CSI: Strip
Strangler.
How does the
opening scene of CSI- Strip Strangler attract the interest of the audience?
Strip Strangler is about young, vulnerable women who get sexually assaulted and eventually murdered generally late at night in an apartment complex by a man who uses a technique of strangling people to kill them. The CSI team try to find out who the killer/stalker is. They do this because if they find him it will prevent more deaths or sexual assaults happening. Every episode in CSI starts with an opening scene to establish an enigma code. This makes the audience anticipate what is going to happen in the rest of the episode.
The opening shot of this episode is a high angle long shot
of Las Vegas, implying that anyone below could be the victim and it plays on
the audience’s expectations. The significance of the dark mise-en-scène, the
flashes of lightning and the rumbles of thunder are that the darkness and the
weather are implying that something bad is going to happen and the people who
are in the darkness are vulnerable.
The second shot is a high angle crane shot of an apartment
building at night. This angle is used to make it seem like whoever is in the building
is weak and not secure; the thunder and lightning implies that something bad is
going to happen and the door of the apartment complex being open shows that
someone has entered the building and it isn’t secure.
The camera cranes down but tilts up so the audience are
positioned to look up to the building this makes the audience afraid of what is
going to happen inside the apartment building. If we look carefully at the top
of the stairs there is an intruder going up to the apartments. The camera angle
moves so it is looking up on the building showing that the intruder at the top
of the stairs is powerful in relation to the audience.
Inside the building the mise-en-scène shows the corridors
are very slim/narrow and filled with darkness implying someone is trapped. The
tracking shot represents the murderers point of view as he is moving through
the corridor, when the camera tracks into the room the audience see the woman
as if she is trapped this is because of the way the camera is positioned so she
is in between the door and the frame and suggests she is in a confined space.
The woman sits up suddenly on the sound of a creaking floorboard;
it seems as if she is looking at the audience as if we share the point of view
of the murderer. When the lightning flash illuminates the room, the colour red
is prevalent because red has connotations of violence and death. To show her
sense of panic there is a cut to a medium close up of the woman and this shot
represents her as a typical young attractive woman dressed vulnerably in her
nightwear.
The woman no longer looks directly at the audience; there is
a cut to her point of view and the audience can read what she sees because from
her point of view everything looks okay and because she can’t see anything it
makes it seem alright as if nothing is going to happen but from the audience’s
point of view we think that the open closet is an obvious place for a murderer
to hide and red is the major colour in the closet which shows impending
violence/danger.
The sound throughout the sequence starts off with discordant
music that then fades away when the victim sits up in fear; this is a
non-diegetic crescendo. When she looked around the room to see if anyone was
there she saw nothing the sound then changed to a low- deep sound suggesting
that there was actually someone in the room with her but she just hadn’t seen
anything in the room.
Because the woman sees nothing that seems threatening, she
settles down on her side to sleep. The music is quite discordant and has a low
deep sound suggesting someone is in the room, she thinks there isn’t anyone
there but the music suggests otherwise. The medium close-up of her on her side
almost fills the frame and it excludes most of the room, this is done because
it blocks out everything else in the room showing that if the murderer is there
we can’t see what he is doing/ going to do.
On the sound of the creaking floorboard, there’s another cut
as she quickly lifts up from the pillow; we see her point of view again. At
first we see the darkness in the room but when the lightning strikes and it
lights up the room we see the silhouette of the murderer; he wears a dark
hoodie with the hood up and the hoodie implies trouble, what we can’t see is who
the actual murderer is because when the light flashes we only see the shadow of
him standing there and not his features, so the audience is kept in suspense
until later in the episode.
There is a cut to a high close shot of the woman screaming
in fear. What we notice about the speed of the editing towards the end of this
sequence is that the pace speeds up giving a sense of urgency, excitement and
tension. What we don’t see in the next cut is the murderer’s face but what we
do see is him in medium shot tensing/ flexing a cable suggesting that the
murderer is going to strangle the woman.
The next cut shows in close up that he pulled the iron off
of the ironing board, showing force and that he is going to go straight ahead
and kill her. She puts herself in a lower position showing weakness and fear
putting her in a more vulnerable position showing herself as the victim. There
is a final cut to a high close shot of the woman as she screams; the camera
tracks in because it is representing the killer’s point of view as he is
getting closer towards her, she backs away and goes further down into her
pillow showing that she is afraid and weak when she does this it makes her look
more vulnerable.
The build-up of a non-diegetic crescendo over the last few
shots emphasises her scream more. The woman is represented throughout the
sequence as a stereotypical young, attractive female victim who is dressed
vulnerably and is weak.
The director uses a number of techniques to attract the
audience by using tropes from the horror genre for example placing a young
vulnerable woman alone in her room at night. The director also uses camera
techniques like a high angle shot to make the victim look more vulnerable. When
using sound, crescendos create suspense and to emphasise the woman’s scream.
The sequence is set up to encourage and to anticipate things happening. Setting
up an enigma code to play on the mind of the audience, the reason we don’t see
as much of the murder is because it would give away who the killer was leaving
the audience knowing who the killer is through the episode.
There is a fade to black before the murder happens because
it keeps the audience in suspense and showing the murder would be to gruesome
to show in the episode.
