The shining Thriller homework

Thriller practical

Let ‘Em Play God
Every director, film maker of a mystery movie has an aim to get the audience on the edge of their seat. The main factor to do this is ‘SUSPENSE’.
Alfred Hitchcock believes that you create suspense when you let the audience play God. He gives us a scenario with six characters and a man has been murdered, everyone is a suspect but not everyone’s really sure, this includes the audience. If one of the characters is a young man and is standing in a shadowy room with his back to the door when an unknown character in a cloak and a black hat sneaks and there is a brutal act. The audience does not know if the young man is the hero or not and don’t know to get scared or to cheer.
If the audience does know, if they know about the secrets and the characters don’t know, the audience will work like the devil because they know what will happen to these actors and this is called ‘Playing God’. This is SUSPENSE.
Hitchcock believes that puzzling the audience isn’t the core to suspense. If the audience knows everything from the start and the players don’t know anything, the audience have nothing to be puzzled on. It is not a thriller if the audience know who the murderer is. The audience watch the actors go casually through a mood which is full of evil which creates the suspense. Watching a thriller would make the audience have many questions and want to scream and shout at the screen if they go through a room and the audience know there’s someone in there but the actors don’t know. This would be seen as a success.
One of the components to get this right is to have a series of believable situation with people who are real, if the characters are unbelievable you wouldn’t get real suspense but just surprise. If a film has a murder or some mystery within the story it doesn’t really mean you would be a great thriller. It is important that a story should have sinister suggestions and should contrast between the story and background this was done in the film Rope. Films such as Foreign Correspondent, Spellbound didn’t follow the conventional rules of thrillers they went against having stormy, dull weather throughout the film. Suspense creates contrast.
It is not necessary for a director to change his style in order to develop new characters and a different story for each film, the directors’ work is tended to be set apart from others. The style in directing develops slowly and naturally occurs.
The story must be the result of growth and patient experimentation with the materials of the trade, the style should appear itself, emerge eventually almost unconsciously.

What Scares Us
While watching the film The Shining there was some elements of the film which scared me and the rest of the class. The music in the beginning, which has a high pitched and has drone, the music which is played before and during the little boy Danny sees a vision on something bad is going to happen. This makes us get ready for something terrible about to happen which creates the suspense. The editing of the clips also scares us because they are quick and fast which creates pace and also is dramatic because you don’t know what is going to come up next.
Other things which make us scared while watching the shining:
• Camera angles- when the camera is behind the character and following them, makes you feel like you are there
Point of view shots- we see at the same time as the character
• Mise-en scene- make up used on the naked women to put on distressed marks all over the body and it creates more suspense because we see the body from the reflection on the mirror, also the high pitched laughter that never stops
• The sudden cuts to the black screen with the day on it, this scares us because it comes in with a loud bang noise and we don’t know when it is going to show.
• Also I think where the location is also scare us because The Shining is set in a remote place and in a big hotel, with a maze
• The part of the film which created the most suspense I think it is when it’s set in the night; this is one of the conventions of a thriller most of the bad actions happen in the dark, which allow the audience to get prepared to get scared.
the main character jack , i also think he is scary because of the way he acts his facial expressions and his low voice. i think also having characters to be different from what the audience is use to also scares people. the two twins in "The Shining" scares people as you would think they are Innocent and not be scary but are because they are ghost and come up when not expected.