Scene Analysis- Tina's death scene, Nightmare on Elm Street

            Another scene analysis gives me an opportunity to build off of a previous post about the subconscious dream state in A Nightmare on Elm Street. The monster in the film “Freddy” preys on victims while they are dreaming. So to make the connection between the dream state and how people are killed I will use Tina’s death scene from the film. The scene begins by our victim Tina settling in for a good nights sleep with her boyfriend. As Tina lays in bed trying to fall asleep the camera snaps out into the street. The camera starts low on the ground focusing up at Tina’s house. In the center of the shot is her bedroom window. The camera elevates and moves toward the window slowly. This effect makes it feel as if someone or something is slowly making its way into the house or bedroom which the victim rests. It zooms and elevates all the way until it gets right up into the window and then moves inside on our sleeping victim. This signifies that the evil made its way to the house and is now inside the bedroom. She lays in bed as she hears the sound of pebbles being thrown against the window. Each time she pays a little more attention to it and she tries to wake her boyfriend which is no luck. She gets up and puts on nothing but her boyfriends shirt and moves to the window. We get a side shot of Tina standing in the window as pebbles continue to hit until the window cracks and as she looks out into the street you hear someone faintly whisper her name. The camera flashes to another room of the house where her best friend is sleeping. We got a point of view shot from the edge of her bed as if we were standing at the foot of the bed. In the wall you begin to see something slowly emerge from the wall. As it moves out more and more you begin to see the impression of two hands with a face in between. It continues to come out until you can recognize the object as our monster. I like the effect of the monster coming out of the wall. It makes it seem as if Freddy is peering into the bedroom to see either a sleeping girl who he looks at or to make sure he is going for the right victim. I also like the effect because it reiterates the effect of that evil making its way into the house. Now we know Freddy is inside and is looking for his victim. As the sleeping girl opens her eyes Freddy disappears back into the wall and she pulls a crucifix off her night stand. She looks at the crucifix and hangs it up over her bed right in the spot where Freddy poked his head through. It almost gives you a false sense of hope in the fact that god will help her. Moving back onto Tina the camera shows her standing inside the kitchen window looking out into the back yard where the pebbles were coming from looking for the perpetrator. She flicks on the porch light and opens the door faintly asking if anyone is in there. She starts walking and the camera tracks at a diagonal so you move slowly into a close up of her face. She hears whispers coming from the dark alley and follows them. She walks out into the alley and picks a direction to look. From behind her a garbage can lid is rolled out of the fog to make her turn around. The victim whirls around and the camera looks down the alley at a large all white garage. As we are forced to look at this garage a large silhouette of Freddy moves onto the garage door which functions almost as a projector screen. At this point we know its on. The camera focuses on her terrified face and then  back to a slow moving Freddy who is hobbling towards her. He is backlit so you can see nothing but a black figure moving at you. His knives on hand screech against a metal door piercing the silent night. Our victim prays to god as he moves toward her. Suddenly his face is lit from underneath and he mutters “This is God”. She turns to start running and we get a shot from down the alley so we can see her in nothing but a plain white men’s button up shirt being chased by an almost entirely black figure. The camera follows her as she runs past us and right into the arms of the monster. She takes off running into the backyard from which she came and we get the same shot that we had when she was going out to the alley. From behind a tree, which is no more than 7 inches wide the monster jumps out of thin air. This illusion is truly frightening in the sense that for the times it was very innovative and that we now know our monster can teleport at will. We then see our monster Freddy raise his hand without knives and demands her to watch him. He then cuts off two of his five fingers and lets green liquid squirt out while having this creepy smile on his face. She screams and runs but is not match for Freddy as he grabs her right before she gets inside. He tackles her into a pile of garbage cans and we lose sight of them and are transported back to the bedroom in real time. She is totally covered by the blankets and struggling and screaming. Her boyfriend wakes up astonished and jumps out of bed. He rips off the covers to show nothing more then his girlfriend, no Freddy. As she struggles on the bed Freddy rips her shirt open and slashes her chest with his knives. It then gives us the boyfriend perspective as she is levitated in thin air and dangled. She get dropped to the floor then dragged up the wall and ceiling slowly. She is apparently being raped and stabbed while she struggles and her boyfriend watches helplessly. She then is dropped after a brief struggle back onto the bed in a pile of blood and rolls onto the floor lifeless and naked. Her friend wakes up in the next room and rushes to her aide only to find the mutilated body and the boyfriend nowhere to be found.     

            There are several things which I like about the scene and that I feel make it unique and effective. First the shot moving from the street to the bedroom and then having Freddy look into the other bedroom is an effective one. This shows the audience that something was coming to get someone and then makes it known when Freddy shows himself. The second thing I like is a technique the film uses multiple times when beginning a dream murder scene. The victim in the upcoming scene always is going to sleep and then in an instant the scene can switch from real life to dream without knowing it. For example Tina was lying in bed calm and quiet and then something started taping the window. There is no definite signal of moving from real life to dream and I think that helps in making the scenes more unexpected. The last thing I like is the shot of Freddy’s shadow/silhouette onto the white garage. His shadow is magnified many times making him seem like a giant. Also he remains unseen while his shadow remains seen and that is creepy. It also gives the definite signal to the audience that you are now in the victims dream and Freddy is here.  THe link to the scene is at the bottom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=609GY6-QDSg&feature=related

Scene analysis: The shinging-hallway scene

The film The Shining according to me is on the list of all time horror classics. Once again I first saw this film as a child and it totally freaked me out. There are many scenes in this film that are absolutely horrifying but there are ones that are especially horrifying to me. Several scenes in the film involve the son Danny riding around the hotel or adventuring the hotel by himself. These films scared me as a young child because I could relate to the fear Danny must have been feeling. A young boy, separated from the protective watch of his mother, in an extremely large and supposedly haunted hotel are all reason which I could relate to because if I were him in those moments I would be scared too.

            One particular scene called the Hallway Scene begins by following Danny. Danny is riding his big wheel through halls of the hotel and the camera is following him from a distance. The camera follows at a distance for quite sometime giving you the sense that you are stalking him. The only sound you can hear is the tires of the bicycle grinding against the tile floors. Even as Danny turns right all the way at the end of the corridor the camera continues to follow him even for a few more seconds reiterating this feeling of following prey. The camera suddenly jumps right behind Danny on his big wheel and follows him through a smaller corridor and then as he turns the corner. As he turns the corner he slams on his breaks suddenly. At the end of this long hallway are two young, identical twins standing and holding hands. These twins have been a reoccurring vision for Danny. Back to the shot, this gives us an over the shoulder perspective view of Danny’s perspective. The camera flips to a portrait of Danny from his shoulders up. All you can see is Danny starting frightened, not blinking, breathing heavily, and obviously shocked at what he is seeing. The camera moves back to the perspective shot as the girls begin to speak in unison in a deathly monotone voice. They encourage Danny to come and play forever and ever and ever etc. As they begin to say ever and ever the camera flashes from looking down the hall at two young girls standing perfectly fine to two mutilated female bodies in a blood soaked hallway, with an axe laying on the floor next to them. This alternates for a few seconds as Danny is having these wickedly fast visions of what happened in the hotel. The camera goes back to Danny as he immediately covers his eyes for a few seconds breathing with a sense of panic. He then peeks out of his fingers and sees nothing left. He then talks with his imaginary friend Tony who assures Danny what he saw was not real.

            This scene is scary for a few reasons. The first I previously mentioned, the camera stalking Danny through the hallways as if it were some sort of hunter stalking prey. Next the scene brings you into the terror Danny is feeling at the moment by giving the close up. Third the camera flashes the visions which Danny is subject to throughout the film which is brutal at its simplest sense: seeing mutilated little girls on a hallway floor.

            Again this film has always been a classic in my book. The use of shots and editing throughout the story help to submerge the audience into the world of constant fear and fantasy which they are subject to in the film.  The youtube link below will bring you the scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFVyAjj3Bs0

Psychoanalysis- The subconcious dreamstate and Nightmare on Elm Street

The film Nightmare on Elm Street is on of my favorite horror films of all time. I first saw the movie when I was in about sixth grade and it really freaked me out. Personally Freddy is one of the most frightening monsters I’ve ever seen in a film. However after taking film communication and learning about how films are made and how their content is derived I have grown a new liking for the movie. Particularly after learning about psychoanalysis and how it pertains to film it easy to make connections between the film and the concept.

            Psychoanalysis revolves around the subconscious component of the human mind; meaning that films make themes to play off the subconscious aspects of the human mind. If you know anything about the film Nightmare on Elm Street you know that the monsters entire strategy of getting to his victims is by accessing their dreams. What can be more subconscious than the subconscious dream state each human is submerged in every time we lay down to go to sleep? I applaud the writer of the film for picking such an obvious yet unique concept to build on.

            One may wonder how the writer of the film could use dreams in a horrifying way. I think that it is not hard to figure out. One reason being is that as common as dreams are they are not always pleasant. Young children are tormented by nightmares regularly, and I as a 21 year old have an occasional nightmare as well. Another reason is the idea of “The terrible place” in slasher films. Each film has this terrible place where the main character(s) may be isolated from help and forced to deal with this monster on their own. “Another fundamental trait of the slasher film is the “

Terrible Place

” a typically remote location where the killer lives and stages his attacks. Although much of A Nightmare on Elm Street revolves around Nancy’s house, the terrible place is actually the human subconscious, which literally separates the victim from others because they cannot enter his or her dream.” (Kendrick 27). James Kendrick makes clear why the dream state in the film is so terrifying to the audience. It is because our monster isolates the victim in the most isolated place in our respective worlds: our dreams. I think this terrifies most people because dreams, their purpose, and the science behind them is widely unknown. People are always scared of what they don’t know. Also the fact that dreams are such a regular occurrence, and the fact that victims are preyed upon in that unknown place which we visit every night is frightening.  

              

Horror Genre Theory

Horror as a genre in films dates all the way back to the origin of film. Horror is a genre which has been around since cave men and the stories they painted on their cave walls of mythical monsters. It is easy to see why horror immediately entered cinema considering the first horror movies made were about horror books. Stephen Prince author of the book The Horror Film gives us a rundown on why horror is an elite genre in this excerpt:

“Like other genre movies any given horror film will convey synchronic association, ideological ad social messages that are part of a certain period or historical moment. One can analyze horror films in terms of these periods or moments, just as one can do with westerns or gangster movies.  But, unlike those genres, horror also goes deeper, to explore more fundamental questions about the nature of human existence, questions that, in some profound ways, go beyond culture and society as these are organized in any given period or form. Here lies the special significance of horror, the factors that truly differentiate it from the other genres and that make it conform most deeply with our contemporary sense of the world.” (Prince 2)

Prince makes an excellent point. I always knew horror was one of my favorite genres of film but aside from the thrill of being scared I never knew what attracted me so much. After reading the prior excerpt I realized that’s just it. Horror scares me because it challenges the unknown. For example one of my great fears is ghosts. The film sixth sense the first time I saw it as a young child opened my mind to the possibility that ghosts surround us and sometimes can become visible and that it can happen to the average American family truly frightened me.

Also characteristic to horror genre is the struggle of good and evil. Originally horror films plotted some unthinkable monster against an individual or group of people who must fight to stay alive. Over the years the monster has mutated into several things including, lunatic fathers, possessed children, ghosts, aliens, the psychotic murderer next door and etc. The struggle of good and evil can be thrown onto many situations and made into a horror film.

Another aspect which makes these films so appealing in more modern times is the idea that humans are not atop the food chain. The idea that we as a race are not the end all be all most powerful creature in the universe. Some of my favorite horror films are the ones where the monsters prevail or are near impossible to kill. In the film Jeepers Creepers, there is some type of human looking monster with wings and fangs and skin made of leather. As it terrorizes a country side every decade its victims are rendered helpless to the much bigger, faster, stronger, and flying monster. The feeling of helplessness is on of the aspects of the films that helps to keep me interested.

Horror as a genre has remained same over the years yet changed so much. The genre mutated time and time again to create sub genres and various aspects to be added to films. Horror films have caught the attention of the American public from the time of their arrival and surely will not stop anytime in the near future.