'Scream' opening genre analysis

This film opening is typical to the genre of psychological horror. The narrative, which contains someone dressed up in a mask going round killing young people, is very stereo typically a psychological horror. Someone who is a fan of this sub-genre would generally expect something creepy to happen to either a single young person or a group of young people, then for many of the young people to die and a couple to survive. This would be stereotypical for the story line for a film of this sub-genre. This narrative follows the repertoire of elements that fit the sub-genre. The stock characters are of the same age as expected for this genre- mid teens to mid twenties, which is the age of the main victim of this film. The location in these kind of films is normally somewhere quite isolated, and dark, which is like where this film is set. The audience would watch this film sometimes for a sense of familiarity, so to watch this film has a very similar story line to many films similar to it, but a slightly different story line so the audience don't get bored watching the same thing all the time. The main surviving character of this film is a female, which also fits in with the repertoire of elements.  This film doesn't have a lot of gore and blood and guts like many other horrors, this is a sub-genre of horror so the film focuses more on scaring the audience rather than showing them lots of the insides of humans.

The non-diagetic soundtrack is very tense and creates a sound to make the audience scared. By creating a suspense, it makes the film have an atmosphere of eeriness and makes the audience satisfied because they came to  watch that kind of thing. The mise en scene, which contains quite obvious windows which are open and not covered, make the audience focus on them because during the narrative of the opening you follow a young babysitter trying to find someone who is watching her. You can see that the mise en scene was set up specifically like that to make the audience automatically look to places like that to look for the person who is watching the young babysitter. The audience get their pleasures from not knowing where the murderer is, because it creates a feeling of suspense for them. The editing also fits into the repertoire of elements expected for this sub-genre, because when the opening finishes the titles of the film come up in quite bold non-animated typography, which makes the audience scared because it is very tense writing. These all fit the codes ans conventions of the genre, because the film is meant to scare the audience and make them relate it to a real-life situation, so by putting it in an everyday house it seems very realistic and that is how this film opening fits the codes and conventions of the sub-genre of horror.