Further Research on Drama/Thriller Openings

 

        It is the start of a new week and even though we feel pretty good about the story we've been brainstorming; we still feel like we need to make a little more research on other openings from the same genre in order to know how to develop our purpose successfully. We've mostly been talking about creating an opening which has creating mystery as its main purpose, so I'm currently looking at drama/thriller movies that have that same purpose developed through their openings.

        Knives Out's (2019) opening is one that clearly and simply develops mystery by showing that a character has died within the first two minutes of the movie. The viewer is immediately led to the questions: How? Who? and Why? They don't really know who this character is and haven't developed any kind of relationship to him, but they can clearly see he is deceased, covered in blood, and there is a knife on the floor, so their mind goes directly to murder and what that implicates. The opening also has minor aspects that develop the setting it takes place in, but that's not necessarily something I would be eager to incorporate on my own opening. What I want to take from this opening is delivering a shock to the audience. In this case it is the death of a character very early on, which isn't the order of events the audience expects, but in my case, it would be showing the audience that the character they are seeing on their screen changing her appearance is supposed to be dead and that there is a funeral going on for her at that same moment. This would create the same type of questions the Knives Out opening created.

        Similarly, the opening scene for Girl, interrupted (1999) starts off at a point of the story at which the audience has no idea how they got there. There is the main character, Susanna, holding an unmoving Lisa Rowe and there are other characters present who seem to be affected by what's happening as they are upset and crying. The audience doesn't know what has happened to Lisa, where they are or how they even got to this point, so starting a movie off like this creates many questions, and therefor mystery. At the same time this is going on, Susanna is giving a voice over that provides no explanation to what's going on whatsoever, but it sets the audience up for what's coming next. I really like the idea of incorporating a voice over that won't necessarily give away what's happened to get to what's happening in the opening, but that will make sense at the end of the movie when the questions the audience have developed begin to be answered. 

        What I take away from this research is that I would like to make an opening in which the audience is watching the result of the story the rest of the movie will tell them, so to achieve that it is necessary to use what i learned from these productions in relation to creating mystery in their openings.