Welcome Back! In my previous post, I did research on some of the highest-grossing Horror films, and now that we have our examples, I want to define what my goals should be for the upcoming film, and how I want to accomplish them. To help with this, I'll also be going over how some directors, namely M. Night Shyamalan, created their beloved works, and how they were inspired to do so.
First off, we do need a basic outline for a plot; Nothing too fleshed out, just something to go for in our opening. For that, I believe that a mixture of both the Supernatural and Science would be something interesting, and could bode some promising mysteries for the Audience, which is the backbone of the suspense that Thriller Horror needs to thrive. Additionally, these two elements were present in all three of these high-grossing movies, so I believe that they'll have a high retention rate and attract a good amount of people to watch.
Now that I have a basis to go on, we should look into the Cinematography of movies like the Sixth Sense and IT. Both of these movies had a heavy emphasis on lighting. Many horror movies do, in fact. Lighting is very important when discerning emotions of a character, but even more important than that is making the character being protrayed seem either human or inhuman. When a character's eyes are obscured, that Character becomes much harder to discern the emotion of, and also appears to be less human.
In the images provided, both women have a rather blank expression, and nothing about their facial features are particularly grotesque or wrong. Instead, you'll notice that the first images' lighting obscures the eyes and has much less color, therefore giving that "Inhuman" effect that we discussed. And, as I just noted, Color is also important to the cinematography of a movie. A prominent example of this can be found in one of the three movies we researched; 'The Sixth Sense' uses the color red to potray a relation to the Afterlife, ghosts, the supernatural or the grotesque. While color can be used to convey a message, it can also be removed from a shot to add suspense or improve the "dehumanizing" effect of lighting.
Now, since we're only doing an opening, our loose plot idea will do just fine. Instead, we should focus on how we want our shots. Conveying a character's emotion is vital to a horror film, but we also need to build the audience's tension, so our opening should employ the usage of the previously-discussed visual techniques, as well as a POV from the characters' vision, an absence of music in favor of ambient noise, and several shots from odd angles that will be taken, from the audiences' point of view, from the eyes of our "Aggressor." While I do want our antagonist to be threatening, the constraints that come with only being a student of film and not an actual director make me believe that, instead, our final shot should focus on the Character's visage, contorting in horror. A sudden scream will play to break up the noise after an uncomfortable resting period on the Character's face.
And, with that, we have an outline for what we want, and what we should do, for our opening! It's a little more than an outline, but any ideas are always welcome in the world of film! Maybe you can even use some of these ideas for yourself! Anyways, see you now!
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