NARRATIVE UPDATE

Due to difficulties casting a male actor in the role of the Father, we have now decided to have the killer as the girl's sister.

We have cast Jodie as the dead girl and Lauren as the sister.

Because of this we have had to change small elements of the narrative.

Narrative

After deciding on the horror genre, we began thinking about narrative ideas. We didn't want our trailer to be like anything that had been done before.

One of our original narrative ideas was that a woman was being stalked by another woman. This drew on the recent increase in men admitting that they had been domestically abused by their female partners and also on the fear that women were increasing their standings in society.

However, we then thought that it would be interesting to include a supernatural element into our narrative. We wanted to include the theme of abuse, as it is a very relevant topic, and came to the idea of a girl who was being abused by her father.

After having researched abuse cases, many of the victims spoke about how they wish their abusers could understand the hurt they were feeling. We then thought of a question;

If a person who had been abused could have revenge on their abusers, would they?

In many cases, the abusers will receive only a prison sentence and not truly experience the pain and suffering they had caused their victims.

We thought it would be interesting if the victim in our film could have revenge.

At first we thought we would focus mainly on the victim (a teenage girl) in our teaser trailer, but it became difficult for us to create something that wouldn't include too much narrative.

We then realised that if we concentrated mostly on the father in the our teaser trailer, it would give less of the story away, thus inkeeping with the codes and conventions of a teaser trailer.

A basic outline of our narrative is;

-A girl is abused by her father. He eventually kills her and dumps her body in a lake, to hide the evidence.
-The father then denies ever having a daughter, and proceeds to try to forget about her. He appears to get on with his life, completely untroubled by past events.
-The girl comes back as a sort of half spirit/half zombie and decides to take her revenge on the man that took her life.

Obviously we won't include all of this in our product, because then it wouldn't be a teaser trailer, but we will introduce the characters of the father and the daughter, and it will be made obvious that the girl is not alive, yet not quite dead...

Research - Building on fear of death and the unknown

Our narrative focuses on the revenge of a young girl, with her father acting as the victim. Throughout the teaser trailer, we will demonstrate the father’s ongoing fears and reminders of his horrific past with his (now dead) daughter. By researching the investigations by Freud and Beeker, it supports our narrative in that the father has a fear of death and the unknown due to unresolved conflicts with his daughter. In addition, we will purposely build on the common fears described in Beeker’s book – being alone and being in a confined space.

Sigmund Freud – founder of psychoanalysis.

• States that thanatophatic (fears of death) was merely a disguise for a deeper source of concern, with people trying to deal with unresolved conflicts.

Ernest Beeker’s 1973 book – ‘The Denial of Death’

• States that not only is death anxiety real, but its people’s most profound source of concern.
• It is such intense anxiety that it generates many of the specific fears and phobias people experience in everyday life - Commonly fears of being alone and in a confined space; and the needs for bright light and noise.
• Victim suffers brutal reminders of vulnerability –difficult to control anxiety.