Opening Scene Analysis

Scream's opening two minutes displays a lot of horror conventions. We are introduced to the main antagonist of the film and shown his dark humoured personality through his phone conversation with the unnamed woman from the scene. This piece of dialogue starts light-hearted and slowly descends into dark tones and evil threats. We do not see the antagonist in the opening scene in order to build suspense and intrigue as to his identity or appearance.

The woman featured in the scene is herself another genre indicator as the role of the helpless teenage girl being stalked by a killer is common in many horror films, who fits perfectly into the stereotypical conventions of weak female victims; for example she is a ditsy blonde, who has no idea what danger shes getting into, she also fails at being able to protect or defend herself. The suspense created by the scene is also helped by the location, a big, empty house with a large garden. The situation is made worse the second the unknown voice says “I want to know who I’m looking at” immediately the audience is notified that there is an unknown person, lurking outside somewhere, the house itself providing the only protection from the evil outside.

The background music of the scene is slow and mysterious violin chords to start off with but as the dialogue of the scene becomes darker and more dramatic the pace of the music quickens and loud drums are brought in. This could be to represent the woman's heart rate increasing as she becomes more and more scared of her attacker. The attacker’s voice works with the background music of the scene to show how creepy he sounds and connotes that he no ordinary sane individual, which suggests to the audiance that he is the main antagonist.

Props aren't really a major factor of the opening scene; the only one of any significance would maybe be the popcorn the woman is cooking on the stove as she talks to the antagonist, another prop used could be the fact that she begins to play with a kitchen knife, while discussing her favourite horror movie, Halloween. It’s ironic because the plot of Halloween – a babysitter being stalked and then murdered is about to happen to her. The expanding of the popcorn pack as the scene progresses could draw comparisons to the expanding tension of the scene, with the dialogue starting off with small talk about favourite films of the characters and culminating in the antagonist threatening the woman to "gut you like a fish".

After the opening dialogue of the scene between the woman and the antagonist over the phone, there is a long establishing shot of the house the scene is set in. The lighting of this shot is helpful towards setting a tone of the scene as the shot is mostly dark, with the only areas well lit the house (representing the safe, protagonist location) and a creepy slow-moving children's swing in the foreground of the shot (representing the antagonists presence outside the house). This highlights the importance of these 2 factors to the audience as they receive the most attention from the shot, it also add's to the rising tension as viewers have no idea where abouts the unknown man is.