Textual Analysis

Research

We reasearched many films following similar plots and themes to ours to get a few ideas and inspiration. We found 3 key films that encouraged us to use certain aspects in our film and in general give us a jist of the genre.

'Don't Say a Word'

The first film we looked at was 'Don't Say a Word' (2001). The main character of this film is a young female who suffers from a mental illness and is therefore in an asylum, similar to our film on some levels.
The main reason we used this film as a key source of inspiration was because of the main character called Elizabeth played by Brittany Murphy being so similar to our idea to have a young female as the protagonist. Her characterisation was extremely powerful and we used some of the theatrical techniques in our film.




This clip shows those techniques. The director uses slow, steady camera work to contrast with the woman's mental state; the camera zooms while she repeats "I'll never tell", emphasising her worrying mental condition which we used in our film.

The Trailer



'Psychosis'


The second film we used for inspiration and brain storming is 'Psychosis', a film based on a woman who's disturbed by the thought of her own death. She expriences extremely far flung visions inside her head which makes it very hard for anyone to believe her and so she get gradually more and more mentally ill with no one to confide in.

This is typical of the horror genre but it works well and the conventions of a horror by including previous traumas haunting people beyond the occurance are certainly present.
This useful portrayal of a woman's psychotic breakdown being driven by a previous trauma persuaded us to go include this conventional storyline, it proved successful in this film.


The Trailer



'Shutter Island'


This film was our final influence and although it wasn't released at this point, we found a preview trailer after a friend who had read the book informed us about it. The story is extremely clever and it's a truly gripping film with a great twist!
If we were to finish the rest of the film, we had ideas to include a twist similar to this film but the opposite of the this film's ending in that the main character wouldn't actually be mentally ill but gifted because she can see into her future and is really experiencing premonitions.
The terrific creepy depiction of mental illness in the film inspired us to base our horror clip on the breakdown of an innocent person's mind.
This film also uses previous traumatic tragedies as the cause of the main character's unstable mental state. As this was frequently the basis for most of the horror films about psychology we researched, we used the same conventional plot line.

The Trailer



In the trailer, it is clear that the main character, Teddy Daniels, is very traumatised by the death of his wife. The representation of the way he is haunted by her death and abscence in his life is fantastic and although we couldn't possibly use the same type of editing and filming, we tried to represent the same feeling of despair and show how much the character in our film is at her wit's end.