Angel Movie Genre Deconstruction

Movie Deconstruction: The Purge

Typography:

The Purge opening begins with the trademark of Universal Pictures in all capital, the font dosen't serve any kind of purpose to contribute to the film.

Overall Plot:

The Purge is an American dystopian horror film which was written and directed by James DeMonaco. The Purge follows the events that happen in America after the economy slowly collapses, the "Founding Fathers of America" vote to sanction an annual purge in hopes to recover their economy. During the purge all crime, including murder will be allowed with no repercussions. The first purge will start on 2018. The purge will occur from September 12 to the 13th for a total of 12 hours, during these 12 hours all emergency services will be halted and no one will be tended too. The Purge is the first in line to a trilogy of movies shortly after following The Purge: Anarchy and the latest instalment The Purge: The election.

Location:

The Purge is set in modern America and filming was done mostly at Chatsworth, Los Angeles, California. At the beginning of the film there is a majority of different film locations however is hard to determine where they are from just the clips due to the type of footage they use. The beginning of the film uses a different form of filming which is the use of CCTV camera, this greatly conforms to the conventions of a horror/thriller genre movie. Location during the beginning of The Purge isn't heavily emphasised on because it is trying to establish the main plot of the overall film which is about mindless murder and chaos.

Evaluation of opening scene + Sounds

The opening scene of The Purge begins with a series of murders, violence and all around chaos happening. This is all seen through the use of a surveillance camera which adds the sense of realism and allows the audience too feel more connected to the actions going on in the film as if it is real footage from a camera. The beginning of the film is just setting the tone for the rest of the film, after watching the opening it gives you the sense that it is what is going to be the prominent theme for the film: death. There is unfortunately not many ranges of camera angles and shots used in the beginning of the play, it is mostly just medium 2 shots and long shots through the eyes of a CCTV camera. The use of sound is very interesting for the start of the film, first of all, it has absolutely no diegetic sound included within the scenes. The soundtrack that they use is very contrapuntal to what is happening on scene and subverts to the common conventions of the horror genre, however the use of using contrapuntal sound is emerging and becoming a widely popular trend within horror films; maybe it may even become its own sub-genre. They use a very calming, beautiful instrumental and manage to make it sound eerie and creepy thanks to what the music has been associated with. Using this sort of music creates very mixed feelings within the audience as they feel uncomfortable seeing the scenes unfolding on screen while listening to music you would normally associate with romance based films. The use of lighting during filming would be very artificial as they would not use normal daylight, lighting wouldn't have also been a main focus for the start of the film as using the CCTV camera means the light seen to the audience is already very altered and hard to make out whether it is light or day. However it is still easy to recognise it is dark when the murders were taking place, this is shown through certain clips and lamp post lights being visible as well as the time and date stamps being present on screen.

 Overall I believe that the opening of The Purge is a very simple yet effective way of beginning a successful movie, not overdoing it and blasting the audience with action straight from the get go. The opening of The Purge is very successful at leaving the audience asking the why and what is going on question inside their heads.