In To White

Cape Fear

How is sound used to create suspense and other effects in the scene?
-Cady's Release (Cape Fear)

This clip shows the release of the antagonist in the film being released from jail after a sentence, he has been waiting for this day for years to be able to get revenge on the man who sent him there.

The music is spine chilling for the viewer, loud and uncomplicated as if to represent the antagonists point in the scene. As the camera moves out from the wall onto the man the music changes slightly when focused on him to a slightly quieter sound but giving the same affect, it makes the focus more on him than the sound to emphasize his presence in the scene. The music is repetitive until the guard says 'the moment you've been waiting for', there is very little speech in this scene which I think enhances the fear of him being released and the significance it holds for the film, marking in your memory. This speech also highlights the importance of the time he has been waiting for and that this moment means he can accomplish the revenge that he seeks later on in the film.


This picture shows Cady moving towards his freedom, past his fellow cell mates and in front of the guard. He walks in time with the pace of the music however it goes from being very loud to very quite as if to highlight this moment, the moment when he walks out of the prison, there is very little noise other than a few quite rattles of the other cell mates cell bars. This emphasizes the movement making it seem as if the antagonist is so dangerous that he brings everyone else to utter silence, including all other dangerous men and prisoners, this shows how powerful he is, that he will bring everything to a stand still and silence.

Survey Analysis

I wrote a survey to find out information about how audiences feel about thrillers and what they enjoy within the films. my results were interesting and a lot backed up my ideas about the audience research that i did.

This graph shows the results for question four on my survey, out of the people that answered it shows that females like the idea of having both lead characters male and female, so a mixture. However many females said they would like a good looking male to be the main character, if not then female. This was interesting because in my research i found that most people could connect better to the characters if they were the same sex as themselves, but this proves that this can be true but it isn't always the case, many said that if the actor was nice to look at then they would prefer that to having the same sex character.

This is my table of results about music in the thriller genre and whether people think it is necessary to include it to create atmosphere and suspense, or if they just prefer these qualities to be inflicted by the actors. My results showed that no one thought that music shouldn't be included at all throughout, which i feel is good because adding music for ambiance will transform a scene from something slightly uninteresting to haunting. However some people felt silence would give a mysterious feeling to the scene, meaning we will have to find the right balance with the music we use and whether it is necessary as many of the viewers have different opinions.

 For this question i asked which sub-genre they preferred to watch and its clear that action is very popular with the younger generation, making the thriller genre more appealing to them. It would be hard to make a good action sequence with a lack of funding, otherwise it would look cheap, so i feel the next best option for us would be to stick to the horror side of thrillers, it will be the easiest for us to make but also the most attractive to our target audience.

This image shows the results for question 8, which asks what their favourite thriller film is, the most popular proved to be 127 hours because it does not have any scenes which are to dramatic. This is useful information as we cannot afford to create high action scenes in our thriller, but we hope to achieve the same excitement for our viewers as a film that does include these scenes.  The other films that prove to be popular are films that come under the sub categories of horror and action which gives me a good indication of where we should target our films towards and who we should target them too as well.
With the information I now have we can create our thriller based around the ideas that these people have given us, and categorise our film into those which people seem to most enjoy.