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What Lies Beneath Themes

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In the movie What Lies Beneath Robert Zemeckis uses camera angels, music, clues, and a riveting plot to convey the movies themes, which are scary and mysterious. The movie has twists and turns to make it where you have to watch the whole movie to fully understand what is happening. The plot is Norman Spence, played by Harrison Ford, killed a girl and the girls ghost starts to haunt Claire Spence, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. When the wife begins to find out what the husband did, he tries to kill her but is not successful and thinks that she is lying about the ghost haunting her. In the movie What Lies Beneath, by Robert Zemeckis with writers Clark Gregg and Sarah Kernochan tried to make a scary and mysterious movie but did not achieve …show more content…

He does achieve the mysterious theme but not the scary theme. Zemeckis made another theme to the movie that is mysterious by adding the missing girl and the key. Madison is Norman’s former mistress that he killed because Madison was going to tell the school’s dean about the affair. The key is to a locked box that Madison was going to give Claire that had a letter and the necklace that the husband had given her as a gift. The key was put in Claire’s robe when she was taking a bath by Madison to show her what she wanted her to see before Norman killed her to show her what she wanted her to see before Norman killed her. The key and Madison all tie in together when Norman tells Claire about the affair when he is about to kill her. In the movie Norman is a very hard- working family man, but he is actually trying to hide the fact that he killed his mistress because …show more content…

Zemeckis tried to make the movie scary with low angel, high angel, wide, close-up shots. The shot that made the movie a little scary is the low angel shot in the movie where they put Claire on a plate of glass to show that Norman was in an authoritative position over Claire and to help the audience understand how she felt at that moment in the scene. The other shot that was effective in making the movie scary was the dolly shot. The dolly shot was used when Claire open Madeline’s box and feels like someone is watching her. When they come back around Zemeckis had placed Norman at the entrance to the living room. The music in the movie also helps to make the movie seem scarier than it really is. The producers use scores to make a particular scene more ominous and dark than it truly should be in that moment. Such as when they had Claire on the glass they played very ominous music when they could have used more of a mysterious

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The shots make the actors more courageous or important. As it is in the film when the body of Claire lies on the glass while Norman stands over her, the low shot shows that he is the bad guy and is in control. A boundary that was never stated, although portrayed by the camera angles. Zemeckis, as a director, only allows certain things to be seen at a time to help the audience catch certain actions of the characters. When she walks backwards down the steps and the view is up the stairs, limiting the audience’s view of what’s behind Claire.

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