Joseph Sullivan—The Shot: Reverse Shot Alchemy Of Horror Movies
Get Out (2017), dir. Jordan Peele
Writes Joseph Sullivan (’19) for Film History:
What sets the context, what sets the entire range of imagery presented in a horror film, just like any other movie, is its cinematography…A prime example of everyday camera shots that horror uses to utmost effectiveness is the shot, reverse-shot technique.
The Coen Brothers often use this method for their dialogue scenes to visually display a sort of rhythm or flow between characters or the environment. We see this in O Brother Where Art Thou? in the scene where the characters have reunited in a movie theater. Delmar, played by Tim Blake Nelson, turns to Pete, played by John Turturro, to tell him they thought he was turned into a toad. The shot, reverse-shot method here paired with the slow, hushed speech of the characters very clearly conveys to the audience the humour of the ridiculous situation the characters are in.
Now take this standard method of shooting a dialogue scene and apply it to a horror film, for instance in screenwriter Henrik Galeen’s silent Nosferatu, where the character of Thomas Hutter sees Count Orlok in the hallway staring back at him from the doorway of his room. Hutter runs to his bed, and we get a shot, reverse-shot sequence of him cowering in his bed, to his view of the doorway, where Orlok slowly opens the door without touching it, and creeps into Hutter’s room ever so slowly. Taken this way, the shot sequence is doing the exact same thing that it would be doing for character dialogue in a talkie, showing body language and rhythm, except in a silent film like Nosferatu, body language is sometimes all the audience is given, which furthers the importance of the usage of the shot, reverse-shot method within the context of horror given to the viewer in Nosferatu.
Another example of this cinematography tactic, this time in a more contemporary film, is a scene from the short film Lights Out by Swedish director David F. Sandberg. The protagonist, played by Lotta Losten, walks through a hallway in her home and turns out the light. The first shot begins with her walking towards the camera, which is placed outside the hallway. As Losten passes through the doorway and flicks the switch on the other side, she sees something appear in the now dark hallway staring back at her. After a short hold, the camera view changes from the woman’s point of view to the newly appeared monster’s point of view looking back at her through the dark hallway, then back to the woman’s point of view where she flicks the light switch back on and to reveal the apparition is no longer there. This shot-reverse-shot establishes presence. Instead of staying on the one character that we already know exists in the space, reverting to the hallway shot suspenesfully confirms to the viewer that indeed there is something else in the house.
All movies, at least in an expressionist kind of view, make something from nothing, or take the world around us and change it, alchemy-like, into something impactful—something new and foreign to us, or something familiar and relatable. Horror, meaningful and terrifying, both awe-inducing and horrible, takes this powerful, familiar cinematographic practice and uses it to create genre-specific new ideas, actions and reactions… The technique that make us laugh in comedy petrifies us in horror. And for many in the audience, the horror lasts longer than the laughter.