Cape Fear (1961)

Cape Fear at IMDb

"Small-town lawyer Sam Bowden's life becomes torturous when Max Cady re-enters his life. Cady went to jail for 8 years after Bowden testified that Cady attacked a young woman. Now that Cady has been released, he begins to terrorize Bowden and his family, particularly targeting Bowden's daughter, Nancy. Initially, Cady uses his newfound knowledge of the law (learned in prison) to annoy the Bowdens, then poisons the family dog... Who's next ?"

After watching this film I noticed some similarities with the plot of our project. Here are a number of things it has in common:

• A notable disparity between civilisation and the wild
• A protagonist pursued relentlessly by someone/something from their past
• Horror based on shock and suspense
• A final "showdown" set far from the city/home of the characters

A useful thing for our group would be to consider how it presents some of these features. The final scenes where Bowden confronts Cady emphasise the natural setting by having the action take place right in the water and the dense woods, compared to the beginning, which is set almost entirely indoors. We can use this method in our teaser trailer by accentuating how the locations we use are at different places in the narrative, for example something we already know of which is the contrast in colour of the forest shots and indoor shots.

Our teaser already has shock and suspense, but before we are too heavily influenced by the shocks in Cape Fear (such as the camera quickly revealing a woman's bruised face) we have to remember that what was shocking in the early 1960s is not shocking today as we live in a world with films like Hostel and Saw. Obviously cutting off limbs etc. is out of our capabilities in filming but by combining shock with well thought out suspense we can enhance how frightening the shocks are. I think an effective way of building up tension, as we do not have much running time to build a whole set piece, is through music. At present we only have one piece of music, running uninterrupted throughout the trailer. If we alter this slightly and choose exactly where the music shall reach its climax so it is synchronised with the action, the shocks will be more effective. Of course we have to keep our film atmospherically scary as detailed in earlier posts so we cannot overdo this.