Extra Credit: Hitchcock and Pisanthanakun & Wongpoom

Alfred Hitchcock is known for his twisted stories and shocking endings. Banjong Pisanthanankun and Parkpoom Wongpoom are two thai movie directors that also hold equally famous titles. Hitchcocks’s 1960 Psycho was a visually thrilling with its play on vertical and horizontals pacing and reveals. This play on camera panning and dimensional movement is also very clearly seen throughout Pisanthanankun and Wongpoom 2004 film Shutter. There are obvious differences in directing styles and voyeurism capturing because of the western and eastern influences, but the last revealing shots are both equally impactful and wicked.

Throughout the film many of Hitchock’s shots are mostly horizontal panning of the camera or bodies moving across the screen in a restively horizontal fashion. In the reveling scene of Psycho, there was a quick pan from a close-up shot of the lightbulb swinging from the ceiling to Lila’s reacting face to a wide shot of Norman dresses running into the cellar dressed as his mother. The swinging light emphasizes the vertical shot: Norman’s full height is accentuated with his raised arm while clutching the big kitchen knife, as his body takes up the entirety of the center of the shot. The vertical shots usually followed the gaze of the characters’ and this shot expertly shows Lila feeling terror and the sharpness of the violin screeching raises the hairs of the audience. The sudden change of close-up to full-body shots also are jarring and highlight the twisted ending.

In Pisanthanankun and Wongpoom’s Shutter, the last reveiling scene is unraveled in a similar way: a horizontal shots circle Tong as he is shouting out to our ghost-protagonist Natre. These are up-close and fully show Tong’s facial expressions, like Lila’s in Psycho. After a few of mid-shots of Tong pacing around his apartment and snapping Polaroid’s, we see a series of close-up shots of faces as a flashbacks before the reveal, ending on a close-up of his face. Then there is a sudden shift to a close-up of a full body polaroid picture of Tong with Natri sitting on his shoulders. This ending is a lot more built-up and elaborate than that of Psycho’s but similar fashion in which the two films used vertical and horizontals to build suspense are both great and shudder-worthy.