The Warner Bros logo appears, however, it is different to the original colour. It has been grey scaled to highlight the film as a horror. An eerie soundtrack is embedded to also depict the horror genre. A classical instrument (the violin) is played with harsh techniques to produce agitation.
The first shot is an establishing shot of a house. From this, the audience can infer that this is the setting where the main action takes place. People are walking past the home, as if it’s an everyday activity, displaying the normality of the location. The Virgin Mary statue refers to religion, indicating the main theme of the film. Titles are then shown after this, and a simple font with a red colour, connoting blood and anger. This against a black background intensifies the thought of death.
A non-diegetic Islamic prayer is then heard in the background, confirming the theme of religion. The long shot of the sun dissolves from the colours black and white to a blood orange. There is movement within the image that follows, identifying as a heat wave. This influences the audience to determine this setting as the mise en scene also includes sand, relating the location to a desert of some sort between the African and Asian continents. This is then confirmed as the body in the bottom left of the frame states the location. The movement also makes the image look like archive footage.
The workers are then heard singing. People usually sing songs in this environment to get through the day, inferring that their work day is quite long as they continue to do the same thing for hours on end; dig. A continuous shot is used for this to refer to the length of time. The sound effect of the sharp mining pick is adamant. This iconography connotes danger as accidents are prone to happen in that workplace. The workers' clothes are plain and dirty, suggesting they are of the lower class and their country is a less economically developed country as they have not experienced the industrial revolution (as seen in the manual labour).
Subtitles are used as the language is foreign. The production company have not made the dialogue in the English language so that the footage seems to have some authenticity, almost as if The Exorcist has already been produced, but with different perceptions in different cultures and religions. The theme of evil is present in every religion. The close-up of the ancient figurine that they find notifies the audience of its importance within the film. This may have something to do with ancient myths or prophets as archaeology is about recovering the earth's history. After this, there is a cutaway to the long shot of the blood orange sky again, with a mosque in its skyline. This is an Islamic place of worship, again referring to the theme of religion. The recurring blood orange instead of a red colour implies that there is room for hope within the narrative.
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