I Should Write a Horror About This 

    Picture it: it's 2 AM on Wednesday school night and you wake up in cold sweats. You're a week and a half into your AICE Media Project and you still have no idea what you're going to do. The room around you starts to feel a little too claustrophobic and your eyes begin to go hazy as a million possible images play in your mind.

    Anyways, for little inspiration, I decided to dedicate this blog post to other horror movie openings. Specifically, I wanted to research some cold opens.

Cold Opens

    Personally, I find the most effective horror openings to be the ones that immediately throw audiences into the nightmare. I think this is partly because MOST horrors are slow-burn, so I usually have at least half an hour to mentally prepare my body for the rest of the film. Since I'm pretty much set on a horror opening, I want to make something intriguing from the get-go, so while I love a good horror slow-burn, I think this is the way to go. I decided to put together a list of all the best "cold opens" in horror that I could think of to watch and then chose two to focus on. 

It Follows (2014)

    I watched this film a couple months ago and while I didn't love it, I thought it was an incredibly effective, simple (but also very unique), and low-budget horror. I specifically chose to study this scene because it's just one of my favorite openings to a horror. It instantly sets the tone for the rest of the film without giving too much away. The opening also ends with quite a shocking, gruesome frame that I can't really recreate but it's a good example of the kind of startling imagery that I would like to convey. While I was unable to find a video of the actual scene on YouTube (I think it's just blocked on school grounds), I was able to find an interview in which the director, David Robert Mitchell, breaks down the opening scene. It's a short interview, he only breaks down about a minute of the opening, but I was really intrigued by his discussion on horror conventions. Mitchell specifically studied and incorporated horror clichés into mise-en-scene elements (particularly her wardrobe). However, he also played on lesser used conventions in horror to catch audiences off-guard. There are very, very few horror films that are shot in daylight, much less ones set in a seemingly normal suburb. It's this sense of normalcy contrasted with whatever the girl is experiencing that makes this scene so unsettling. This is a technique that I definitely want to try in my opening. I'm tired of horror films feeling so predictable and cookie-cutter in terms of how they look. I'm still brainstorming at the moment but there's a playground close to my house that would be a PERFECT setting to get this contrast. I also wanted to bring up It Follow's cinematography that really help develop the tone. The opening, along with the rest of the film uses slow pans and negative space to create a sense of paranoia. I love these techniques because they utilize basic techniques to creep audiences out, which is exactly what I'm trying to produce as someone with absolutely no budget. 

Talk To Me

    This example is more gruesome/violent than the last one, which is not really what I'm trying to emulate, but it has techniques that I would like to use. Like the beginning of It Follows, this opening puts us right into the scene. It begins with a party full of teenagers and hip-hop music playing. The only aspect that indicates the genre at this point is the lowkey lighting, which sets the mood for the rest of the scene. While the music and atmosphere feel out of place with the genre, it does establish the carefree, dumb teenager characteristics that become important later on and (again), serves as a juxtaposition. I love this introduction because of how abrupt the change is. These super abrupt changes are sprinkled all over the film and are so effective for shock value. I also chose to focus more on this opening because it's a more modern (movie was released last summer in fact) representation of teenagers. Truth is, it's unlikely that I'll find anyone other than my friends to act in this, so I have to shape my film around how a teenager would act, and I really love how this opening characterizes its characters in just two minutes.