Stangers on a Train Reaction Essay

Strangers on a Train Reaction

Brittany Mckallagat

Movies have never been my thing. I’ve been forced to watch countless amounts of movies with my movie buff friends, and they’ve just never been something I’m into. When forced to sit down and watch a movie I tend to get agitated and angry and yell things at the screen. I think Strangers on a Train is the perfect example of a film where I want to yell at the screen, but of course my yells always fall on deaf ears (or speakers). There’s something about Hitchcock films that make them particularly scary in comparison to other scary or horror films. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but after examination you realize that the “evil” character or the “bad” character always is someone you could meet in real life. Hitchcocks characters have mental illnesses that are explainable. In the case of Bruno, everything he says to Guy on the train makes perfect sense.

Everyone has mumbled, muttered or at least thought the three words; not I love you, but I’ll kill you. Bruno makes this mere thought that every person in the world has probably had at one point or another into a reality. It’s what makes Hitchcock films so realistically creepy. Bruno is a real man you could realistically be sitting next to on a train.

Not all of Hitchcock’s creepy factor comes from the realistic nature of his characters, it’s also in the way of the camera. The camera angles used by Hitchcock are some of the most interesting and manipulative of any movie I’ve seen. Hitchcock manipulates the audience into seeing strictly what he wants you to see. Hitchcock uses creative methods of showing what is going on, such as showing Mariams death through the glasses. The glasses represent that kind of distortion. They also leave the audience wondering what exactly happened because we were only given a distorted view to look through.