Director: Mike Newall
Year of Release: 2005
Genre: Fantasy
The movie begins with tense orchestral music which builds to a crescendo as the camera focuses on the ‘Warner Bros. Pictures’ logo. The camera zooms into and passes through the ‘Warner Bros.’ Logo to show a wall made of skulls. As the camera vertically pans down the wall, we see a snake emerging from the mouth of one of the skulls and slithering up a grassy path in a dark, misty graveyard. The skulls along with the misty graveyard emit a sense of death and the snake itself could represent evil. This is because in the Bible, Satan takes the form of a serpent in order to persuade Eve to disobey God’s orders and eat the forbidden fruit. As the snake progresses through the graveyard, it reaches a tomb accompanied by a statue of the Grim Reaper. The serpent slithers up the tomb and in the meantime the camera approaches the statue and vertically pans upward to give the impression that the Reaper is imposing itself on the viewers, again, supporting the sense of death in the scene.
The next shot is an establishing shot of a small cottage in the foreground, and a large mansion in the background. The mansion appears to be enshrouded by mist, which suggests it may be involved in sinister goings on. Up to this point, the setting seems to be quiet and uninhabited; however, a light suddenly appears in the upstairs window of the cottage, suggesting that we are likely to encounter the first human character in the film. The first we see of this character is of them striking a match over a stove, with an intension of boiling the kettle. After he puts the kettle on the stove the man steps back and stretches out his arms and fingers. This signifies that his arms could be stiff as a result of arthritis. The man is distracted from making tea when he looks out the window and double-takes to see a flickering light through one of the upstairs windows of the mansion. He throws the teabag down in anger and mumbles “bloody kids” as he walks off to investigate. His reaction to seeing the flickering light may imply that he has either had trouble with local youths trespassing in the mansion previously, or he has a stereotypical view of young people, and instantly accuses them of being the culprits. He picks up a set of keys from a hook, which could suggest he is some form of caretaker or grounds keeper of the mansion. It has now become obvious that the mansion is probably derelict, as if it were inhabited, the man would not find it unusual for a light to be flickering from one of the rooms.
We then see the old man walking through the gardens towards the mansion. He looks uneasy as he walks, reinforcing the possibility of him being arthritic and finding movement a chore. The man walks up the stone steps and approaches the door to the mansion, finding it unlocked, which further arouses his suspicion that there are intruders inside. He slowly crosses the threshold, to see the hallway ridden with cobwebs and dust, which supports the viewers’ suspicion of the mansion being derelict.
