JM Technical analysis of 'The Number 23' (Schumacher, 2007)

When it came to choosing a film to analysis, I took into consideration the genre that we had chosen for our film opening. For our film we were looking st doing a psychological thriller, so having seen 'The Number 23'(Schumacher, 2007) previously I knew that it had a good opening sequence.
Technical Analysis
The film starts with the 'New Line Cinema' logo, before a blank parchment effect fades in, upon which some text appears, with a type-writer style font. After this different text appears and disappears on different parts of the page. After this, the cuts stop and a scolling effect is instead used to reveal more and more text. The number 23 is repeated over and over again in the text, and the screen eventually shows 'The Number 23' in the middle of the screen, but this text is in red as opposed to black which has previously been used. An effect of blood soaking into the page is used to cover the text, before it cuts to more text. From here on the text that comes up on the page is surrounded by repeated '23's. This makes the text difficult to read along with the cutting rate, which progressively speeds up. The text on the screen are stats from history such as 'There are 23 letters in the latin alphabet' and all the stats in the passage are connected by the number 23. Further into the scene there are blood spatters appearing around the text, and blood trickles across the screen. As well as this some of the text is now turning red, having appeared originally in black. Again the cutting rate increases and different distance shots are now being used, for example and Extreme Close-Up magnifies the text to fill the screen. Throughout the scene the soundtrack is just music and no dialogue. This music has deep bass, contrasted with a high tone brass instrument, the notes being very jumpy up and down a scale. Another effect is now used on the text, with what appears to be permenant marker some of the text is now crossed out or underlined. After this the blood soakes the whole screen, turning it red. Different shades of red are used to expose a large '23' before it fades to an establishing shot of a house on the outskirts of the city.

What have I learnt from this analysis?
Although this isn't the most visually spectacular opening sequence, I do think it provokes a feeling of suspense and mystery early on, which is key to wether or not the audience will think initially. The mystery surrounding the number 23 means that the audience will want to continue watching the film in order to find out the significance of 23. When I first watched this film I thought the use of historical statistics that kept me gripped for the rest of the film, as it gave me a feeling that the film had relevance in the real world. Furthermore, the lack of dialogue meant that I was filled with a bigger sense of mystery. However, this involves very little camera work, and therefore would not be very useful to our film, but some of the effects and text manipulation could be useful.