Week 3

CLASSMATE 1:

I chose to watch the movie Hannibal released in 2001. The film is of the horror genre but is more creepy and suspenseful than it is terrifying. The film much like horror films in the 1940s used music to enhance the suspense and anxiety of the scenes. Hannibal keeps the viewer in a state of expectation of what may happen by the slow development of the frightening scenes and growing intensity of the music as these scenes progress. Hannibal is different than the horror films of the 1940s in that some of the scenes are more graphic than what could be shown in the 1940s due to censorship laws. Modern horror films rely heavily on the scare factor to keep viewers entertained and grow the popularity of the film. A movie that claims the genre of horror but isn't scary can be labeled as a bad movie.           

Sound played an important part in the film with both sound effects and music adding to the suspense and scare factor. Throughout the movie Hannibal, music was used to set the tone of the scenes and help create a more calm feeling for the viewer or a more anxious feeling depending on the nature of the scene. In the scene in which the character Hannibal Lecter disemboweled and hung the Italian inspector from the balcony of a building, the music played an important roll in the heightened fear of the scene. The film used classical music in a scene showing Hannibal Lecter working in a lab to give the Hannibal character a feeling a classness, brilliance, and preciseness even though he was a psychopathy serial killer. In one of the final scenes Hannibal kidnaps two FBI agents and performs a procedure on one of the agent's that allows him to remove the top of the scull exposing the agent's brain. The sounds effects used during the scene as Hannibal removed the top of the agent's scull made the scene much more powerful and realistic. Without the sound effects this scene would not have had near the effect it was intended to have and did have.