blog 1

Tim Baldrick

Dr. Langguth

Philosophy of Film

Night of the Demon

            When an individual thinks about what the typical scary movie consist of there are always the common themes. The first thing that comes to every person’s mind when they think of scary movies is when the part is going to happen that makes you jump. Typically there is always one aspect of the movie that is supposed to make it scary. In this movie there is a demon that is supposed to be the additional character that makes the entire plot scary.

            This film was put together in 1957 as a horror film. The director of this particular film used many different techniques to help him throughout the movie with the plot and character relationships with the viewers. The three main techniques that were used in this particular film are indexing, scaling and bracketing. With all three techniques put together the film has a better appreciation for the horror category. It helps the entire movie as a whole go smooth together and makes the viewer enjoy the overall movie better.

            When we talked about the first technique in class we said you can define indexing as angling and moving the camera in on an object for a specific purpose. The main purpose of indexing is to get the viewers to focus in on an aspect that the producer finds important in that particular scene. There are many different things going on throughout the movie on all different parts of the screen at all times. When the producer wants to make a point of his across to the audience he will focus in on it to make sure that the viewers see what he wants them to see at that particular moment in the film.

            The second technique used in this film can be defined as screening out everything in the picture and then just focusing on one key object. This technique is called bracketing. This technique is very closely related to indexing but at the same time there is a difference. When bracketing the producer will go through a different process to get the audience to focus on what he thinks is important at that time in the film. Bracketing means that he shows everything that is going on at that particular moment but then will zoom into that one object that he finds key and thinks the audience needs to be focusing in on during that moment.

            When we discussed the last technique that is used in this film we stated that scaling is defined as when they make the object bigger and zoom in on it. All three of these techniques are different ways that the producer gets the viewers to focus in on what he wants them too. In this technique the object that is supposed to be focused on is enlarged. This can help when the object that is supposed to be focused on is smaller and needs to be enlarged for the audience to truly understand what it is.