Paranormal Activity and Insidious are two of the most popular horror films of the past few years, although both use different ways to scare the audience, this can range from the two basic ways to scare an audience;
- Visual and sound jumps, that give the audience a shock this is usually associated with dramatic irony as the character on-screen does something that the audience know will come, although this can be used as an advantage to the film crew, as the suspense of the scene may build but the shock come at a point different to what the audience were expecting.
- Using the imagination of the audience to create something that will scare them, examples of this are films like Alien, were the alien in the film was never fully shown allowing the audience to come up with its own perception of what the creature is capable of. This can also be used to make the audience feel that they should fear something; the Hannibal series utilises this by not providing the audience with the ability to predict what Hannibal is capable of, and him knowing things outside of his cell in a mental hospital.
Paranormal Activity uses the audience’s imagination in how to scare them, in the beginning of the final scene, the main character of this mockumentary, wakes up and stands over her boyfriend who is peacefully sleeping in bed. A timer in the bottom right hand corner of the view shows what time of day it is. After the woman stands up and begins staring at her boyfriend the timer speeds up, showing that someone has edited the footage to skip the boring parts of it.
Around three hours goes past, the makes the audience immediately certain that something is wrong. It isn’t normal for someone to stand up in there sleep and stand-staring at their partner showing no emotion. This also has an effect of drawing in the attention of the audience, as getting an actress to stand-up and stay in the same position for 3 hours would have been boring and if the actress moved at all, the shot would need to be re-shot; this brings the attention of the audience in, as it makes it more believable that it actually happened which is the main effect the film-makers want to have on the audience.
After the three hours of sped-up footage is done, the timer returns to normal speed and the woman moves away out of the room and down the stairs, the audience have no idea what is controlling her, why she is doing it and where she has gone after going past the stairs. The camera is in a fixed position, as moving it would break the effect of a documentary style film. After a while of the woman going downstairs, a loud scream is heard this is there to shock the audience, but also to provide a moving point of the story. This makes the audience feel curious, but also scared as they have no idea what is coming next, and what is causing the woman to do what she is doing.
After the scream the man immediately wakes up, shouts his partner’s name and runs downstairs to where the screaming is being coming from, this increases the panic in the scene and increases the curiosity and horror in the audience. Something is obviously wrong as the man runs downstairs, the woman still screaming as the man shouts; “what the f*ck”, he immediately stops shouting and the screaming stops, this increases still the horror and the curiosity in the audience as still there is no answer as to what has happened because of the camera’s stationary position.
The footsteps sound like they’re gradually getting closer and closer, the audience do not have any idea as too what is coming up the stairs, until eventually the woman appears holding a knife and her stomach covered in blood. This implies that she has killed the man, but the viewer cannot be certain. There still isn’t an answer as to what and why she has done this but throughout the film she has been told and shown by the recorded footage that she is being possessed by a demon, but the audience never get a sight of it.
The woman walks slowly towards the bed and sits rocking back and forth at a constant and steady rate. This is still something that no ordinary human would do, and still shows that there is something controlling her or that she has mentally broken. Either way it creates an abnormal perception of her from the audience. The timer on the camera speeds up to later on in the day, after 10 hours nothing has happened other than the woman sitting and rocking back and forth constantly. The phone rings, no-one picks up, which implies that the man (along with the woman being covered in blood and holding a knife) is dead, the woman doesn’t react at all to the phone ringing and continues rocking at the slow and steady rate.
Throughout Paranormal Activity the demon is never shown, the only thing that is shown is its footprints which look more like a dinosaur’s than anything else. The fear is made by not showing this creature, making the audience unable to predict what it is capable of by not knowing its size.
Insidious uses visual scares and sound jolts to get the adrenaline going in the audience, it also utilises suspense that may or may not lead up to a scare in the audience. In the beginning of the final scene, which shows a child’s father going into what is effectively limbo and trying to find his son who has been taken by a demon who is possessing him. Immediately from going into The Further, the mise-en-scené of the film completely changes.
Most of the film uses filters and high contrast to give a cold feeling, which may have a subconscious effect on the audience as cold will increase body functions to produce heat and therefore make the mind feel more awake as it is having to control everything with higher focus, this is all subconscious but it may still have an effect to increase the attention of the audience.
To get into The Further the father must have the help of a ghost specialist, who has told the parents of this child that they need to go and reach their child, who is trapped in The Further, to get him back to consciousness. The father is the one who decides that he should go to find their son. He is sitting in a chair with his eyes shut with the ghost specialist talking to him in a quiet voice about going to The Further. Gradually her voice becomes more and more echoed; this implies to the audience that he is going away from the woman, for me it reminds me of going further and further into a tunnel or a cave, and noise from further away becomes more echoed. The shot immediately turns greyer and a lot blander, the colour goes from a pale orange from the lamps in the room, to a very pale blue and green. This shows something has changed, at this point the audience are not fully aware of what has happened as there has been no explanation of what The Further looks like. This gives a sense of curiosity in the viewer.
After the colour change, the man stands up and says, “It’s useless, I have no idea what I’m doing”, and he turns around to see himself sitting in the chair with the woman talking to his unconscious body. He looks shocked as the woman turns her head slightly and says “take a stride, into the further”. The shot of her is set-up to look strange and provide the audience an inkling that there is something wrong with the setting, the woman’s central line is on the right third, but she is facing outwards of the frame, which is generally the opposite way to be facing in a shot. The woman also isn’t turned fully around to the man and is talking to him, but also his body in reality. This gives the audience some indication that he is in The Further.
After the man has discovered that he is in The Further, he begins to wander around in search of his son. The man grabs a torch on his way out of the house. He always holds the lamp close to his face, which is most likely because there wouldn’t be any other way for the audience to see his expression, but this also shows that the light should be trusted by the audience, as the entire would is in bleary darkness.
Throughout most of this scene, there is an overall indication that the man is somewhere odd. The entire area is a replication of our world, but it is very foggy. The man meets a boy later on that runs away from him on first sight, but then meets him further down the road and points to where he can find his son, Dalton. Even the way the boy raises his arm to point to where Dalton is is very slow, almost robotic, improving the audiences confusion and curiosity.
The man goes in the direction that the boy has pointed him to go towards, he comes across the house that the family moved out of to try and get away from the demon that is living off of their son. As he goes in there are no lights of, everything is in a normal place, which implies that everything is fine, but with no warning a woman in a bride’s dress appears from behind the front door that has just been opened by the man. The shot has been edited so that the woman appears with speed from behind the door, also there is a loud non-diegetic orchestral jump, that helps the film to shock the viewer.
The man doesn’t seem to be too stirred by the woman appearing from no-where, and shouts at her to find where his son is. He follows her up the stairs, which implies that something is leading him to where his son might be, but in turn whatever is leading him isn’t going to help him, as all that is he comes to is a woman in darkness crying in the corner of an empty room at the top of the stairs. This still increases the confusion and curiosity in the audience.
Before the man gets a chance to light the woman’s face with his lamp a child runs across the landing and makes the man go towards the noise, as he is still in search for his son. This shows that the audience shouldn’t get too distracted by what is going on in this house. The man goes towards the sound, and eventually downstairs to try and find his son. Throughout the rest of the scene more and more abstract things occur, trying to scare the man into getting out of The Further, but he has been told by the specialist that he cannot exit without his son. Whatever is controlling what goes in the limbo-like world is trying to get the man away from it, and give-up the search for Dalton, this makes the audience also want to get him out of it, as it will end all the shocks and jumps that will come about.
For me, the more effective way to make an audience be scared during the film is with the methods used in Insidious, as this really does get adrenaline pumping through the body very quickly, whereas the methods used in Paranormal Activity, scare an audience after viewing the film, as they are still left with the question as to what was haunting the woman and what it may look like.
The mise-en-scené of both films is quite different as Paranormal Activity is in the documentary style and is restricted by what it can use to keep the documentary feel alive. There is very little that can be done to provoke any prediction as to what will happen and very little to shock the audience. In Insidious the filmmakers were allowed to do whatever they wanted to shock and stun their audiences as they went to a traditional feature film style, and because the script showed the man going into a place that had no boundaries of the laws of physics, there were infinite ways to scare the audience.
