Film Opening #no.3

This is is the opening scene to the film 'Prom Night', the genre of this film is a slasher. It is a slasher film because these type of films usually consist of a weapon, and in this film the weapon is a knife. The film opens with a young girl arriving home from the cinemas. When she steps out of the car it is dark outside which is how slasher films usually begin, then the background music starts, it starts off as quite slow but its also scary. This builds up tension as the audience do not know what is going to happen but as the music gets deeper the audience will start to guess that something bad is about to happen. When the audience start to see the dead bodies in the house this builds up even more tension because now they know for
certain that something horrible is going to happen, as the girls mom is running away from the man, the music starts to get faster and which builds up to a climax then when she gets killed the music goes slow again.

During the opening scene, you will see lots of different camera angles, but the most common one you will see is a medium shot. In a medium shot you cannot see the whole background so this will make the audience question what is happening or what is going to happen. The only thing that will give you clues as to how the person is feeling or thinking is their facial expressions.

For example in this particular camera shot you can only see the girls upper body and background, this provides a lot of questions for the audience because they know nothing about the girl, they don't know who she is or anything about her background. By looking at her facial expressions I can tell she is quite unsure or puzzled because herself and the audience know that something isn't quite right. Her body language tells me that she could be scared because she seems quite timid and her body is all closed up.

I believe the target audience for this particular film is teenagers and any age above.This is because of the language being used which isn't suitable for children, also there are scenes of violence and other scenes that 

a sexual nature which again would not be suitable for young children.

The codes and conventions of this film are dark lighting to show that it is a scary film, bright lighting to show that there are some happy but good moments in the film e.g the prom, the background music to build up the climax. The symbolic codes of this film are the weapon which shows there's going to be a lot of blood/gore and violence, the title of the film and the caption underneath.

The caption underneath the poster says "a night to die for" this is quite an ironic thing to put on the poster because when the prom starts, the characters begin to die one by one until there is only one person out of the whole group still alive, the young girl.