Scream Opening 2 Minutes Analysis

 

Scream's opening 2 minutes displays a lot of horror conventions. We are introduced to the main antagonist of the film and shown his dark humored personality through his conversation with the unnamed woman from the scene. This piece of dialogue starts light-hearted and slowly descends into dark tones and evil threats.We do not see the antagonist in the opening scene in order to build suspense and intrigue as to his identity or appearance.

The background music of the scene is slow and mysterious violin chords to start off with but as the dialogue of the scene becomes darker and more dramatic the pace of the music quickens and loud drums are brought in. This could be to represent the woman's heart rate increasing as she becomes more and more scared of her attacker. The attackers voice works with the background music of the scene to show how creepy he sounds and connotes this is no ordinary sane individual.

The woman featured in the scene is herself another genre indicator as the role of the helpless teenage girl being stalked by a killer is common in many horror films. The suspense created by the scene is also helped by the location, an empty house at night with an unknown entity lurking outside somewhere, the house itself providing the only protection from the evil outside.

After the opening dialogue of the scene between the woman and the antagonist over the phone, there is a long establishing shot of the house the scene is set in. The lighting of this shot is helpful towards setting a tone of the scene as the shot is mostly dark, with the only areas well lit the house (representing the safe, protagonist location) and a creepy slow-moving children's swing in the foreground of the shot (representing the antagonists presence outside the house). This highlights the importance of these 2 factors to the audience as they receive the most attention from the shot.

Props aren't really a major factor of the opening scene, the only one of any significance would maybe be the popcorn the woman is cooking on the stove as she talks to the antagonist. The expanding of the popcorn pack as the scene progresses could draw comparisons to the expanding tension of the scene, with the dialogue starting off with small talk about favourite films of the characters and culminating in the antagonist threatening the woman to "gut you like a fish".