Special Effects & Animation in Vertigo
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	Although Vertigo is to a certain extent a realistic thriller, it employs animation and special effects as a prominent way of representing Scottie's psychological state. One of the strangest uses of special effects is Scottie's nightmarish hallucinations, which occur after Madeleine's death and his subsequent breakdown because of his guilt over having caused a second death. Triggered by his psychotic depression, this
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	eruption of animation depicts the scattering of the mythical Carlotta's bouquet of flowers and a black abstract form of Scottie's body falling onto the roof of the church. Another powerful example of special-effects animation occurs when Scottie begins to lose his grip on one reality and become engulfed in another. As Scottie kisses Judy, the woman Gavin Elster hired to impersonate his wife, they spin free of the background of the room and become literally
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	engulfed in each other, like a kind of exotic dream. Of course, this dream won't survive these special effects or Scottie's realization that Judy as Madeleine had been part of an elaborate scheme. At the end of the film, Scottie and Judy return to the church and tower to confront his vertigo. Judy is startled by a nun emerging from a trapdoor and steps backward, falling out the tower window to her death.
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	An eerie matte shot superimposes a tower on the actual church at San Juan Bautista, perhaps to add a crucial element to the setting where Scottie's fear of heights is exploited. And as if to enhance the nightmarish significance of the tower, in the last shot the matted image of the tower appears to glow ominously as it looms over yet another dead body.