Director's Commentary

A Deadly Charade

Director's Commentary

We’ll start our review of A Deadly Charade, We start out here with a close up on the bottle with the skulls on it, this insinuates that something bad is about to happen, the close up on the hands that provides a mysteriousness, though we see the hands we don’t know who it is yet. Then we have the titles. Then you kind of get a group shot here, you get a group shot of everybody. Then you get a medium long shot here of the guy acting out charades. You got the titles. Then you get that shot right there of him drinking that cup, then you automatically go back to the beginning and you think about that first shot. You get a close up on the paper right there, from his point of view. You see them acting out charades that’s pretty fun, they’re trying to guess it. This is the interesting part, what everybody thinks is good acting, good charades, this is the mysteriousness, you got to really look at everybody’s face there, and then you see a sense of discovery right here that’s about to occur; someone recognizing something’s wrong, something went wrong. It’s no longer a typical game of charades. Then after the discovery you get, you got the character deciding that they’re going to stay until somebody is decided to be the killer. This is where you really have to start paying attention to the facial expressions, because as a horror movie you want to know who the killer is, you know? You have to look for all the suspicious faces and actions, that’s a little funny right there. We have the titles in between to kind of show the transitions, that’s an editing tool and for certain silent films they’ll have title pages come between. What you saw in the first scene is a bunch of natural light coming in from the windows and now transitioning to the darkness, which provides more mystery. It’s still natural light honestly, it’s just darker. You get the overhead view from a different perspective; right there you kind of get the perspective from the killer. The camera is at the angle looking from the perspective of the killer, so you just see the victim, and this is from the victim’s perspective as the killer is going up the stairs. Right there was an editing tool, you see the guys at the top of the stairs and then it cuts to him at the bottom of the stairs laid out. That was an editing tool to insinuate that the guy was pushed down the stairs. Here at the end you get the discovery of who the killer is, then the titles again of course. So, you figure out who the killer is here and normally you would think, well, the killer comes in to contact with an innocent person so that person must die or join forces, then it kind of transitions into you know, somebody, to the innocent person taking over; becoming the killer himself. Taking matters into his own hand and then at the end you have the credits. That’s about it, that’s where it ends. That was A Deadly Charade.