Analyze A Hurtwood House Thriller

I’ve chosen the AS thriller PARAGON

At the beginning you didn’t really realize that this short film is a thriller. The setting looks like a normal office. And the woman and the man look like normal people working in an office. The dark and blue lightning creates an evening atmosphere. The sound of that clock and the scratching pen makes this silent time of the day in an office. All the work is done and no one is really busy anymore. The phone ringing we know that this people are in an office.

Nothing indicates that something terrible will happen. You might be thinking that this man is not really nice, but when you watch the film the first time you don’t this guy is a psychopathic serial killer. When the woman walked to his desk and the volumes of the clock noise increases, it seemed to me that man tried to concentrate on this clock noise, on this silent. The clock became still when the woman brooked the silent. You first realize that something is wrong with that guy, when get the imagination of killing the woman. You really get shocked you when you watch this clip for the first time, because you didn’t except it. The fast increasing, non-diegetic synth string sound makes this shocking effect much more powerful, because you haven’t got any non-diegetic sound until then and suddenly there is so much and so loud sound. This sequence remembered me a little bit of the movies “Analyze That” and “American Psycho”, which used short (or long) imagination sequences, either.

After that you know that this guy is a psych and that the woman will probably die. When the man got interested in her ear and asked her for eating something, the word cannibal came into my mind immediately. I thought that he might want to eat her ears. When I watched the clip the second and third and fourth time, I noticed that the woman is a typical victim of horror movies. Young, blond, red lipstick and a white top.

 First I thought that guy might be a cannibal, but then I stopped the video in the moment when his little book was on screen. If you strained yourself a little bit you could read a little part of something like a diary. On this page he had written down how he saw a girl at the bus station. He hated nearly everything what she looked like. He also thought about making her more beautiful.

In my opinion this guy is psychopathic serial killer, who kill women he thinks are ugly. He also tries to make them more beautiful. So he is not a cannibal. He sees himself as a cosmetic surgeon.

All in all: We have a psychopathic serial killer and typical female victim. That’s a shocking psycho-thriller.