Genre Research: Birdbox

 To do more research on the Thriller genre, we watched the movie Birdbox. Birdbox is a horror, post-apocalyptic thriller that follows a woman as she struggles to find refuge for herself and her children away from an unknown entity who kills people when they look at it. Overall, the film was good with a compelling storyline that made you want to keep watching. The film used many elements usually found in the thriller genre, like for example, close-up shots. The movie used many close-up shots to display the character’s emotions and create a dramatic effect. The characters also all wore clothing with very dark and muted colors, and a large part of the film had low-key lighting to create shadows and build suspense. Many shots were over-the-shoulder shots to maintain a close up as the characters were talking, and many high angles to make the characters seem small and helpless against the entity. There were also a lot of track, pan and tilt camera movements to drag out the revealing of certain characters or objects and keep the viewer on edge. Something we found interesting as we were watching the movie, was that you could not see the antagonist. While doing research on thriller genre conventions, we found that the antagonist of the movie usually wears dark clothing that covers up a certain part of their body or just them as a whole to build suspense. This movie did that in a way, but instead of clothing concealing the antagonist, the antagonist was invisible. This was one of the things we liked about the movie, as it is a creative way to keep the audience engaged and create fear. We also liked that the movie had two storylines happening at the same time. One storyline was told from the perspective of the group of survivors 5 years in the past, and the other storyline was told from the perspective of Mallory and her children in the present. It kept you on edge as it made you wonder what happened in those 5 years that led them to that point. An aspect we didn't like about Bird Box was how gory it was. We found that there weren't many action scenes, but in the times when there was, you could see people dying in very violent ways. We feel the movie could've left out some of those details and it still would've been equally as frightening. Overall, the movie was enjoyable to watch, and we feel it was a good example of the thriller genre. The use of the closeup shots and over-the-shoulder shots, for example, exemplified the characteristics of the thriller genre and added to our enjoyment of the film.