Horror films: The Orphanage

After watching the Shinning I watched The Orphanage which was a very big change giving a very different form of Horror to the shinning.

Although the feel of the film was very different, it does share alot of similarities in terms of setup with the shinning, as with the shinning the film follows a couple and their son who are staying in a larg building, this time being the namesake of the film an orphanage. In this film The Wife Laura is the protagonist unlike in the shinning however throughout the film she has supernatural visions of the ghosts of the orphans who used to live in the building and although she has these experiances it cannot be said for sure that they were real

which can aslo be said with the shinning.

There is a very prominent feel of isolation in th film, particularly during the middle of the film onwards because Laura decides that she wants to be alone in the house to try and figure out where her son Simon because she begins to embrace the supernatural experiances in hope that they will help her find him.

although there where alot of classically scary shots throughout the film and jumpy scences throughout the film I did not find that theses were the scariest thing about the film. I felt that the endind was very powerful interms of horror, she confronts the ghosts of the orphans and finds her son who also turns out to be dead and as a result of this she takes her own life to be with them in the afterlife. While being made out as a happy ending as she is reunited with her son and the orphans I felt that the idea that she was driven as far as to kill herself was very extreme and what I felt to be the scariest thing about the film because something horrific was masked to seem like something beautiful and joyus.

Posters:

With the

posters of the Orphanage thay all share the same trates: they each have a central image being a significant characters being either Laura or Tomas, they all hav

e slightly blurred and faded surrounding images with a black haze boardering the poster, and there is a light scource coming from behind the central image boosting it and showing it's importance. These are fairly common trates amnongst horror posters (and many other genres)