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Film Analysis : ' The Film '

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Spatial Horror
A movie is a series of images shown very rapidly one after another. Each frame is just a flat two-dimensional image, yet with certain formal elements directors can create a sense of a three-dimensional space. Some techniques utilized by filmmakers are the same as those painters’ use; things such as lighting, color, contrast, and shadows. Yet when the painting starts to move a whole new world of spatial elements open up, giving a filmmaker many ways to bring a two-dimensional image to life. The space created by such elements can be used to make the audience feel a certain way about a scene or movie as a whole. In the Swedish horror film Let the Right One In there are three scenes in which the vampire Eli murders people. The director Tomas Alfredson uses space differently in each of these scenes, evoking different emotions in the audience each time and escalating the horror sequentially as the film progresses. In the first, the audience is shown everything; Alfredson uses a single take and a motionless camera in a wide angle to show the entire attack. Secondly, the audience is taken around a small dimly lit house and is subjected to a jump scare when Eli attacks her victim (I will be referring to Eli as “her” despite the fact that her gender is left ambiguous). In the final murder scene, almost the entirety of the horror is done in an off-screen space. In Let the Right One In the use of varying camera angles, sounds, lighting, and editing establish space in each

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