- Diagetic sound
The diagetic sound is all around the whole movie. I pick up a scene which is starting at 32 second at the beginning of the movie. The female character is called by the teacher and suddenly stand up and walk down to the stage. The sound that teacher make and the sound that the girl make when she stand up and also the footstep when she walk down to the stage are three simple example for the diagetic sound. Because diagetic sound is made for pushing the story continue to go through the movie, I think those sound is helpful for movie to provide a horror atmosphere. However, it is not strong than the non-diagetic sound because diagetic sound is the sound that audience can still easy to imagine and understand. When people realize a sound that they might heard in their normal life, they will feel familiar with it. People will have less probability to afraid of a sound that they already known.
2. Non-diagetic sound
When I see the movie, I found that around the 24 minutes, when the girl look out of the window, she suddenly found an vampire show up in front of her. The movie choose a very terrified music to be the back ground to make audience to be shocked as the girl in the movie. Even though the sound is cooperated with the film’s plot, it is still a sound that would never appear in our life to make people’s emotion fluctuate. I pick up this scene is because I also shocked by the movie not only because of the vampire, but also because of the sound of background. The diagetic sound suddenly show up and lead my emotion to involve in the film through the exciting moment. I believe that non-diagetic sound is helpful for director to provide horror environment.
3. mise-en-scene
An example of mise-en-scene can be found around 13 minutes and 22 second in the film which is a scene of a clock tower. The director use angle of elevation to emphasis the tower’s gruesome—looks like it cover the whole sky. This scene seems like an hint to tell audience that there must be something happened in the tower, which can increase the effect of terrified the people might have during watching the movie. I believe this feature in the film is significant and essential because to build a horror atmosphere need some basis of sentiment before audience really see the climax of the film. It is unnecessary for a horror movie to be “horror” in every second, the audience also need time to think about what is going on in the movie. Those scene give them opportunity to think about what will happen next and arouse their curiosity.
I got some special feeling about the mise-en-scene in that section. For me, sometimes, I think the culture influence our feeling about the meaning of the horror. For example, when I saw the clock building, it did not seem to be horrible but the white pieces of cloth are horrible to me. I think this is because culture and in Chinese tradition the white cloth means someone dead and it has relate to many ghost story. When people died, the white cloth will cover their face to hide their face expression because most expression are not looking good when they died. It can generate a series of imagination which is horrible rather than show me a monster face. But the monster faces may have some special meaning in western culture. Another example is the dragon,the dragon means holy and right in Chinese culture, but they do mean evil in western culture. Thus, I think the expression of horror are different in different cultures.
I like the contrast that you pointed out in your analysis of the diagetic example that you gave. I agree that non-diagetic sound is a lot more effective in bringing out the horror of a film because of its ability to catch the viewer’s off guard. In the second scene that you mentioned, you talk about how the sound was well related to the film’s plot, however was still able to surprise the audience. I believe that this demonstrates what Carroll had to say in her essay. She claimed that, “the locus of our gratification is not the monster as such but the whole narrative structure in which the presentation of the monster is staged” (Carroll, 2002, p. 278) which in this case was the music that was playing as the vampire appeared in front of the character. The vampire might not have been as scary had it not been for the genre or type of music that the filmmakers chose specifically for the scene. Had they chosen a different song, or perhaps no song at all it would take away the horror from the scene. Therefore, non-diagetic sound is an almost necessary aesthetic of horror. Did you feel any sense of foreshadow before the vampire appeared? How do you think foreshadowing within the narrative affects the horror within particular scenes? Does it take away some of the element of surprise, or do you believe that it adds to it?
I think you definitely found examples of all of the characteristics in the episode and you points of non-diegetic and mise-en-scene were spot on with places that really made a difference. I loved the way that you used the time she turns and sees the vampire for the non-diegetic sound example. This was a place that I think the director was really making use of the technique. The music made the timeframe much more exciting and probably is the reason many people may have jumped while watching this. The one thing I would have liked to see, however, is with your diegetic sound. I would have liked to have a more specific example of when diegetic sound was used to really affect he movie in one instance.