How The Others and Nosferatu Establish a Genre and Narrative

How The Others and Nosferatu Establish a Genre and Narrative

In this essay I am going to compare and discuss the ways in which the

opening titles of Frederich Murnau's Nosferatu and Alejandro

Amenabar's The Others establish horror genre and narrative. The two

films differ a great deal and hopefully I will be able to describe

each one in detail.

Although both Nosferatu and The Others are stereotypically horror

films they each have their own purpose and ways to put horror across

to the audience. For example during the opening titles of The Others,

Amenabar chose to use Sepia as the colour to his small yet disturbing

animation. This has a good effect because we all associate evil and

horror with dark and plain colours, furthermore he goes on to use

close-up shots of cartoon boys and girls screaming, and headless

angels which are connotations of iconography for the horror genre,

zooming in on them as soon as they come in shot giving the audience an

eerie feeling that something has happened to these innocent looking

children who seem to be all alone in a huge manor house.

On the other hand Murnau's Nosferatu is a silent film therefore there

is an even greater use of image a lot of which comes through the

language used, as well as over exaggerated facial expressions which

stretch to the limits to get the desired effect.

The opening mise en scene of the Mansion in The Others establishes a

sense of horror because they take a long shot of it with lots of mist

circling around it and apart from some trees the only other thing

visible is the mysterious reflection of the mansion in the lake. The

camera pans round from quite high and at a distance which suggests

it's a crane shot. There also isn't much lighting in the scene to help

the audience believe that it isn't an ordinary mansion and that

something sinister will take place, in addition to that the setting

creates an effect of solitude and that they are cut off from the rest