Final Idea

To come up with an overall idea for our psychological thriller, we put our two individual ideas together to compare them and work out which aspects we liked best about each others. We then came up with the basis of our final idea:

We then came up with the details of our opening, which were again based on both of our separate ideas. We have the protagonist (Christian Carter) beginning the opening by killing his girlfriend (Alice Nate).
The first things we see and hear is a black screen and then Alice's scream followed by two gun shots. We are then shown Christina carrying Alice through a deserted field who we can clearly see has been killed.
Christian then jolts awake in his bed with a voice over explaining that he experiences the same nightmare every night, but that that the incident actually happened. We are then introduced to a photo of him and Alice smiling together, except Alice's eyes have now been crossed out.
We decided to do this as we wanted to create a sort of enigma to why Christian has killed Alice, and to make our audience wan to find out his reasons for this. The photo will then dissolve into a missing poster of Alice, showing that she has not been found, and people are unsure of whether she is actually dead or not.
Christian appears walking down the street, and another voice over is used to introduce a flashback to when he was younger and found his brother on the floor, dead. He will then state that this event caused him to have to see a therapist.
When he arrives at the therapists office, she opens the door to greet him and Alice steps out, but only Christian notices her, connoting that she is a ghost or some sort of figment of his distorted mind. This is the end of the opening.

 

When looking at Todorov's Narrative Structure Theory, we found that our opening idea does not in fact follow the 'rules' of a film, as we do not start nor end with an equilibrium, meaning that we consequently have nothing to disrupt the start or restore at the end. However, I believe that this works well for our specific genre as Psychological Thrillers are supposed to be out of the ordinary and follow their own set of rules which are separate to other genres.  

We also completed a codes and conventions table which allowed us to figure out how we were going to create enigma, how we were going to set up the plot, how we were going to introduce the characters and what the pace and rhythm and the mood and tone were going to be like, and whether or not they would work well together to attract our audience.

Psychological Thriller Documentary

To summarise our research on Psychological Thrillers, we have created a documentary containing codes and conventions of psychological thrillers, the history of psychological thrillers, our target audience and also how our findings have all come together to help us produce our opening. We have included a lot of research which we have found throughout this stage of our production, and this documentary will ultimately be our guide to what we shall and shan't do in our opening.
We have used a range of technologies within our document such as voice overs, clips and music. However, I believe we could have made it even better by embedding these technologies together, such as inserting clips into the history of the genre. 

PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER DOCUMENTARY:

Target Audience

I have made a mood board based on the demographics of my target audience. I have chosen these images as they represent the types of teenagers that we found would enjoy our film. We found that our target audience enjoyed spending their time doing activities such as surfing the internet, doing their nails, playing on game consoles and listening to music. The range of ages that we found was 16-18, which meant that our target audience would still be completing their education. We found all of this information out via both survey monkey and our focus group.

 

Psychological Thriller Opening Ideas

Focus group document

This is a video of the actual focus group that took place. As well as the questionnaires, we also had the participants take part in a small discussion about each of the films, and also a discussion about which they preferred and why. Our focus group was very effective, as we had a diverse range of people attend and it allowed us to understand more about the demographics of our target audience, and also their opinions of psychological thrillers; what they like and dislike, what they expect, what they don't expect and what works well and what doesn't.

Focus Group

For our focus group, we showed our audience two Psychological Thriller openings: The Sixth Sense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyCqv7ReKz4 and We Need To Talk About Kevin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxHdvs01QEA. They watched the openings, then completed three questionnaires we construced about both themselves and the openings. We did this to get a greater understanding of the demographics of our target audience, and also what their opinions on Psychological Thrillers are.  

History of Psychological Thrillers: Alfred Hitchcock

When researching Psychological Thriller, we believed it would be a good idea to include aspects of Psychological Thrillers from when they were first created. We looked back on the history of them to find out who had the most influence in starting the genre and making it what it is today.

When the genre was first introduced, the main aspects that made it identifiable were the levels of suspense, tension and excitement the genre conveyed in contrast to other film genres.
One of the most influential film directors in the genre was Alfred Hitchcock. (13^th August 1899 – 29^th April 1980)  Hitchcock was an English film director and producer who established many of the techniques we find in the suspense and Psychological Thriller genres today and

was named England's best director after his successful career in silent films and talkies.

Hitchcock’s first thriller was his third silent film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), which was a Jack the Ripper story. The Lodger introduced many themes, which would later run through most of Hitchcock’s work, and the director himself would refer to The Lodger as the first true ‘Hitchcock film’.
Hitchcock continued to direct and produce films through the 30s and 40s, then began to add colour in the 50s with films such as Strangers on a Train (1951) and Dial M for Murder (1954).
After his mass of classics in the 50s, Hitchcock released the shocking and engrossing thriller: Psycho (1960) about an encounter between a secretary, a motel's disturbed owner-manager.  Psycho initially received mixed reviews, but eventually led to overwhelming critical acclaim and four Academy Award nominations including best Director for Hitchcock.

It is now considered one of Hitchcock's best films and praised as a work of cinematic art by international film critics and film scholars. Ranked among the greatest films of all time, it set a new level of acceptability for violence, deviant behavior and sexuality in American films.

In 1992, the US Library of congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry, and is now known as the icon for Psychological Thrillers.

The 1970s and 1980s saw Psychological Thrillers becoming vivid, explicit and violent. Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) was given a R rating as a consequence of an explicit strangulation scene.