Going off of the research I’ve conducted over the last few days, I’ve also come across the different types of mystery and thriller films and how easily other genres may overlap in doing so. Covering most to all of these types and blends will lead to us having a better understanding of what to do for our specific narrative following the struggles of a detective. I will also address movies that are categorized in these blends as well.

Types of Mystery Films

Standard Private Eye

The standard private eye type of mystery film mostly follows the plot line of a detective film, but with a more official approach to it. More psychology is involved in these types of films, so more psychological attacks rather than physical and more mental mind games rather than the typical mystery here and there. (Libguides, 1) The “Private Eye” part comes in as an actual private eye instead of being named a detective. These films typically overlap with the crime genre, which is what Sitara is covering in her research. A great example of this is Zero Effect, directed by Jake Kasdan. While this film also has elements of comedy in it, the narrative of a “Private Eye” mystery film is kept throughout the film through its main characters being Daryl Zero and Steve Arlo. They’re both the “private eye” in this instance and they deal with blackmailing and complex crimes throughout the film and different mind games the villain is playing on them. The plot of this film is that they are two of the best detectives in the world who have to Our film isn’t typically following this sort of story formula, so while it’s good to differentiate between the types of movies, this type is not too useful to us right now.

Cozy Mysteries

Cozy mysteries are typically movies that don’t involve a lot of violence or action in many ways, but in just a simple small, closed off town and can be solved through simple intuition and problem solving. Police and CSI procedures are typically left out of these sort of films. These types of films can easily overlap with classic detective films. (Libguides, 1) A good example of this sort of film is Murder At the Gallop, directed by George Polluck. Miss Marple figures out the murder with her skills as a detective and being able to deduce who would’ve done something like that easily. Not a whole lot of violence is seen throughout the film as Miss Marple would probably be easily hurt from said violence. This film will also be useful for the representation of women is mystery films, as our main character is meant to be female and could add to the struggles of that detective. This genre and the next genre I’m going over is sure to be a good idea of what we want our film to end up like.

Classic Detective

Classic detectives movies are exactly what they sound like: a classic detective investigating a mysterious murder with a close-knit circle of suspects that all have a well developed motive to kill the victim. The difference between this and the Cozy mystery is that there could involve violence or different mind games to go with the detective’s investigation. Though, they are still very easily overlappabe in creating a mystery film. A movie that follows this formula nearly perfectly is Murder On the Orient Express, directed by Kenneth Branagh. The main character, Hercule Poirot, is stuck on a train and left to investigate the murder of Cassetti that occurred on that train with a pool of suspects who all had a connection to the victim. This is truly the type of mystery title sequence we want to go for in our project. Other obvious examples would be Sherlock Holmes and Ace Adventura.

In order to truly find out what kind of conventions and narrative structure I would need to follow for this specific detective movie, Sitara and I analyzed a scene from the movie in order to do this. Compiling all the information we gathered, we put it all into one video, which can be seen from here.

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The full video, blocked by Fox on YouTube so I’m unable to have it embedded, can be seen here through Google Drive.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jXvGDJCg1up5FoPHl9prD2JaUOwJoj_7/view?usp=sharing

Police Procedural

This subgenre of mystery is a little different from the typical formulas mentioned earlier. The detective takes on the role of the police officer. (Libguides, 1) A familiar narrative in this genre would be the idea that the police are not doing enough to solve the crime, so the detective will take things into their own hands in order to solve the crime once and for all. Another things that makes this genre more different is the amount of mistakes the detectives could make which allowed room for error and development of their character as well. A prime example of this genre is M, directed by Fritz Lang. Following the outline that I stated, the plot of this movie follows the true police being unable to catch a child-murderer, but instead of “detectives” finding the criminal, other criminals join in to find out who’s committing the crime. It’s different than a typical police procedural film, but the conventions follow that sort of mystery very well.

Thrillers

Since thrillers are not a genre we are really focused on, I only researched the relevant topic of thriller mysteries rather than many different types of thrillers. Thriller mysteries are narratives with the idea of a corrupt social construct, perception of mystery, and more psychological ideas of solving mysteries, so a lot more deduction and logical flow of solving the murder/crime is invovled. (Libguides, 1) A movie that follows this narrative structure is A Simple Favor, directed by Paul Feig. A Simple Favor follows the narrative of one of the main characters, Emily, disappearing and the “detective figure”, Stephanie, to figure out where she is. Though, it’s considered a thriller of sorts because of the tricks and mind games and obstacles that Emily put in place for her. Having these sort of narrative strategies in the back of our minds, it may be able to spice up our title sequence that much more.

Concluding my research, this has really helped my narrow down my options to the sort of plot I want to establish for our title sequence, so our original skeleton is definitely bound to change.

Sources

https://libguides.enc.edu/mysteryfiction/genres

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_film

https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-structure-your-mystery-thriller-or-suspense-novels

FILM GENRE AND ITS VICISSITUDES: THE CASE OF THE PSYCHOTHRILLER 1 Virginia Luzon Aguado

I cited multiple movies and a YouTube video where they were mentioned.

Since our narrative falls under a total of four genres, researching all of them will take a lot of time, and then implementing aspects of all of those genres into will be a challenge. Although, having more information will give us more opportunity to create the best title sequence we can.

I researched the two genres mystery and thriller, having mystery being the main focus of the research.

Mystery

Mystery is defined as a “subgenre of narrative fiction”. (Scholastic Professional, 1) The narrative story involves a murder that is unsolved or happened mysteriously. The main character (detective) solves the mystery through “logical deduction” (Scholastic Professional, 1) from the clues and information they find from their investigation. That’s the basic narrative aspect of the genre, they can take many different turns, but the skeleton of mystery films go along the guidelines of this. In tomorrow’s research when I address movies that fall under mystery, I’ll also go over the different types of mystery films that might benefit me in this project.

Through watching different mystery films (which will be addressed in another post), there are certain mise-en-scene, cinematographic, editing, and sound techniques that are typically followed.

Mise en scene-

Setting- countryside home, isolated, big cities, police stations

Costuming- 90’s get-up , protag in most recognizable get up

Lighting- mostly naturalistic, usually lowkey to obstruct the viewers view of the killer

Props- magnifying glass, police tape, murder weapon, blood, evidence

Cinematography-

Distance- lots of close-ups or extreme closeups to show fear

Angles- high and low angles to show potential murder victim/killer

Movement- fast paced tracking shots to show panic or still shots to build suspense

Editing-

Speed- slow paced for suspense, darker transitions, fast paced for actions and murders

Sound- speed is typically fast paced sound if there’s a chase scene, or slow if suspense is being builtE

Sound-

Ambient sound- may be little ambient sound to build suspense

Sound Motif- if the detective comes onscreen, a motif may play

Themes-

-Good vs bad, justice, confusion, persistence, mystery , interrogation, crime always fails

Fonts-

Fonts used in mystery movies are typically simple fonts, or curly looking fonts. The colors are usually white or possibly gray-ish within mystery movies, for example Afterschool and Mystic River.

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Thriller

The narrative of a thriller is to mainly build suspense and make the audience anticipate what’s going to happen next. Throughout the movie either a killer or some sort of violence is involved all throughout the film. An equilibrium is typically kept throughout the film and is left disrupted by the killer or the violence towards the victim soon enough. A big part of thrillers is the suspense and anticipation growing in the audience as they watch that part of the movie. This suspense is typically built through the other conventions listed below. (Filmsite, 1) In tomorrow’s research, I’ll go over different types of thrillers along with which movies they might correspond to.

Mise-en-scene-

Setting- isolated areas, dark alleys, house in the middle of nowhere

Costuming- villain in black, victim in white, detectives in uniform

Lighting- lowkey lighting, maybe some natural

Props- murder weapon (gun, knife, etc.), obstacles in house, object victim uses for defense

Cinematography-

Distance- close-ups to show fear, midshots to show the actual killing/violence, long shots to show isolation

Angles- high and low to demonstrate power between killer and victim

Movement- tracking shots and handheld to show chase or getting away from the killer

Editing-

Speed- fast to build tension, slow paced to build suspense (this also applies for sound)

Flashbacks- there may often be flashbacks if the victim and killer have some sort of connection

Sound-

Ambient sound- may have little sound if killing sequence is occurring or to build suspense

Sound Motif- if the killer or someone important to the killing comes onscreen, a motif may play

Diegetic sounds- heightened to build fear since the victim would only focus on that sound

Themes-

Reality, good vs. evil, perception, guilt, obsession

Fonts

The fonts used in thriller movies and in the titles are typically bold or have special little effects within them, as seen in The 5th Wave and Jason Bourne.

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With all of these aspects coming into play and shaping our title sequence, I’m sure we can figure out what should go where and what shouldn’t. Plus, with Sitara researching drama and crime, it will show us the blend that would be best to set up our film.

Sources

http://teacher.scholastic.com/reading/bestpractices/comprehension/genrechart.pdf

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088930/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089155/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037101/

https://www.filmsite.org/mysteryfilms.html

https://fontmeme.com/movie-fonts/mystery/

https://fontmeme.com/movie-fonts/mystery/

https://the-artifice.com/common-themes-in-psychological-thrillers/

Starting my research today, I already have an idea of what I want our title sequence to be like. The skeleton follows a female (possibly male if we face complications) detective struggling at the beginning of their investigation of a murder. For our proposal of this project, we challenged ourselves to set the sequence in the 90’s, so 1) the female detective would have more of a struggle since gender equality is still making its way to completely equal, and 2) so we would give ourselves a good challenge to find the right setting and the right decor and costuming and props so it will fit in the setting that we wanted it to be like. This will give us a good idea of how real set designers can set the scene of an event with the best use of mise-en-scene they can get. This sequence will most likely fall under three main genres, crime, mystery and drama, and possibly go under the one subgenre of thriller. The main events for each scene are listed next to this block of text of how our title sequence is going to play out which is definitely subject to change with more research to come, but our basic idea follows the detective struggling to find the truth to the murder. Our idea for the title sequence didn’t particularly start anywhere, but our interests stemmed from the same ideas of wanting our sequence to resemble a mystery and someone solving it. This allowed for us to bounce ideas off one another to come up with the idea of Into the Truth. The title came to us almost naturally once we established the mystery aspect of our film, finding the truth is one main aspect of solving said mystery, so it flowed well with our idea. Our research should be done around our schedule we have set in place, so by February 3rd we should have all the research we need and then we can really shape our title sequence into the specific genre conventions it needs.

Schedule

Our schedule for completing our title sequence is as follows.

Research being finished and completed- 2/3

Scriptwriting and funding completed- 2/10

Preproduction- 2/24

Production- 3/3

Postproduction- 3/17

Sources

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LzwHaUkQUWghp2WahZUrI2mpSkKyNTtBEI8NKk36yLM/edit?usp=sharing