With reference to The Birds and Final Destination 3 analyse and discuss how the directors create fear in these two films.

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With reference to “The Birds” and “Final Destination 3” analyse and discuss how the directors create fear in these two films.

Horror is a genre that has had even the strongest of men curled up in a ball with fright; it’s been scaring people for decades. There are two types of horror films, the first plays on the idea of tangible fear, which means that people get scared by things that could actually happen, for example an aeroplane crashing or drowning. In my case the example of a tangible fear based film is “Final Destination 3” co-directed by Penny Gibbs and Art Schaefer. However, on the other hand, some horror films are based on irrational fears, like when people are scared of zombies & vampires which don’t actually exist or situations in real life like being scared of spiders, there isn’t anything really to be scared of we just find them creepy. In my case the example of an irrational fear based film is “The Birds” directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

The storyline for “Final Destination 3” starts at a theme park somewhere in the USA. The films main characters are having their last night before graduation, and everything is going fine until Kerry tells Wendy that she’s going to break up wit her boyfriend (Kevin) after graduation. Wendy then has a vision of the rollercoaster crashing and pleads to get off, then in turn saving half the people on the rollercoaster. After the rollercoaster crash, Wendy and Kevin watch all their classmates that survived the coaster crash and piece together that there is a certain order that they are going to die by ‘accidents’, and the remaining few realise that they will have to fight fate to stay alive.

The storyline of “The Birds” is about a beautiful blonde socialite (Melanie) who pursues the hunky lawyer (Mitch) to a small isolated Californian town called Bodega Bay. Half way across the lake, after delivering a pair of lovebirds to the Brenner’s house, she is attacked by a gull that takes a little chuck from her head. Then chaos unfolds as we see the birds are not the docile animals we thought they were as we see numerous deaths and attacks on the town folks of Bodega Bay.

Although, both films are very different from each other, they both share some common features of horror.

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Firstly, in the opening credits of the “The Birds” we see lots of birds filling the screen flying from either direction, giving the sense of attacking or hysteria. The colours in the opening credits are also very important because it’s a stark image having a white background with the black of the birds flying across; the text is a light blue colour which looks like it’s getting ‘pecked’ away by the birds. The noises in the background however are the most effective having the screeching and squawking of the birds and the flapping of their wings, these sounds put together ...

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