Anaysis of the first 3 minutes of the horror film "Wrong Turn".

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Micro Elements – Wrong Turn

        

Wrong Turn is a horror film directed by Rob Schmidt. The theme of horror will instantly attract the viewers into the film as they are always going to be sitting on the edge of their seat. The film is set deep in the woods… but no one’s lived to tell about it, where Chris Finn is on his way to an interview but turns around to avoid traffic and makes the biggest mistake of his life, where there he then crashes into a group of young friends and they are stranded along this long road. The friends then encounter a group of monsters and then face death. I am going to look at the Misc en scene and sound of the Micro Elements in the first 3 minutes of the film.

The film starts off with some non-diegetic sound, which gives off a spooky, edgy vibe. As this is going on there is a crane shot of a huge forest with a long road running down the middle of the deep woods, this shot then runs down the forest at speed, whilst the track playing is getting lighter to hear.  This then leads to a rocky wall with a long shot of two people both male and female escalating the wall, these actors both have their rock climbing equipment and are doing a good job of climbing the wall, this automatically gives off the image that they know what they are doing and are highly experienced in rock climbing. At this point the track has stopped playing and the diegetic sound comes into play as their cables are crashing into the rocks and the man is groaning as he climbs his way up the wall.

The Shot then changes to a medium shot from below as the male character has reached the top of the wall; this gives the male character power as we as viewers are looking up at him. The Male character is then rubbing his hands together to gives off a sense of ease and accomplishment; the diegetic sound now changes to the whistling of the trees as the wind are pushing then around. There is then a quick point of view shot from the male character at the top of the wall, where he is looking out to what’s below and round him, the shot displays the deep woods which is nothing but trees. The shot then changes to a medium close up of the male character and then point of view shot from his view to the women who is still climbing, but at the same time the women is talking to the man asking to help, this shows that the female character is weaker than the male character in that she is asking him to help her go up the wall, the shot then quickly changes, to a point of view from her view looking up at the man then seeing him walk off out of her view of him.

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Then more diegetic sound comes in of the women breathing heavily as she is having a difficult time escalating the wall, this may tell us that she isn’t as experienced and as good of a rock climber as us as an audience expected. There is then a close up of the women’s shoe on the rock and then a quick change of close up to her hand trying to grab onto a rock, this then leads to the women falling off the wall and being saved by the mountain climbing ropes attached to her. The women whilst falling off ...

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This is a fairly detailed analysis of the micro-elements of the 1st 3 minutes of a film in the horror genre. It is occasionally quite insightful, but on the whole it should focus more upon explaining why the director is making these choices, rather than simply describing them. It is also important to point out things like the age and conventional beauty of the couple who are climbing the rock face, and to notice that their clothes suggest they are reasonably well off, because this is in such stark contrast to the ugliness and poverty of the killers we will later meet. These aspects of the mise en scene are important, because they point to the subtextual MEANING of this seemingly meaningless film... Current grade: 3 stars maximum, but probably less because there are some errors in the use of terms like "micro-elements" and the term "diegetic sound" is used more often than it needs to be.