Sunday 14 April 2013

Violent scenes

Easily the most difficult aspect of trying to create your own slasher: your earnest efforts can end up causing laughter instead of chills unless you're very careful about framing, editing, mise-en-scene/SFX and sound. Try watching almost any slasher kill/violence scene with the sound off (repeat with no pictures, sound only) and you'll quickly appreciate what a difference sound can make. That includes unsettling diegetic sound (often exaggerated), not just non-diegetic music.
This is just a placeholder post for now, something I'll add to at a later date. There's no substitute for viewing (though reading the likes of Stephen Rebello's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho [1990], or any of the many journal/web articles devoted to this topic will certainly help) examples to boost your understanding of how filmmakers maintain verisimilitude in this central feature for slasher audiences.

Sometimes, though, there's an intentional degree of campness, even before Scream made postmodernism part of the slasher mix. The vid below (a daft vodcast ... with over 175k views) contains some examples, but its not hard to find many more on YouTube.
NB: The following vid features strong language and clips from 18-rated films featuring strong violence.

tbc