Dexter: From script to screen

The idea of Dexter initially came from the name "Dexter" the letters in the name can be turned upside down, or back to front and they still look relatively the same. Eric Anderson found this important for the character he was about to create, because Dexter doesn't change much from his everyday life, to when he becomes a serial killer.
Eric was also fascinated by crime scene photographs, for example a photograph of a window looks ordinary, until you find out it's background and find out that it's the window from which Martin Luther King was shot from. Which reflects back to Dexter, he seems ordinary until his background is found out through the way he carries out his morning routine.
 Everything has a sense of violence to them, an example of this is a blossoming flower; the petals opening up could be seen as an explosion. This bleeds into the morning routine that Dexter has, because all of the normal activities have been twisted into a sense of violence, for example tying his shoe laces reflects him strangling someone. even though it is a normal everyday the way he does it makes him seem scary, and violent, allowing the audience to see what kind of character he is.
Noir lighting and shallow depth of field has been used to hide a part of Dexter (with shallow depth of field it was his face in the mirror, and noir lighting it was half of his face being put into shadow) These techniques have been used to connote that Dexter has a dark side, or a secret, making the viewers see him differently. Non diegetic music and jump cuts has added more to the atmosphere and makes Dexter seem all the more scary because he is portrayed as a "normal" person, and we know from the way he does things that actually he is not.
Eric's first choice of music for the sequence was Xploding plastix but after some advise from the show creators he changed it to the track that is being used now. Xploding plastix seemed too dark for Dexter, so non of the other techniques were being focused on as much (for example Barthes' enigma codes) The music didn't give the sequence as much mystery, because it gave too much away. The music that was finally used lets the audience listen to the music along with the pictures and see that Dexter is in actual fact not what he seems. And that there is something wrong about him.