Before I wake

Today, I would like to discuss about the movie “Before I Wake” by Mike Flanagan in 2016. I will discuss the genre of this movie and how it relates to the semantic and syntactic approach.

Genre is a way of organizing films according to type. As Rick Altman said, the best method of categorizing films is semantic and syntactic approach. Semantic means the visuals, mise-en-scene of the films, which are locations or settings, makeup and costume, lighting, and actor’s behavior and movement. Syntactic means the themes of the film and we can derive it from the narrative of the film. Genre analysis must only be made by combining both components, semantic and syntactic.

Why we should have genre for the films?

The film must possess universal semantics and syntaxes that found in corresponding genres in order to fall into any particular genre. It can be the guideline for the director to do a film. It also lets the audience has a choice to choose what type of film they want to watch easily. Genre can display the characteristics of the film by semantic and syntactic approach. The director knows that what scenes should be include in the film to humour the audience’s expectation. For example, in an action film, there must be extended chase scenes, fast cuts shots to show expression of every characters and repeating scenes in different angle. These is what audience expect to see in the film. When directors are familiar with these “laws”, they try to innovate new things into the film so that the audience will not be bore.

(Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=before+i+wake&

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Back to our film for this week, Before I Wake. It is an American supernatural fantasy horror film directed by Mike Flanagan and co-written by Flanagan and Jeff Howard in 2016. The story is about Jessie and Mark, a couple who just lost their son Sean, adopt a new foster child named Cody. This child is really lovely and pleasing but the problem is he refuse to sleep at all. Slowly they found out that Cody’s dreams will become reality. Jessie attempts to use Cody’s power to meet with Sean. But nightmare comes one after another and starts to harm their life. In order to save their family, Jessie and Mark must find out the hidden secret behind Cody’s dreams.

As I mentioned before in my several blogs past few week, horror is one of the oldest genres from Hollywood. Horror is the main genre for this film as it contains a number of scenes to frighten the audience. There are a few subgenres under horror categories which is unnatural, psychological and massacre or slasher flicks. This film is in the unnatural as Cody has the supernatural power. The nightmare that created by Cody, Kanker, actually is himself, he tries to protect himself as his dying mother told him “I’m always with you” when he was really young. He does not understand what is cancer that time so he read it as “kanker”, where the nightmare come. There are also some old tricks that usually used in horror film. For example, the children ghost hide under Cody’s bed, there is someone behind Jessie who she can’t see but the audience can, and the dead child, Sean, comes back to interact with parents. The bathtub scene where Sean accidently die is really a horror scene for me especially when Jessie came through a room and she saw the same things happen in front of her. But actually it is an illusion created by Cody’s nightmare. We can see that Jessie is really anxiety and miserable. She is struggling whether will she goes to the bathtub or just ignore it and goes to save Cody in another room.

The idea of this film is very interesting and attractive at the beginning, but the ending seems like not following the usual horror film trend. I think that the director wants to combine horror film and touching storyline to show the love between mother and son. It looks like a combination of genre in this film but not mixed very well. The child has supernatural power but ended with actually the nightmare is himself. It is an anti-climax for me. The story ended with Jessie hugs Cody and tells him all the characters in the story will have a happy ending. The point is the film did not tell the audience how about the innocent people that eat by the nightmare? Where they go? It looks like an open ending for the audience to imagine and no too much explanation for Cody’s supernatural power.

Lastly, genres evolve from times to times until now. The combination of genres makes the narrative different so that the audience will not be bored. But genres should have to be audience based, following the expectations of industry. For this case, I didn’t not see what I expect in the ending.