Last week, my group made the decision the opening part of our film is going to be inspired by the murder mystery genre. Therefore, we need to research films from this genre to see how the most effective films have started...
I have started by looking at the opening credits and opening scene of the film Psycho. It was a 1960 American phychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, inspired by the book 'Psycho' from 1959.
The film recieved very positive reviews and made record-breaking box office sales, it has inspired 2 sequels, a remake and a T.V. spin-off programme. The film is categorised as a drama, horror, mystery and thriller, so it appeals to a wide audience.
The opening credits go on for 2 minutes with a simple grey and black stripe animation background. Luckily, it also includes fast paced, loud music which draws your attention in. Without the music, I feel the first impression would be almost entirely dull. The piano music sounds spooky, giving you a feel for the movie.
Then we see the opening scene, which consists of a man walking up steps into a house at night. There are no street lights, cars lights or people nearby so at first it is hard to work out what is going on and though a street of semi-detatched houses, it feels quite isolated. It then gets slighty lighter, so shadows begin to appear and low pitched violin and piano music begins to play. Since the beginning, it has all been a long shot, so we can see the surroundings and make an immediate judgement of what he is doing and whats going on. It then zooms into a medium shot of the upper part of the man, at the top of steps and walking into a door of the house. We see this from behind him, focusing on the bottom of his legs and feet. Gradually, the music has got higher pitched, faster and fainter. From this we feel as it is graudaully building for something big to happen... There has been no digetic noise and we have only seen this one character, that we are following.
The man then enters the house, there are stairs to the right of the door which he begins to go up, as he does this we see a long shot of his whole body slowly moving up each individual step. At the top of the stairs is a corridor with numerous doors, one opens slighty and we see a shadow in the gap but not yet a body. The man is not quite at the top of the stairs but our view of him has changed so we are now looking down on him, maybe to show the powerful position changing? Just as he reaches the top step, a person who we don't get a glimpse of comes running out of the partially open door, down the corridor and straight at our original character, holding a large knife, stabs him right in the heart. During this, the sound effect is a 'dun dun dun' getting more expressive with each 'dun' and then a loud, high pitched (very fake) scream. The shot changes to an extreme close up of our stabbed man's face as he falls down the stairs in slow-ish motion, seeing his facial expressions. They range from shocked to scared and then quite pale and dead looking! Somehow, he has blood coming out of his forehead and cheek which doesn't really calculate as he got stabbed in the heart..? He eventually falls to the bottom and is happily dead on the floor, the stabber quickly follows down the stairs and the scene ends with them again stabbing character 1 in the heart and we simply see a close up of their hand with the bloody knife in. The lighting throughout this in-house scene has been quite dark but, light enough to cleary see body language and facial expressions of the first character. You can see the surrounding area without difficulty but as it was set at night time it is going to be dark which i suppose adds to the tension and atmosphere they are trying to get across to the audience.
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