Horror, Genre, and Choices (10/31/18)

Today's class began with the introduction of the daily 'I Will Be Able To's which covered the ideas of how certain cinematic choices impact the genre and tone of a movie. The 'I Will Be Able To's for today were: evaluate how a director’s choices develop genre and style & synthesize the stylistic choices of multiple directors. We then transitioned into the lesson and Mr. Rivers then split us up into our groups to talk among ourselves about what makes a good or bad horror movie. After about four minutes, Rivers called our attention back to the front of the classroom and had each group share what they had come up with for what makes a good or bad horror movie. The list that the class came up with was:

Good:	Bad:
Lack of Sound	Predictability
Atmosphere
Soundtrack	Subject based on hot topic
Builds suspense	Stupid characters (Laziness)
Deliberate Jump scares	Over use of jump scares (if used it too much, you detract from the plot)
Interesting story line

After this, Rivers pulled up the opening "Shoot Her!" scene from Jurassic Park (1993) in which a park worker is pulled into an enclosure by a velociraptor after an accident occurs. Mr. Rivers then had the class watch the scene, write down what choices in the movie create suspense, and then had us share our answers with the class. The list of choices and effects that was produced was:

• Pulled into the cage → Builds panic (Quick cuts of panic due to shots)
• Sound (shrieking, yelling, screams, slow fast paced music) → Adrenaline rush & Huge tone shift
• Dark! Low visibility (LOW KEY LIGHTING) → Makes audience wonder

Next, we moved on to the opening of the thriller/horror movie "Get Out" (2018) and we were tasked with writing down the same choices and effects that we did for Jurassic Park. The choices and effects that were found were:

• Run Rabbit Run music while a murder is going on transitions to fast and sharp violin music afterwards → Sadistic
• Subsidiary features kept blurry → We can’t see behind or around him
• Dark, suburban street, self-aware → DREAD ; also an allusion to other horror movies where characters are stupid

The class today obviously has many different and clear connections to the outside world as we reviewed and analyzed two of the most famous and well-known thriller/adventure/suspense movies of modern cinema. However, while in class today we already drew some clear connections between the subject material that we are learning and the outside world, another prime example of how certain choices create suspense and other effects is The Hunt for Red October (1990). Unlike in Get Out or Jurassic Park, in The Hunt for Red October, most of the characters in the film are constantly trying to figure out what Captain Ramius's intentions are while the audience is fully aware of what his plan is but are also unaware of what is going to happen in the end. This technique creates a different form of suspense where the audience is constantly hanging on the edges of their seats as the situation revolving around the nuclear submarine and its fate is and can drastically change at any given second based upon the uninformed actions of the other characters in the movie.