Opening Scenes - Analysis: 1 - The Purge
The first opening sequence I'm going to look at and analyse is "The Purge", a horror film.
The opening sequence contains the following conventions:
Includes titles
Sets up an enigma
Establishes the genre
Introduces the setting
Includes production company logo
Sound (contrapuntal music)
Establishes style
The key thing that makes this opening different from my expectations is that it does not set up any characters or locations. In fact, in terms of the plot of the film itself (a security system salesmen finds himself and his family trapped inside their home when a band of attackers arrive hoping to commit violence) nothing is established.
What the scene does instead is opt for exposition and establishing tone and theme. The security footage tells us what "The Purge" is (a night when all crime is made legal as a method of societal catharsis), and the changing dates on the security footage tell us not only that the film takes place in the year 2021, but also that in the world of the film, this custom has been going on for at least five years.
The use of soothing classical music over the violent imagery creates a cognitive dissonance which is unsettling (as talked about in Freud's infamous essay "The Uncanny"), but it also plays off the fact that the supposed justification for the violence is that it creates peace and calm during the rest of the year, an idea which the very next scene will make explicit.
The opening sequence contains the following conventions:
The key thing that makes this opening different from my expectations is that it does not set up any characters or locations. In fact, in terms of the plot of the film itself (a security system salesmen finds himself and his family trapped inside their home when a band of attackers arrive hoping to commit violence) nothing is established.
What the scene does instead is opt for exposition and establishing tone and theme. The security footage tells us what "The Purge" is (a night when all crime is made legal as a method of societal catharsis), and the changing dates on the security footage tell us not only that the film takes place in the year 2021, but also that in the world of the film, this custom has been going on for at least five years.
The use of soothing classical music over the violent imagery creates a cognitive dissonance which is unsettling (as talked about in Freud's infamous essay "The Uncanny"), but it also plays off the fact that the supposed justification for the violence is that it creates peace and calm during the rest of the year, an idea which the very next scene will make explicit.
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