Film Opening Analysis: The Strangers

First seen of the screen is the opening titles of the production and the distribution companies written in red on a black background. The music featured on these opening titles is a very effective dramatic device and is very deep sounding. Afterwards we can listen a very deep voice in the background reading the paragraphs that they appear on the screen. The first sentence tells us “What you are about to see is inspired by true events”. This makes the spectator feel scared and in danger. Psychologically, the spectator can feel that what he is going to see would happen to him in the future. Then the voiceover continues telling us a statistic of the FBI about the violent crimes in America each year. The number is huge and the audience is in a state of anxiety since the first twenty seconds. Now we can read about the protagonists of this film, a man and a woman. We can assume they are together because we can read that they move to the house of the man.

The last sentence we can read and listen is “The brutal events that took place there are still not entirely known”. Being the last and effect sentence, we understand from that there still is a sort of misery around these events. We understood that these events are brutal, they take place in a summer house, so it would be isolated, and, from the title, we understood the attackers would be stranger people.

In the following scenes we can hear the noise of a car and we can see scenes about houses. From these scenes we can understand that the house where the events take place is actually isolated. In fact in the first scene we can see two houses next to each other in daylight, until the last scene that we can see an isolated house in the countryside during the night. Then, black screen.

We can hear a conversation on the phone between the police centre and a scared woman, most likely in danger. The woman tells something like “there are people here” and “there’s blood everywhere”. The police centre tries to ask the woman questions, but she is so frightened that she cannot answer. At the same time we can see a car with a gunshot on the glass, two children who goes in a house with the open door, a knife covered in blood, a ring case, a blood stain on a wall and a rifle. When she says “There’s blood everywhere” the screen becomes black. Then the title of the film appears.

We can understand for this second part that the scenes we can see are after what it happens. Someone will be hit with the knife, someone will use the rifle to shot the glass car and to shot someone, because there is a bloodstain on a wall. We can also assume the couple would be married soon, from the ring case. Perhaps before the brutal events happens, the man will ask her to marry him.

From this opening film and from the shining I understood the importance of the sound in the horrors and thrillers. I will use the sound in my task to increase the state of anxiety in the audience.