The conspiracy thriller as paranoid thriller Manchurian Candidate ….If the conspiracy thriller (or paranoid thriller) is a sort of ‘subgenre’ of the thriller film hot in the 1970s in the US – it came in the wake of all that insanity and power that spawned Vietnam, the bombing raids, the gunning down of Kennedy, and good old Watergate – so we get the clandestine machinations and conspiracies that lay like wounds in the ‘orderly’ fabric of political life.The protagonists of conspiracy thrillers are those (wishfullfilled) journalists / amateur investigators whose ONE MAN investigations unravel some vast conspiracy that ultimately goes “all the way to the top”. (read the serious young man cleans up the world stuff)AND the REVENGE of the rightious narrative of more recent years maybe is the offspring of this genre –