Sunday 10 November 2013

The Exorcism of Emily Rose Deconstruction

We are exploring many different ideas that we could use in our coursework when we come to filming to do with supernatural horror, one of them is the idea of possession being what we revolve our opening around. I watched 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' and chose the following scene which she is possessed in to deconstruct and see what I noticed about mise en scene, lighting, sound, editing and camera angles to notice any effective techniques which we could carry out in our own work.




                                  
   
The scene begins immediately with a girl screaming, it is very high pitched and is unnatural, it sounds as though she is in pain. In the background of this diegetic sound is a low built up non-diegetic sound which is contrapuntal to the noise the actor is making and also reflects well with everything else happening as it is quite a creepy undertone. She looks as though she is in a grubby not well decorated room as you can see the tears on the walls in the background and they are an unattractive orange colour. Her hair is messed up and she has a mad look on her face which suggests to the audience straight away that she is possibly possessed by some sort of demon.




She then turns around and pounces at the wall, starts scratching and hitting it with a large force whilst unnaturally jumping up and down, this shows us as well that this is definitely not the actions of a normal human being. The diegetic sound of her screaming carries on but the longer it goes on for the more it begins to sound like a noise of a possessed person rather than a normal scream, there is also a wind type non-diegetic noise in the background working with the scream to make it sound even creepier for the audience. We see her outfit for the first time, she is wearing a plain long sleeved baggy top and trousers and it looks like pyjamas.





 She continues jumping up and down in a strange manner, when two men and a woman walk into the room, then she begins viciously ripping out clumps of her hair. Making a different sort of scream as she does as though she is in pain but still continues to do it. Non-diegetic music is played and sounds like string instruments which works well with what is happening in the scene. She screams again towards the people standing in the corner of the room which makes them look in fear towards her and the other woman steps back.



The two men then attempt to hold her down to stop her from hurting herself anymore. She continues to scream loudly and more high pitched again like at the start, she struggles against them bending backwards and in different directions to try and get out of their hold. They eventually get her on the floor after a big struggle of trying to restrain her, the fact that two grown men found it extremely difficult to hold one woman down also highlights a factor that as she is possessed it has given her greater strength and power. The non-diegetic music becomes more fast paced as she is kicking and screaming as if it is building up to something.




Once they have got her on the floor they hold her down by her head so they can look into her eyes and see whether or not they can get this demon out of her. We are shown a close up of her face with a crazy, shocked expression, she doesn't seem to be showing any human emotion. She then begins to growl at the men as if she is some sort of animal warning them away, and then says something in a very deep voice which is clearly not hers, this shows a characteristic of possession is not showing any regular human qualities. 





Towards the end of the scene after they have restrained her, her eyes roll back into her head, her arms go into a strange position and she locks like that and does not move or make any other noises. The men then stand her up but she still remains in the same position. All non-diegetic music has stopped after she stopped moving and the only noises in the room are the people talking to each other which suggests that the supernatural activity has come to a stop for now.




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