Genres and Inspirations!

After two days of scratching my brain, trying to form a coherent idea or plot for my film and to pick a genre, I have decided that my film will be a psychological thriller. I truly enjoy the suspense and the character-drivennes of thriller films. One of my favorite thrillers  of all time, Gone Girl (2014 dir. by David Fincher), is a psychological thriller and even after watching it for the umpteenth time, I still enjoy it.

Psychology is something that has always intrigued and interested me (it's one of my college majors!) and I want to sort of have that effect on my audience with my film opening.

The opening scene from Gone Girl is very cryptic and rather disturbing in my opinion because the music is very eerily soothing. It creates a calm-before-the-storm aura which, in addition to Ben Affleck's character Nick Dunne's dialogue, piques interests. It also instills doubt and curiosity in the minds of the viewers which I think is exactly how a psych thriller should be. I feel like this is an excellent way to start off the film and it's something I want to do with mine. 

Gone Girl is definitely one of my  biggest inspirations so far. As of now, I want to follow the typical characteristics of a thriller to the 'T' because the rough idea that I have in my head is very suited to the archetypal thriller genre.

I found a rather interesting article about the elements of a psychological thriller in books and comics, and I want to use that (along with all the research I will do over the course of time!) as a basis to create my film. Although the article talks about reading, the audience of films are quite similar to readers of a novel in terms of their expectations from the works. 

Another aspect of the film opening that I have finalized is that I want the protagonist to have dissociative identity disorder (DID). I haven't done nearly enough research on the topic yet, but I do have some prior knowledge about this disorder. I recently watched the film Split (2016 dir. by M. Night Shyamalan) which revolves around a man with DID who kidnaps three girls. The disorder is depicted perfectly in the movie and it sort of inspired me to use the same disorder, although the plot of my film will be completely different. I'm sure that in the next few weeks, I'm going to watch this movie a few more times, so I can figure out the filming aspect of my video.

I currently feel very relieved to have a general direction to move in! Hopefully, by next week, I'll have created a plot for the film-opening and rough character sketches of the protagonist and the alters.

Citations: 

"10 Basic Ingredients of a Successful Thriller". Writer's Digest. Writer's Digest. 5 Sept. 2008. www.writersdigest.com/qp7-migration-conferencesevents/qp7-migration-maui/10-basic-ingredients-of-a-successful-thriller. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. 

"Elements of the Psychological Thriller, Mystery, Suspense and/or Crime Fiction Genres". Word Hunter. 12 Oct. 2012. www.hunterswritings.com/2012/10/12/elements-of-the-psychological-thriller-mystery-suspense-andor-crime-fiction-genres/. Accessed on 9 Mar. 2017.