Night of the Demon

Marcus Woelfel

Philosophy of Film

April 26, 2014

Dr. Langguth

Night of the Demon

            If you are a fan of scary movies then the Night of the Demon is a good one for you.  I am a fan of scary movies and this was a good one.  When watching scary movies it makes you think about all the possibilities that could happen and makes you think it can be real life.  Scary movies make you have suspense and keep you on your toes.  The demon isn’t shown too much in the film but it’s still in the back of your head that it’s there and you’re just waiting for it.

            Night of the Demon is a horror film that was created in 1957.  Jacques Tourneur is the director of this film.  The director uses a lot of indexing, scaling, and bracketing and does a good job with all of them.  When the director uses all of these it helps the audience concentrate on what he wants them to concentrate on.  This also helps the audience pay attention to detail in the movie and helps the audience.  Usually when the director uses these techniques is to show something that is important and to make it easy to take notes on the film.

            In the class book they define indexing as angling and moving the camera in on an object for a specific purpose.  When the director uses index it helps the audience pay attention to an object and it helps the audience know that it is a key component to the film.  A key part of the movie when he used indexing was when they zoomed in on Dr. Karswell business card and you could see the writing on the card then all the writing was gone.  That was the key part in the movie when they used indexing.

            In the book bracketing is defined as screening out everything in the picture and then just focusing on one key object.  In the film there are a lot of examples of bracketing but the big key one I remember is when Holden broke into Karswells house and the audience could see it but Holden couldn’t.  This is a good key point on showing bracketing just so the audience can see it and focused on one object.  There is always bracketing in all films but that was one key one in this film.

            In the book scaling is defined as when they make the object bigger and zoom in on it.  In the film an example is when Karswell has the piece of paper in his hand and the camera zooms in on the writing so it helps the audience key in on one specific object.  Even if the writing is in a different language it still keys to the audience that what’s it says is a big point in the film.  It helps the audience to show what they will focus on in the movie.  All three of these techniques can be used together and can overlap to help go off one another.