative, a glimpse of the enemy/killer, it shows him killing and gives us a hint of what the film is about.


In this opening scene there is no music in the background, there's just a narrative with an overview of a dessert in what looks like Texas and then a scene in the police station where the camera slowly zooms into the officer on the phone, while we can see Chigurh escaping his handcuffs and eventually taking down the officer and killing him.