Title Font and Style
Conventionally, the font and style of the title is meant to reflect the tone of the film itself (e.g. in Dawn of the Dead, it uses a bold, red font for the title that appropriately sets the tone for the graphic nature of the film itself). In order to go along with this, we chose to have fairly fancy font that is the main focus of the shot (being on a blank background and centred), which links to the character and his need to keep up a positive outward appearance (as noted in evaluation activity 2), being a person who cares more about their appearance than what they actually do. This is also reflected in the music overlaying the opening too, which all represent the tone of the film accurately, as normal film openings do.
Setting / Location
Normally, a film opening sets the location up via a long shot, often sweeping, however the long shot that we use for ours isn’t used to set up the location, but rather the atmosphere. The actual location of the opening is stereotypical of horror films, and takes direct inspiration from the “kill scenes” of both Dexter and American Psycho, and (if the film were to be fully made at some point) would have the audience know what was going to happen the moment they saw the room again, helping to advance the feeling of anticipation in them, something that is conventional of the horror movies of old, but is something lost nowadays in preference of jump scares – this is helped along by the repeated shot of the empty room, in which the basic elements of the room are all shown (chair, white surroundings, and newspaper covered floor) and are kept on screen for a few seconds to sink it into the memory of the audience for the rest of the film, or at least as long as they need to remember it.
Costumes and Props
Costumes, traditionally, represent the basic ‘need-to-know’ qualities of a character, and are meant to be there so that it’s easy to understand what role those characters take within the scene. Film openings often don’t have characters being shown, but when they do it’s easy to understand who exactly they are in that scene – with horrors, this is often whether they are the victim or the killer. From the moment you’re introduced to the man in the white shirt, you witness him being dragged across the floor and see blood down his shirt, as well as bruises on his face, and it’s obvious that he’s the victim, whereas the (dashingly handsome) man in the suit is much more refined in his appearance, and it’s clear that he has the control in the scene.
Props, again, are traditionally meant to give some immediate sense of fear or anticipation to the audience on seeing them – knives are the quick, go-to weapons of choice for killers stereotypically, so we decided to use them within the scene in order to link them to the killer and make it clear what he’s going to be doing with them. After thinking it over, removing the pizza cutter was probably a good choice in the long run.
Setting Up The Story
More often than not, film openings don’t really set up much story, but rather give brief overviews of them, or reflect some of the more basic elements of it. For example, in Dawn of the Dead, the opening shows a viral outbreak that the government can’t control and then shows some of the “infected”, which gets the general gist of what happens in the background of the film, but doesn’t point out that the film is mainly based around the survival of a group of people within a mall, nor the ultimate goal of escaping from the mainland via boat. Overall, our film opening conforms to that kind of set up, with the use of a murderer doing his thing and whatnot whilst not revealing much about the killer himself or his motivation, but does hint at some sort of health issue, mental or physical, with the shot of the pills.
Portraying The Genre
Film openings often portray the genre note for note to the audience, with horror films basically always having some sort of grim or graphic opening sequence. In The Reeds, they have a man being hunted by an unknown attacker, and in the opening for Dawn of the Dead they have a fairly pessimistic government official and a graphic few clips of the infected. We decided to challenge this and focus more on the portrayal of the character of the killer rather than the genre, which may have been a bad choice in the long run but felt right at the time, such as the various shots of his interaction with the man in the chair whilst not really showing much of the character visually – the genre itself really only shows through in the action of the sequence, such as the murder itself and the transport of the body, though the room being used is a traditional, easily recognizable “death” scene type of room that reflects the genre as well.
Character Introductions
With film openings, the protagonist often isn’t introduced, at least not in horror films. In Dawn of the Dead, there is no mention or portrayal of any of the characters, and in The Reeds they show the antagonists – in fact, both of these openings show the antagonists instead. Technically, we’ve kept to this convention with the introduction of the killer, but the opening was designed around introducing him not only as the ‘bad guy’, but also as the main character of the film. The victim within the scene however was something that deviated a lot from traditional openings – characters that aren’t repeated just don’t get given too much screen time, or at least no shots of the face, simply because they don’t want the audience to linger on characters that don’t matter on a personal level, and in this case I think we did rather badly.
Special Effects
With horror films, special effects are mainly used for graphic content – what the audience have come to see it for, essentially – and in our film opening we’ve tried to keep to that as well via the use of blood and an eyeball, which we’ve detailed the creation of in separate posts.
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