First Reel

Shivers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Luke Aspell
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Plural Identity ◽  
Private Medicine ◽  
State Financing ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe ◽  
English Canadian

This chapter discusses the opening scenes of David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975). The exteriors and interiors of Starliner Tower, where the film is located, are played by Tourelle-Sur-Rive on Nuns' Island, a late work of the Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The structure of the building provides a physical framework for Cronenberg's choices in the film. The mise-en-scène and production design works with the shapes of the rooms made available to the production by their residents, and their existing décor, which the production had little budget to re-dress. This unity of location makes Shivers the last of three major Cronenberg films to begin, or double, as explorations of a built environment. The chapter then considers the film's plural identity as a Quebecois production made with English-Canadian state financing. It also introduces the characters of the story. In Shivers, as in most of Cronenberg's horror films, the source of the danger is private medicine, ‘private’ in both the ‘commercial’ and ‘personal’ senses.

scholarly journals Family Values in the Movie “A Quiet Place”: A Semiotic Approach

HUMANIS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 339
Author(s):  
Ni Putu Ayuniantari ◽  
Eunike Iona Saptanti ◽  
Eunike Serfina Fajarini
Keyword(s):  
Family Values ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
Know How ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
The Family ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Desk Research ◽  
Deep Impression

There are only few commercially successful horror movies over fifty years since 1970s that win many awards. One of many horror films released in 2018 that left deep impression for audiences is “A Quiet Place”. McClintock (2018) claimed that the movie has earned more than $300M globally, making strides toward becoming one of the biggest-grossing original scary movies ever. “A Quiet Place” is a silence movie directed by John Krasinski. Because of its silence and quietness, the audiences were forced to focus on the nonverbal signs in the movie. The theme of this movie was family values. One of many important films is mise –en-scene as this communicates indirectly to the audiences. The aim of this study was to know how the theme “Family Values” was visualized in the movie. Using qualitative approach and Semiotics analysis method, this study focused on how the signs and mise-en-scene in the film were interpreted based on the researchers’ interpretation using Metz’ Grand Syntagmatique (1974). This study was a desk research and the data were obtained from selected scenes of the movie. The results showed that there were five syntagma category used in the film; i.e. autonomous shot, episodic sequence, scene, alternate syntagma, and descriptive syntagma. The signs that were presented in the film were arranged by using those five syntagma to show the audience about the family value in the movie.  

Kubrick and Horror

The Shining ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Laura Mee
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Popular Work ◽  
The Grotesque

This chapter discusses Stanley Kubrick's relationship with the horror genre. The Shining (1980) is a clear example of Kubrick's status as ‘an artist of complex and popular work’—rather than being exclusively one or the other. Many approaches to understanding the film see it as a ‘serious’ work by a master filmmaker operating without commercial imperative, or elevated above a disreputable genre. This overlooks a number of important contextual considerations, not least the fact that Kubrick had been clear in asserting that he wanted to make a supernatural film and liked a number of horror films. Moreover, Kubrick, whose films ‘repeatedly mix the grotesque and the banal, the conventions of Gothic confessional morbidity and the self-conscious involutions of modernist parody’, was ideally placed to make a horror film. If The Shining is in many ways typical of the Kubrickian style, then it surely follows that the Kubrickian style was ideal for horror. His auteurist style—the use of black comedy, his artistic approach to mise-en-scène and cinematography, an interest in the uncanny—all lend themselves to the genre.

The Look of Usher: Picturing a Story of Death

2018 ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
Evert Jan van Leeuwen
Keyword(s):  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Emotional Feeling ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Natural Forms ◽  
The Look ◽  
Subjective States ◽  
Edvard Munch

This chapter analyses the artistic aspects of House of Usher (1960) to reveal how Roger Corman's crew managed to successfully fuse the dark Romantic tradition to which Edgar Allan Poe belongs with a more expressionist horror film aesthetic that made the film more directly appealing to 1960s horror-movie audiences. Used in the context of low-budget horror films, expressionism should be understood as a term denoting ‘art which depends on free and obvious distortions of natural forms to convey emotional feeling’. House of Usher is not expressionistic because its frames resemble the art of Edvard Munch, but because its mise-en-scène is not naturalistic but functions as a visual vehicle for the expression of subjective states of mind and emotions. In developing House of Usher, Corman told his crew: ‘I never want to see “reality” in any of these scenes’. The décor of the Usher mansion is not designed for verisimilitude, but to give the audience a glimpse at the fear that lurks in the darkest corners of Roderick's psyche.

Analysis

Black Sunday ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 63-84
Author(s):  
Martyn Conterio
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Mise En Scene

This chapter discusses Mario Bava's debut feature film, Black Sunday, which is considered to be among the most stylish horror films ever made and won praise for its delicious look and cinematography. It illustrates Black Sunday's ravishing mise-en-scène that marries fairy tale to surrealist irrationality, as well as ingenious special-effects design. It also mentions Tom Milne, who summed up Bava's film as a chillingly beautiful and brutal horror film that is superb and a chiaroscuro symphony of dank crypts and swirling fog-grounds. The chapter recounts how Bava filmed on monochrome stock and delivered what is touted as the last great black-and-white Gothic horror picture. It talks about the clever effects and use of miniatures, matte paintings, grotesque character transformations and the painted backdrops in black-and-white that is fused together to create a magical air.

Scrap Metal, Stains, Clogged Drains: Argento’s Refuse and its Refusals

2016 ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Karl Schoonover
Keyword(s):  
Scrap Metal ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Critical Account ◽  
To Come ◽  
Dario Argento

It is a cliché to title a critical account of horror with a list of things.1 Things such as those that precede the colon in my title announce the uncanny role given to them and the expressive hyperbole granted objects by horror diegesis. What I find interesting about this titular evocation of horror’s things is that the books and essays they announce rarely address these objects themselves. Instead, horror’s things are pretexts for a discussion of the unique affective registers of horror or its exuberant corporeality. This essay will attempt to account for things in the giallo and horror films made by Dario Argento during the first decade of his directorial career, widely regarded as his canonical period. In what follows, I largely bracket the infamously wasted bodies of those iconic films in order to allow the matter that populates Argento’s mise-en-scène to come to the fore.

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