Remix: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Screams

Wow, what a masterpiece. In all seriousness, there are a lot of things I could have potentially executed better. Before I get into that though, allow me to talk a little bit about the texts I remixed.

For my video, I went the route of the given example video “Shining” (The remix of “The Shining ” set in a romantic comedy style trailer), and remixed the film “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” to mimic the style of a horror movie trailer. As guides I used the trailers for “It” and “Cabin in the Woods.” These trailers used intense music, foreboding scenes of suspense and violence, and ominous title graphics to induce moods of fear and adrenaline. While I didn’t actually sample directly from these texts, the music that I used from the video “Dark Action Trailer Music” seemed to fit the theme of the typical horror trailer well enough that it could have substituted for the music in the “It” and “Cabin in the Woods” trailers. For this reason, I deemed it a worthy text to remix with the Harry Potter film.

I chose to remix “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” because I view it as a text with pretty interesting atmosphere and tone. While it’s definitely a piece of children’s media situated firmly in the fantastical genre of children’s fantasy, some pretty dark things happen in this film. There’s an ominous message smeared on the walls in blood, Hermione gets petrified, Harry and Ron get attacked by the whomping willow and a horde of spiders, and there’s a giant snake monster prowling the depths of the school waiting for the right moment to strike. I felt that I had a lot of darker elements in this particular movie to play with, and thought that remixing this film would help bring these often glossed-over themes to the fore-front.

As for what I could have done better, I think some of the captions stay on screen for too long–especially at the beginning. The part with Ron and the spider still irks me. I can’t tell if it’s the lack of audio or the choppiness, but it’s something. Obviously my sound mixing is off, and I could stand to include more sinister clips from the film. Maybe more of the basilisk itself! I also think my clip suffers from not defining a main antagonist like so many horror movies do. I think if I worked more on it, I might be able to frame the teachers as evil as Snape and Filch do a pretty good job of acting intimidating towards a gang of 12-year-olds.

Really quick, I’d also like to talk about what’s up next! I think I might do an ARG WordPress game where you, the player, would be someone who stumbles across the blog of this missing girl. Her parents have left a note saying that their daughter is missing, and they’re leaving the blog up just in case anyone can find any hidden clues. The girl (Emily, I’m thinking of calling her), wrote poetry, so the clues for finding out more about her story will be nestled in her poems. I was THINKING about having a lot of her posts be password protected, and the fun come from solving these passwords through reading her poems, but that doesn’t seem wholly exciting enough. Thoughts? Suggestions? Is there a platform for a fake blog that might work better than WordPress?

Music:

Trailers: