Michael wrote these notes while watching the first episode. They are not exhaustive, but give a little context to the episode when revising or considering themes. Remember to include a range of media language every tie you textually analyse a media product.
- Initial opening shots of the alps situates the show instantly. Themes of exoticism (for international audiences) and a popular holiday destination for French audiences.
- Montage of coach interior. School trip: an instantly recognisable situation for both young and old audience members.
- Coach crash and the death of schoolchildren is a potentially alarmist and extreme opening event.
- Iconography of death and impermanence. The scene of the butterfly breaking free from the glass is a particularly effective symbolic and hermeneutic code.
- Rural setting is emphasised through montage. Drained, desaturated MES made possible through post production colour grading.
- Opening credits use a restrained, low-key and atypical opening theme for a horror TV show.
- The lake pub - a stereotypical, even hyperreal location. Intertextual references to similar locations, such as the Double R diner in Twin Peaks or The Bronze nightclub in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
- Delivery and performance is slow, considered and understated.
- The bleak, desaturated, highly stylised twilight MES has possibly influenced other TV shows, for example Netflix's Ozark.
- Jérôme's distaste of the support group raises interesting themes about grief, community and togetherness.
- The Séguret family's middle class status is continually reinforced through through the MES of their house and it's surroundings/ This forms a binary opposition with Julie's smaller (state provided?) flat
- Horror elements are quiet and existential. Mogwai's soundtrack emphasises the horror that the mother suddenly experiences when her dead daughter emerges from the bathroom and asks for a bathrobe.
- Camille's status as the gendered other puts her square in the same realm as other horror film threat. The creepy little girl who comes back from the grave.
- Julie watches The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in a sly intertextual reference to a conventional horror film.
- A range of characters of different demographic groups. An effective targeting of many target audiences.
- Camile's apparent nonplussed reaction to her radically fantastical situation is confusing and alienating to the audience.
- Aside from the symbolically hermeneutic issues 'the returners' represent, and the still enigmatic murder scene in the underpass, there is a definite lack of antagonist in the first episode.
- MES of Camille's bedroom that of a stereotypical middle class teenager
- Again, Victor fulfils the 'creepy child' archetype. Julie's 'adoption' of Victor is as close as Les Revenants has to a cute, feel good story arc.
- The murder in the underpass may be an intertextual reference to Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002), which features a particularly notorious and unpleasant rape scene that happens in an underpass.
- Setting of brutalist, 60's style housing blocks
- Monsieur Costa killing his returned wife is an alarming and distressing scene, a confusing reaction for those used to the hyperreal romances of Hollywood TV and cinema
- Intertitle: FOUR YEARS EARLIER. A bold narrative choice, that confirms to the audience that many of their assumptions are wrong. Camille is not recently dead (in fact all of 'les revenants' have been dead for some time), and Camille and Lena are identical twins! Playing with the audience's expectations suggests a potentially high level of maturity... or something.
- The sex scene between Lena and her boyfriend is potentially shocking for British audiences. Depicting at an underage sexual relationship is seen as taboo (despite that fact that Britain has a much higher teen pregnancy rate than France...). It must be stated that while the character is 15, the actor was 18.
- The French for 'orgasm' is 'le petit mort' (the little death). What symbolic and ideological signification does this scene have?
Themes
Existentialism
Abjection and disgust
Death and rebirth
Challenging horror conventions
Loss and grief
Community and rural life
