THE IMPACT OF MISE EN SCÈNE IN THE HORROR MOVIE ‘SWEET HOME’

Abstract

A movie’s design can have a lot of power, and by power it means that said designs may immensely affect how a movie is delivered. By using the Sweet Home film series as a study case, this paper aims to identify and analyze the use of mise en scène in the movie and how it affects the plot, the audience, and the general mood of the movie, which would help the audience to decipher what exactly happened off screen and make them guess what will happen next. Our studies in this paper have deduced that mise en scène plays an important role in presenting this movie’s identity, which is horror, through its visual depiction of the plot. As such, it is very curious how this movie’s mise en scène has impacted the series in such a way that it successfully achieved its main objective. Therefore through literary studies, we will break down how mise en scène, specifically in lighting, decor/props and costumes may shape and control the mood of this movie, how and why its portrayal of the survival apocalypse, body horror and other components of the plot has proven effective to heighten the ambience of a horror movie and highlighted the frightening parts of the plot even more. As a conclusion, we hope that the studies we have done and wrote on this paper can give a proper, valid and clear, yet interesting, explanation of how mise en scène greatly affects the Sweet Home film series and its audience.

Keywords: mise en scène, sweet home, horror, monster apocalypse