Analysis of past thriller openings

To get ideas of what works well ina thriller opening and what doesn't work as well we have analysed some of the past thriller openings from TCC.

The first thriller opening i analysed was called "It Dies Today" The films consisted of a main image of a hooded figure sitting on a bench with other clips spread across the film for example someone lighting candles. I thought the low-key lighting and setting which was a church and inside a fairly normal looking house was good, although maybe not used to full effect.
The unkown figure on the chair did create an enigma which is conventional of thriller films however after a while it gets kindof boring, also the opening scenes didn't give much indication of a main character or where the narrative is going.

The second opening i analysed was "Walking backwarks" It began with someone in a dark room processing photos, there was some good use of camerawork for instance there was a shot where the camera panned across the photos then zoomed out. Another effect that worked well was the shot which zoomed into a photograph and then actually went into the scene that was in the photo, it clearly showed that the woman in the dark room was some kind of investigator. The only thing that was hard to understand was the relationship between the plot and the map of the london underground which was flashed up on the screen near the end.

The film "Craze" clearly established that it was part of the crime thriller sub-genre, one of the reaosns for this was the first shot was an establishing shot of a police station, and then there where some shots inside an interrigation room. One let down was the plain modern mise-en-scen, this is what a modern station would look like however it seems rather boring. Another thing that did work well was photographs of murder victims-when the camera zoomed in on them a black and white image with the camera tracking over the body was shown, inserts like this help to establish the reality of the events that have occoured. This helps to establish the verysimilitude, in our film we probably will not use any inserts however we are going to show a photograph of the characters in "the past" which will help establish their relationship.

"Third floor" worked well as a thriller opening, it was in black and white and showed a man in a suite about to walk into a lift, the next shot was a low angle shot of him walking out of the lift with a body on the floor, I thought this was a good use of ellipsis of time because it was made clear what the man in the suite represents. One thing that was slightly confusing was that after this the character in the suite was then shown getting into anhother lift with different people, it wasn't very obvious whether this happned before or after the attack on the other man.