a study of the first 1 minute of '28 Days Later' in comparison to 'An American Werewolf'

An American Werewolf is a film about a tourist that was bitten and becomes a werewolf. 28 Days Later is about chimps that got very angry when someone told someone else that a chimpanzee had bitten a woman. These two films have completely different plots, I will now evaluate the opening sequences of these horror films because it will be useful to explore the mise en scene used as my group have decided to record a horror film.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMGA3e0I-2c
An American Werewolf the horror conventions are immediately shown through a dark background against blue bold text in upper case writing which soon turns to night sky with blue outlining of clouds and the moon and lightening bolts striking through the sky, this is shown in a low angle shot also known as a worms eye view. This shot then fades into a long shot of the city of Paris in the night time, this sets the scene as the well known Eiffel Tower that instantly tells the audience that the scene is set in Paris. The sound of the wind whistling is added to scare the viewer along with low toned music. The camera moves backward to end up with a medium close up of a church which creates a spooky atmosphere and then moves on to a close up shot of a statue in the rain. The weather acts as a convention to show the genre of horror.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1VbxTx2uLQ
In comparison to this, 28 Days Later starts off with a very stressful scene of people fighting, the hand held camera gives off the impression that the veiwer is there in the crowd of people fighting and quick cuts add to the stressful atmosphere.The conventions used in the background are: police, fire, darkness. Long shots help to set the scene and close ups help the audience to feel a part of the scene, this is quite similar to An American Werewolf. The camera then fades out to show that the footage just viewed was actually being viewed by another character on a television set. A long shot then shows us that this character is a monkey being strapped down to a table and forced to view these horrible scenes, this immediately introduces the horror genre.