Planning/Research- Evoking feeling from the audience

In this blog post, I will focus specifically on the feeling that my audience should feel in the first 4 minutes of my film. I’m not exactly sure how many minutes that my film's opening actually needs to be, but for the plan of my film, it would probably have to be at least 4 minutes.

I discovered that in the first minute, you don’t want to shock the audience, but you want to make them curious and slightly uncomfortable. This could be done with normal everyday actions that feel off, strange backgrounds, subtle camera movement, or odd sounds.

For example, many horror openings start with normal people in normal places, but the little touches- weird lighting, silent sounds, or unsettling camera movement- make you feel something isn’t quite right yet. These kinds of tricks are talked about in filmmaking guides, which explain how lighting and framing can make viewers feel “on edge” before anything scary happens.

This early tension works because it makes the audience’s imagination start filling in the blanks and the imagination is one of the scariest tools in a slasher movie. 

Despite this fact, I might want to challenge this convention simply because I want my film's opening to transition from scary right off the bat, to what seems like a " day in the life" kind of film- building tension and keeping the audience puzzled on how the initial scary scene's foreshadowing will be revealed in the rest of the film. My mindset for this brief is to think about if I were making a full film, even thought im not. This helps me to make meaningful decisions on how to start my film.

Increasing Anxiety Without Full Scares

By the end of the first four minutes, the audience should feel anxiety and suspense, even if they haven’t seen anything truly terrifying yet.

A lot of the best psychological horror films build up tension through pacing, slow, quiet moments that make viewers wait for something to happen. That stretch between “nothing scary yet” and “something scary might happen any second” builds fear in the audience. Websites that discuss horror filming techniques explain that filmmakers use lighting, sound, and camera angles to play with the audience’s nervous system and make them feel tension without showing grotesque images right away.

Also, movie discussions and fan threads show that part of what makes an intro feel scary isn’t the monster, but it’s the suspense, silence, and the feeling of not knowing what’s going on. Viewers often say that the best intro scenes are ones that just make them tense and on edge.

Sources

https://raindance.org/crafting-fear-filming-techniques-to-evoke-emotion-in-horror-movies/

https://raindance.org/crafting-fear-filming-techniques-to-evoke-emotion-in-horror-movies/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagged_Mind?utm_source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagged_Mind?utm_source