Sound Analysis: Funny Games

Funny Games
(1997)

(There was a 2007 remake but the 1997 version is so much scarier)

• The scene starts with an opera song while the camera tracks a car along a motorway. It isn't uncommon for horror movies to include opera songs at the beginning but they are usually slow and calming. This song is very dramatic and intense which could be foreboding of the rest of the movie. 
• At first you can't be sure if the song is diegetic or non-diegetic. We then find out that the family in the car are guessing the songs playing on CDs in the car (diegetic). 
• When the woman and the man start to have a conversation, it catches the audience's attention because in the beginning they are just listing names of composers and the audience may be trying to guess at what they're talking about. 
• The conversation throughout the opening is not stimulating at all; the dialogue doesn't tell the audience anything about the plot except that these 3 characters are involved. Usually at quiet and peaceful parts of a horror movie something scary is expected to happen to give the audience a jump scare. This conversation may have been intended to keep the audience on edge.
• The disruption that the audience might have been expecting came in the form of a disturbing heavy metal song that suddenly presents itself along with the title of the film. This is contrapuntal because it completely counteracts the serenity and monotony of the first few minutes of the opening with disarray.
• This causes the audience to feel slightly disorientated and uncomfortable because their eyes are telling them one thing, but their ears are telling them something else. The situation isn't familiar and the music is especially disturbing with screaming and random bursts of yelping.
• This could also connote that the audience is being told something that the characters don't know (dramatic irony) because we can hear the loud commotion and feel uncomfortable confusion while the family sits in the car with happily with ignorance behind the blood-red titles.
• The music continues even after a CD is taken out of the player, demonstrating clearly that the music is non-diegetic and that the music is something that the family wouldn't listen to. The classical music and heavy metal are on opposite ends of the music spectrum, almost mirroring the innocent family's lives being ruined by something anarchic.

The use of conversation and music definitely worked well to convey genre and to manipulate the audience's emotions. I think contrapuntal sound is used a lot in films because it is an unusual and unconventional way to present the atmosphere (or genre, or storyline...) and is used  abstractly to draw audience's attention to the screen which would be useful in our opening sequence. However, because our film is crime action, if we used contrapuntal music it would end up sounding comedic, and we want our film to be thrilling and exciting.