Even before watching a horror movie, we know its core purpose is to scare and shock people. Horror movies provide short anxieties, suspense, and jumpscare, with terrifying background music. The movie may contain scary characters or it may be psychological horror.
This essay compares movies – Sinners and Insidious which are both from same genre – Horror. There are numerous similarities in both the films. They both are focused on family’s destruction by other beings. Both films focus on demonic entities (Insidious – Demon, Sinners – Vampires). Both movies have intense and horrifying music to create sense of fear. Darkness is used as main element in both like in Insidious – Dimension (The Further) where the child does the Astral Projection is full of darkness, and in Sinners – Mostly the main scenes are at night as vampires are active with absence of the Sun. Slow moving camera techniques are used in both films. We see slow and deliberate camera movements and let the characters handle the weight.
There are differences in nature of threat in movies. The Sinners, main character has to face Vampires that feed on their victims and want to enlarge their group. In Insidious, the protagonist has to face the dark realm (The Further) to save his son from demon and prevent other souls to enter his body. The techniques of delivering the stories are also much different from each other. Insidious uses classical horror style with many jump scares to create fear, moving in a fast pace. Sinners use a different approach – it takes time introducing its characters and moves in a slow pace. There are less jump scares in this movie in contrast to Insidious.
Both demonstrate Modus Legendi perfectly. It is a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender. In Insidious, the evil doesn’t haunt the house, it wants to haunt a child. It shows us about the parental anxiety. Here, the anxiety is about losing you child to something you cannot see or understand. In Sinners, there is connection of music and spiritual practices. Symbols used are guitar, vampires, and family bonds. It also tells how people deal with trauma and hope. The main Vampire wants to oppress and steal other’s life. Vampires here also represent a group suppressing other groups and want to take control on them. It is just a supernatural version of real-world oppression.
Insidious and Sinners use very different visual techniques to build their stories. Insidious makes feel like a nightmare using floaty camera keeping the mood creepy. In dark sights, camera moves very slowly as if camera is a ghost approaching towards the character. In contrast, Sinners have a rich and beautiful mood. There are long and elaborated scenes with slowly rising music.
Pivotal point in Insidious that changes everything and makes a way to find solution is in the scene where Josh’s mother shows him his childhood photos proving that the bride in black is the demon that haunted him first. He gets to know that he is the one that can bring his son back by doing astral projection as he done in his childhood. In Sinners, pivotal point is turning of Stack to vampire. This is the moment the entire film fractures. Smoke, the main character is in conflict to fight with his own twin. It is revealed here that evil may also attack you using love and emotional manipulation, using desires as weapon. The problem for smoke keeps shifting between “how to fight them” and how to “how to fight our owns”.
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