The Shining

In today’s lesson (Monday 15th December 2008) we watched a very suspenseful thriller called The Shining. We watched The Shining to give us an idea of what makes a great or good thriller, and the answer was simple; a lot of suspenseful moments. In my personal opinion I though The Shinning was great at keeping viewers on the edge of their seats at all times and creating suspense through a variety of different methods. The main way in which tension and suspense was created in The Shining was through the soundtrack and background noise. During the lesson we were all told to make notes of three suspenseful moments whilst watching The Shining, and I must say that nearly the whole of the movie had tension and suspense carried out from the beginning all the way through to the end. The first moment that created suspense was straight in the very beginning at the credits, in the background behind the credit’s their was a car travelling amongst the dark hills in the distance, and the fact that this was a birds eye view really conveyed to us a sense of isolation, remoteness of the location and loneliness. As we are shown the scenery in the opening credits there is a beat that is representative of a kettle that is boiling water and at the same time a faint beating sound that represents a heart pounding; both of these noises gradually get louder and louder. The second suspenseful moment that I picked out was when we were shown a close up of a type writer and in the background a thumping sound which I initially though was something violent occurring but as the camera panned out away from the type writer the thumping sound got louder and louder and we then found out it was just Jack playing with a tennis ball (throwing and catching the tennis ball). The fourth and final moment was when Danny was being chased by Jack through the maze, as Danny was running the camera was following him and turning the corners with him, this made us very uneasy as we did not know what or who was around the corner.