Section 2: research into examples of comparable products: American Psycho Analysis

Narrative structure:

• a man who lives alone and is also very succesful and has everything he wants is suffering from depersonalisation, which is a mental disease and he starts to become more and more insane as he kills people

Codes and conventions:

• blood so that the audience have some idea about the genre of the film and that it does contain gore and violence
• dark music that creates tension within the audience
• transformed city- this is because it is a normal working class place and the scene is overshadowed by these murders
• killer with a mental disease which is quite common within the thriller genre

Camerawork:

• slow track in around the killers home which gives the audience a personalised view of the killers day to day surroundings
• close ups of killers face so that te audience can see what his emotions are when he is in the normal state of his illness through the day and when he is about to kill someone, this shows the contrasts and hoe even though the audience can relate to him when he is normal we can easily be fooled by his posture on screen

Mise en scene:

• when the character is getting frustrated he appears to get angry and says things that are disterbing to the audience
• the settings are always the same places in a sequence to one and other- home, work, resteraunt, club and this shows the audience that his day is always the same as the day before
• the costumes of the character are always suits which suggest that he is a succesful man in what he does
• the costumes of the waiters in the start of the film suggest that the action is going to take place in a resteraunt
• the lighting in his home is very bright and this is where he also kills a man and this is unsettling to the audience as most thrillers have very dark lighting and because this is bright at a death scene it kind of hightens the tension

Sound:

• opening sequence has very dark ominous music which is setting the mood and creating tension before leading to a climax for the audience
• the music at the death scene in the home of the killer is diegetic noise because it is what the character decides to play so that he cant be heard and this creates the tension for the audience but it also makes it more personal for them also

Editing:

• foreshadowing
• cutting from scene to scene and this makes the audience feel the lapse in time that the character feels because it is like the day is just flying by and only represents itself to the character as a sequence of events and not a continuous process, and this could also be considered to be elliptical editing

Graphics:

• opening scene had dark drops of supposed blood against a white background which is an indication to the audience of genre and the tone or mood of the film

• in the laundromats on the sign it said "you feel better when your clothes look better", and this relates to the characters attitude to the way he must look and the way in which he feels about himself