The Most Suspenseful Scene in Perfect Blue
(trigger warning for blood)
You know, after having several years of experience working as a security guard in a parking garage, a certain scene in the Satoshi Kon movie, "Perfect Blue," hits differently.
I kept thinking what made the radio in the elevator scariest for me.
I'm a security guard who has worked in parking garages like this for a few years now, particularly in an elevator lobby. I've used elevators like this one all day every day for years. And the thing that sticks out to me the most, is that for the most part, these elevators move at a moderate pace. Even the slowest ones will get you to your floor in a few seconds, but it still takes some time for it to reach the bottom and open the doors automatically. But, they go just slow enough, that if someone was really hurrying down the stairs, they could beat the elevator to the bottom floor, easily, even if they started on the same floor. I see it every day.
And at the beginning of this scene, we see him find the note on his car, and we figure, huh, some lousy punks are pranking me, they probably did this some time while I was at work and are long gone by now.
But then, we hear the music coming from the elevator and it completely recontextualizes his feelings of safety and mundanity in this situation. Now we think, what if whoever left the note on his car... What if they aren't gone? What if they're still around...?
And then we watch him carefully approach the elevator with unease,
So then when the doors actually open we're expecting to see the killer, but we don't. Instead we see the floor of the elevator, and it's red. (That is far from a common color for elevator floors I'll just say that,)
This was intentional, to contrast the blue radio, and give the environment around it a sense of danger.
Because as soon as you see the blaring radio on the red floor of the elevator, your gut wrenches as you realize, the killer isn't in there. But someone put that radio blaring that Cham song that loudly on that elevator, at that moment he was there, on purpose.
Specifically because they wanted him to be looking down, at the elevator, with the music blaring so it drowns out all other sound behind him, which is even louder in big echoey parking garage, and be so puzzled, he's not even not thinking about what could be behind him.
And that's when you realize what's about to happen but it's already too late.
