Idea for an opening title sequence 2: (One Down Three to Go)

Genre: Horror

Description of the opening title sequence: The title sequence starts with an opening shot of a bruised, bleeding girl tied up to a chair in a big open room at the end of a hall. She gets the gag out of her mouth so that she can shout for help, and after about 10 seconds of her shouting for help desperately, the shot moves to another room, adjacent to the hall, but out of sight from the girl. In this room, there is a man, and he goes over to a vinyl record player attached to a gramophone speaker. A 50s, spooky folk song starts playing, and the camera moves back to the girl to see her reaction to the music, and she shouts even louder and more desperately. The man who started the music then moves from the room he was in, into the hallway. The camera follows him from behind, and the only part of his body that it captures is his upper legs and lower body, so that the audience can see that he is carrying a long machete. The camera follows the man, who is walking towards the woman tied up, and switches shots between, the man walking, and the machete dragging across the floor (in both shots however, the girl is in the background getting more desperate, and screaming more and more as the man gets closer.) When the man gets close enough the woman gets quieter as she anticipates her fate, and the camera moves to watch the machete wing in the air, and the screen goes black before the machete is seen hitting the girl, however even whilst the screen is black, the sound off the machete hitting her and her scream are still heard. During this entire opening sequence, the audience do not see the face of the man with the machete.

 

Brief narrative of the rest of the film: The rest of the film would be three others who are already in that house but locked in different rooms. They all manage to escape their rooms but can’t seem to find their way out of the house and end up finding each other and having to learn to trust one another to get out of the house without the man knowing or seeing. The man finds that they have all escaped the rooms they were locked in, and hunts for them around the house killing two of them, and as the last one is just about to be free, kills him too.

 

Inspiration or similar films: I got inspiration for the narrative for this opening scene by thinking of the scariest situation I could imagine myself in, but other horror films that are similar to this that I have watched are Jigsaw, Terrifier and Hush. However, the most similar film that gave me a little inspiration for this opening title sequence was the thriller film The Purge, as it shows people locked in a house with people trying to kill them.

 

 

Where would it be shot: I always envisioned that this opening title sequence would be shot in one of the boarding houses at school, preferably the oldest building, since I want it to be fairly dark, and I want an old house to accompany the old use of technology used for the music to play, and the older 50s music.

 

How big would the cast be: The cast for this opening scene would be 2, the girl who is tied up, and the man who is killing her.

 

Sound: This opening scene would contain purely diegetic sound. It would have dialogue from the girl, and music played by the man on a vinyl record player. The song that I had in mind for this opening scene is Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny, as it combines the poor sound quality of a song written in the 1950s with dissonant slow guitar making it sound quite creepy. Also since the song was actually written in 1959, the poor sound quality of it isn’t artificial.

 

How would I show the titles on screen? The titles in this scene I always thought would be in a very jagged and sharp font, to make it look like someone had used a machete to write them. I also thought that for the actor who plays the girl, when her name came on screen, her name would be written in white to emphasise the purity and innocence of her character and how she is the victim, whereas when the actors name who plays the bad guy, I would want his name written in a darker colour, or perhaps red to link back to the blood of the people he has killed.

 

Inspiration for the use of the titles: I got my inspiration for the font of the titles from an American Horror Story series that I watched in class, as the font was also very jagged and knife like.