Analysis of the opening sequence of John Carpenters (1978) and Wes Cravens Scream (1996), identifying and accounting for their similarities and differences

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Textual analysis Essay

Analysis of the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s (1978) and Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), identifying and accounting for their similarities and differences

I am carrying out an analysis of the opening scene of John Carpenter’s Halloween and Wes Craven’s Scream.  The analysis will include characters, dialogue, setting, storyline and film language between the two films.

The two films both use the horror film convention of a young female as their victims.  The women in Halloween isn’t scared at all and is more concerned about making sure that her brother doesn’t see her naked.  A convention in horror films is that women usually get killed before or after they have had sex and Halloween follows this same sort of rule.  Where as in Scream she is in a normal situation which makes the audience more scared because it shows that it can happen to anyone.  Also in scream the killer is tormenting her over the phone by ringing her up lots of times, but at first it is okay because he is flirting with her but after a while he starts to give her threats such as killing her boyfriend and it starts to get sinister.  With the first two phone calls Casey’s response shows us that she is quite clever because she deals with the phone calls sensibly by saying “wrong number” to the first phone call and not telling him her name.  Also in scream, Wes Craven doesn’t show the killer until late in the first scene which makes the audience more interested and anxious to know what the killer looks like.  Like Scream Halloween also doesn’t show the killer until late in the scene and disguise the killer as an adult by the camera being of an adults point of view shot and we only find out at the end of the scene that the killer is an child.

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In Halloween the killer is a small boy in a clown’s outfit (the costume of a clowns outfit might be because some people are scared of clowns).  Whereas in Scream the killer is very calculating and is wearing an outfit that is out of a painting called ‘The Scream’ by Edward Munch which is all about a man is despair ( the reason why he is in this outfit is because it hides the killers face and makes people more scared).  In Scream the killer uses ideas from previous horror films and follows their conventions to get to his ...

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