I have posted this because I want to show the reader what makes a good thriller opening, so we can use this when we are starting our 2 minute film opeing project.
This is a section from 'No Country for Old Men' where the bad guy shooting into a Motel and slowly searches for a cowboy, who is hiding in the opposite room.
The clip starts off with complete silence, which builds the tension of the scene, and a mide-shot of a person walking down a street, then shot then turns into a close up shot of his feet and he is wearing no shoes for added silence. The man is caring a gun and a gas cylinder which is leaking badly, this adds to the tension and suspence becuase the noise of the gas breaks the silence and I woundered what he was going to do with is cylinder. the man stops outside a room and blows the door handle off with this gas cylinder and shoots a guy sitting on the bad, all of this is fast editing becuase it is a contrast to the man having to quickly blow the door off and kill the first person they so, so that they are caught off guard. Throughout this entire scene there is no music to add suspence just the silence of the night which when put to good use makes one incredible thriller filled scene becuase the music normally tells you what is about to happen but here I had to guess which just terrifed me, becuase I thought that I was actually there and about to be killed like in a real situation.
This is a section from 'No Country for Old Men' where the bad guy shooting into a Motel and slowly searches for a cowboy, who is hiding in the opposite room.
The clip starts off with complete silence, which builds the tension of the scene, and a mide-shot of a person walking down a street, then shot then turns into a close up shot of his feet and he is wearing no shoes for added silence. The man is caring a gun and a gas cylinder which is leaking badly, this adds to the tension and suspence becuase the noise of the gas breaks the silence and I woundered what he was going to do with is cylinder. the man stops outside a room and blows the door handle off with this gas cylinder and shoots a guy sitting on the bad, all of this is fast editing becuase it is a contrast to the man having to quickly blow the door off and kill the first person they so, so that they are caught off guard. Throughout this entire scene there is no music to add suspence just the silence of the night which when put to good use makes one incredible thriller filled scene becuase the music normally tells you what is about to happen but here I had to guess which just terrifed me, becuase I thought that I was actually there and about to be killed like in a real situation.
This is a scene from the film 'The crazies' which is a every scary scene becuase you don't know who the person will stab.
There is a constant high pitched noice in the background which is then sound-matched into a scraping sound going on the floor, this contrabutes to the thriller factor becuase I didn't know what this sound was made by and this wasn't helped by the very dark room with a few beams of light entering the building. The shadow of the person scrapping the tool on the floor soon comes into view, after a sudden blur, and the audience know then that it is a pitch fork, al you can hear is the pitch fork scrapping across the ground. This raises your anxiaty becuase you don't know what this person is going to do. That is until he leans over a bed and jams the pitch fork into the stomach of the person several times until him moves on to the next person, blood splatters very where in this scene and the man's face doesn't change as he is killing people.
This is a famous scene from 'Jaws' when chief Brody suddenly realises that he 'needs a bigger boat'
As soon as the clip starts you can see the Great White Shark spring its self out of the water and lunge its self at the cheif, to which chilling music kicks in, which tells the audience that these 3 people on the boat are going to die becuase the music is very deep and bassy, which in thriller films normally means that the characters you see in the boat are going to die. Also at the start the chief is shoveling blood and guts (chum) into the water to attract the shark, at that moment he looks away and in every thriller situation that is when the audience gets the shock of a life time and so does the chief. Chief brody then backs away as the digectic sounds continues in the background, which still adds to the suspence and the scene. You can see in the chief's eyes as he backs away the shear terror and in his eyes you can see that he has never seen a monster quite like this shark. It is also natural in a thriller that a inexperienced person always sees the monster first and the more experianced people don't believe that he his teling the truth about the shear size of this creature from the line "you're gonna need a bigger boat".
