Title Research: Along came a spider

 While researching title sequences, we discovered the movie Along Came a Spider on the Watch the Titles website. As an intriguing suspense-thriller from 2001, it caught our eyes. During the opening sequence, the film studio, production company, first-billed actors, the movie name, casting directors, music supervisors, costume designer, and editors. The titles were introduced gradually, with a single letter crawling to the middle of the screen, as if it were a spider gliding down a thread. The rest of the letters in the titles were soon revealed. This process repeats until all the names are shown on the screen one at a time. There are little to no explicit images shown in the opening. For almost the entire sequence, the background was just a series of constantly flickering green and blue lights. It’s extremely difficult to distinguish where these lights are coming from, until it is shown that it is actually a monitor by the end of the sequence. Thus, immediately as the movie starts, the audience is confronted with a mystery they want to solve. They wonder what they are looking at for 2 whole minutes. The thriller genre is notable for its strategies to make the audience uncertain. The opening already established this suspenseful feeling from the beginning, since the titles were introduced as if they were spiders, an animal feared by most people. The main points of the opening sequence had to do with the sound. Throughout the opening, the audience can hear a conversation between two faceless people. With the sound quality of these voices, the audience can assume that they’re listening to a wiretapped conversation. There was static ambient noise, and a signature sound motif that sounded as if something was soon going to happen. With the sound and title sequence together, the opening gave a sort of eerie and suspicious feeling, an essential component to any thriller film. This movie was rated R and is marketed as a thriller/mystery, which means its intended audience was adults that like to stay on the edge of their seat as they play detective. Immediately as the movie started, there were so many mysteries that the audience wanted to figure out. First, the titles that were shown were a mystery. For example, Morgan Freeman did not just transition onto the screen immediately. First, a single letter appeared, and then the entire title was shown. Secondly, the audience did not even know where they were. For most movies, the opening is where the location is established, but the location was shrouded in mystery during the opening sequence. 

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