'Edward Scissorhands' opening scene analysis

An Opening scene should outline key characters and narrative in the Film. It should also use mise en scene, sound and lighting to set the genre of the film.

At the start of my A-level media course we took a long time
looking and analyising different film openings. I wrote two seperate peices of work on the opening of Dirty Harry and Edward scissorhands. The point of doing this was to get a better understand how film makers use sound, lighting, mise-en-scene, genre and camera angles/shots. Here is the opening extract from my essay on Edward Scissorhands, the question was How does Tim Burton Convey romance, fairytale, gothic and horror in the opening scene of 'Edward Scissorhands'?

"The opening scene of Tim Burton's 'Edward Scissorhands' conveys many conventions of the horror genre, however these are mixed with elements of fairytale and romance. The first image puts across the aspect of horror straight away as we associate an old, creepy statue covered in cobwebs as a scary image. The images of machinery appears cold and heartless untill we notice the machines resemble childlike toys, thus changing the mood of the scene. This miseen-scene begins to combine the genres of horror, fairytale and romance as we see elements of each genre in these images. Aspects of fairytale are continued throughout the scene as we see shapes of hearts, stars etc falling, creating a magical and childlike atmosphere which contrasts with the images of horror seen earlier. The image of the house sitting solitary at the top of the hill reminds the audiance of a haunted and spooky house. The fact that it appears surrounded by nothing reflects the character of Edward and how isolated he is form the outside world."

As you can see i have analysed the mise-en scene of the opening few seconds of the film to cleary show how different genres are combined in the scene.