Halloween (1978)
The opening scene to John Carpenter's 1978 horror film titled 'Halloween', begins with noises of just the wildlife that lives outside of the characters home. The sound of crickets chirping in the grass as the camera shot slowly zooms in to the house we are shown at night. The use of crickets establishes a continuity of how there is a sense of reality and time moving forward, as it is night and you can hear things around the house instead of it being focused on just one thing.
In this scene, there is no title that says 'Halloween', it is an opening scene to establish what the film is with the gruesome and random murder that occurred in the house at the beginning, with no reason as to why, and we watch to find out.
Once the male and female teenagers go upstairs, the camera jump cuts back to outside, to slowly with a steadicam, pan around the house and explore. Little do we know until we see a hand reach for the kitchen drawer with the knives that we are watching from a point of view from the killer. To make this scene even more disturbing, we cannot hear the diegetic sound of him breathing, showing that he is a sociopath, and has no real emotion that causes a thrill inside him when he is committing a murder. Sound from the characters and effects are rather absent from this scene, but when we get the point of view shots from the killer, there are a few high pitched notes that happen, to show that he is progressing. After, there is a steady two high pitched noise, a non-diegetic sound as the characters cannot hear it. The two notes become low as the point of view character walks around, and alter between low and high to keep a calmness of the scene until the killer goes upstairs, once he sees the woman he is about to kill, the same beginning high pitched notes are head. Even though we know it is a point of view shot, because the killer is wearing a mask and we can see through the eye holes, we still do not hear him breathing, even when he is about to murder someone, showing how he is a sociopath, as his heart does not race at the thrill.
Then the sounds heard are stabs into the woman's body, where he is stabbing her repeatedly, as well as her muffled screams of pain, and the sounds from the non-diegetic are louder and continued at a high pitch to scare the audience with the eeriness of the scene. Once the woman is dead, the music dies down to a calm and slow tempo after its rushful and thrilling scene.
The sounds used for the opening scene of this film are effective, as they add a sense of fear into the scene with the fact that there is a sociopath who will quietly walk into your home, take your own kitchen knife and stab you to death without remorse. The fact that there is a tempo which picks up during the woman's murder is effective as it builds horror into the scene, and when the tempo slows back down to a few notes it has a new tension building scene where you wonder what will happen to the killer next as he walks away. The non-diegetic sounds would be rather easy to recreate, as all we would need is a keyboard that can play the same notes but in different pitches, and we can create the diegetic sounds of the stabbing with something simple, like a knife digging into a piece of meat.
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