Codes & Conventions

•  The modern city

Going back to the era of film noirs, when these pictures portrayed the worries and vulnerabilities of a post-war world, mystery films are most frequently seen in contemporary urban cities.

Mystery movies still today play our anxieties about contemporary films, whether they be in the political realm or in our very own lives. Mystery movies play our nagging hunch that lying just beneath the surface is something sinister and terrible.

Cities themselves frequently have a dystopian aspect to them, which is very true in Blade Runner. They are dark and filthy, with flashing lights from billboards and skyscrapers that contrast with the ugliness of the reality that the people below live in.

• Questionable protagonist

Despite virtually always being told from the perspective of one major character, mysteries frequently have protagonists that are difficult to understand and frequently give rise to suspicions of ulterior motives. This expresses the feeling of mistrust we have for ourselves, as well as for our own memories and deeds. In a movie like Enemy, the protagonist discovers a duplicate of himself, leaving us to wonder if this is actually happening or if the expressionist point of view of the protagonist losing his sense of reality is just being used. The main character in my movie will have a dubious mentality.

• Technical codes

In order to depict people's terror when they find something, close-up or ECU views are often used. High and low perspectives are used to either portray a potential murder victim as weak and defenseless or the murderer as powerful and in charge. When the Hero is pursuing a suspect, fast-paced music and shifting camera angles are used. The uncertainty of whether he will escape or not heightens the stress.\

• lighting

The lighting in mystery movies is frequently stylized, and the muted colors mirror the depressing mood of the movies. Enemy's sepia tone filter gives the entire movie an almost apocalyptic feel, expressing the dread that both the audience and the main character are experiencing.

To evoke a sense of suspense and fear in the viewer, I'll use a tone similar to Enemy in my movie.

The usage of B&W cameras in other, more conventional movies like The Third Man and The Big Sleep is advantageous since it naturally produces deep, dark shadows.

• Themes

Thematically mystery films have throughout there history always subverted the common trends of there day. For example in the earliest mystery films in the 1920's and 30's directors such as Fritz Lang pushed cinema into far darker and more complex terroites such as in the film "M" which was censored heavily for decades after it released being outright banned by the UK and the USA when they passed censorship laws for cinema, as well as in Lang's country of birth Germany, when the Nazis took over as they found the film to subversive and possibly dangerous to society. The influence of this film was evident almost immediately in the dark, expressionistic film noir of the post-war American era, which peered behind the surface of the new society, showing a hideous dark underbelly.

With the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the mystery genre which had previously danced around the psychoanalytic issues of the modern world, plunged deep into them. Vertigo, considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made, places the protagonist's psychosis and phobias right into the center of the narrative, making the audience both question the character's motives, but now also his mental state. This sense of suspicion from the audience is something I want to capture in my film, so that audience never really has a full grasp on the main character so a sense of looming threat hangs over the whole film.

 Vertigo features something else that he pioneered in mystery films, the protagonists questionable morality; he isn't a simplistic hero, his character is more relatable as he seems motivated not by the narrative thrust of the narrative but by his emotions and thoughts.