Movie Genre: Psychological Horror

When deciding what our movie clip would be about, my partner, Isabella, and I knew for sure that we wanted to work on a horror movie. However, there was one slight problem. Prior to this I had only ever seen one horror movie. Although I hadn’t seen a ton of films in the horror category, I knew more about its conventions than any other type of genre. We both knew that this would bring up a lot of difficulties so I took it upon myself to watch as many horror movies as I could during the weekend. Some of the ones I watched were: “It”,”Us”, “Get Out”, and “The Conjuring”. Although this terrifying experience lead to many sleepless nights, I understood more about how horror movies are sequenced and how even the smallest things can have a huge impact on the way the film turns out. With the newly found knowledge I decided to look into the different types of horror movies.

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My partner told me about psychological horror films and they seemed pretty interesting so I decided to look at different opening scenes from psychological horror. The one that stood out to me was an opening scene from the film,”It Follows.” In this scene, a terrifying and suspenseful mood is created for the rest of the movie through the fast pacing of the opening scene. When the scene opens there is no slow and deep introduction of the characters. Instead, it starts off by showing a girl running away from something that the camera never shows. Throughout the next couple minutes of the opening scene, the audience is still not informed about what is happening and therefore infers that the girl is being chased by a monster through the cinematography such as the long shot of the girl running. The long shot shows the girl’s scared movements and how she is looking all over the place in a nervous manner, this lets the audience know that something is definitely wrong. Shortly after, the girl dies in what appears to be a beach. This fast paced introduction creates a tone of horror and suspense because the audience is aware that whatever was following her is dangerous and vicious but they do not know exactly what the thing was that was following her. My partner and I found this really interesting and decided that we wanted to incorporate this anonymity into our opening scene.