Narrative Developments

1. Devising an idea with a clear narrative structure

We were asked to come up with a detailed synopsis of a story for the following premise:

Horror, 4 teenagers on a road trip. Four of the teens dissappear/die. One girl survives.

How will the story start? -
 A group of friends go on a holiday to stay in a beach hut in "Kilton-by-the-sea"

What is the threat? -
One of the female characters who tags along with her boyfriend on the trip has crazy tendancies. After an argument with her boyfriend she looses control of this. Everyone she sees she visualises as her boyfriend and her anger takes over her as her friends suffer.

Where are they? -
A run down beach hut in Killton-by-the-sea, it is dimly lit, abandoned by its previous owners and isolated next to a dangerously rough sea. The area itself is rough and barely inhabited.

How do they go missing? -
The group go out to look for her, on a dark misty evening as the tide is quickly coming in. Each time one finds her they are killed as she sees them as her boyfriend, not for who they actually are. Each death is different and relates strongly to the sea side setting around them.

Why and how does she survive? -
The last two left are the crazy girl and a smart girl, the smart girl is able to predict the crazy girls next moves which allows her to kill her. However the smart girl is aware she will take the blame for the deaths so makes the crazy girls death appear suicide and then frames her own death as a murder before running off.


2. Anti-narrative: Break the narrative conventions


We were then asked to change the order so that the narrative was more complicated and non-linear.


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We used the lack of narrative in our new plan to create a more paranoid horror where impossibilities could be revealed and used this advantage to change who the murderer is multiple times to keep the audience guessign and wondering even after the film has ended.

Nick Laceys Schema of Genre

We learnt that films follow a number of generic conventions to allow them to be recognised as a part of a genre and then looked at Nick Laceys schema of genre and used it during planning.

Characters: We included imature teenagers as they are instantly more vulnerable and made a few of them female as females are looked upon as more vulnerable in horror. We stuck to the final girl theory and left our crazy female and smart female fighting it out to the end.

Setting: We used a typical abandoned area where the group are unfamiliar with and included a number of dangers for them from the begining such as the rough sea, the run down beach hut and its unstableness, the roughness of the area surrounding it, the dark misty weather and the isolation of its destination.

Iconography: We have planned to use pathetic fallacy where the weather is dark and misty when the murders start and allow it to get darker and darker as they proogress. We will use an unrythmatic piece of music to unnerve the audience and we will have the girl who murders the others wearing a necklace with the devils logo on from the start to give the audience a small hint before anything happens.

Narrative/ Theme: In our origional plan, we used Levi-Strauss's theory of binary opposites. Everyone in the group is outgoing and loud whereas the crazy girl is quiet from the begining. At the end, the two characters left are the smart girl and the crazy girl, two characters which are compelte opposites. With our second film plan, the anti-narrative, we aimed for the audience to percieve the messages in different ways allowing them to question themselves and each other and not give the film and individual meaning ourselves. We looked into Barthes theories to help us with this:

>Enigma Codes - We included many hints to who the murderer could be including contrasting ones to make the audience think and come up with a plot themselves.

> We included action codes, mainly with the crazy girl whos quietness and origional innocence and shyness hints to her character having dark secrets. We also had a male character who acts as the "know it all" which an audience will have seen in other horrors and understand he is unlikely to surive.

>Semic Code - The old abandoned run down beach hut in an isolated area at night = a danger.