The Shining - Stephanie Brand

In todays lesson we watched a Thriller Movie called "The Shining" by Alfred Hitchcock .
We were asked to look at what features the movie has that makes it suspenseful. Where were asked to look at three examples and for each write down what happens in the scene and how it is suspenseful.
In the beginning of the film we are shown from a Birds Eye View, the scenery, is a car driving off to the mountains and while we are watching this there is a soundtrack playing, like a heartbeat sound which gives the audience an immediate feeeling that we are going to be kept in suspense troughout the movie and this keeps the audience in constact contact with what we are watching. Alfred Hitchcock tends to always give the audience a big idea of what might happen in the movie before the actual characters know themselves what is going on.
A second example of how the director keeps the audience under suspense is when Danny, the little boy is playing around the hotel in the long corridors, it keeps the audience in suspense because of sounds that are playing in the background and when things start to appear the sounds become louder! The fact that it takes place in an big empty hotel emphasises the fact that something out of the ordinary is obviously going to happen. Also when a tennis ball appears while the little boy is playing with the trucks along the corridor really scares the audience because the tennis ball appears from nowhere and when Danny gets up to see where it came from, room 237 is open and this makes the audience tense as we know that he is not meant to go inside the room.

All trouhtout the movie we are lept in constant suspense, and most of it is all because of the sounds that are you and the constanst repetition of scenes, like when the little boy plays in the long empty corridors by himself, its obvious to the audience that something is bound to happen.