INITIAL IDEAS

Charlotte Bareham, Georgina Ottaway & Abbi

Griggs

INITIAL IDEA 1

A girl who lives alone in a farm house looks out her

bedroom window and sees someone standing outside her

house.

She investigates.

It’s a farmer who is holding a pitch fork.

He tries to kill her.

We have used our market research to influence our idea to

have no speech and for the protagonist to be a woman.

INITIAL IDEA 2

A girl is housesitting.

She hears a strange noise upstairs.

She stumbles upon a doll which is possessed.

The owner of the doll comes and haunts the house sitter.

On this idea the market research has guided us in the

direction of having an every day domestic setting and to

have a present day period.

INITIAL IDEA 3

Somebody escapes from a mental hospital because

she keeps having flashbacks of being bullied at

school.

She finds them people.

Kills them.

The market research has had an impact on this

idea as we included

DEVELOPED IDEA

The house sitter starts to read the note of what she has to do whilst housesitting.

However, she hears a strange noise upstairs and investigates. Whilst investigating

she finds a china doll. She picks it up and the door slams behind her. As she is

feeling frightened she rushes into the bathroom to cool down. Splashing her face

with water she glances out the window and discovers a young girl in a white dress

holding the doll whilst raising the other hand which has a knife in it. At this

moment in time she is petrified so reaches for the door handle, which won’t open.

Suddenly, the lights flicker which makes her even more scared. She opens the

door and runs out, but the young girl is standing behind her in the dark holding

the doll and newly blood covered knife. As she is running downstairs the audience

can see that she has newly cuts and bruises all over her back…

FINAL IDEAFor our final idea, we have decided to do idea number 2, which was about the girl who finds a doll in a house she is looking

after and a haunting begins and the ghost of a little girl starts appearing.

We are making a 15-certificate film because in order for it to be a horror it has to be either a 15 or 18 and considering our film

isn’t going to include intense gore/blood/language we have decided to go with a 15 certificate, as it would be more suited to

our plot.

We have taken into consideration our market research and our idea involves what the audience wants to see. For example,

the audience liked the black and white effect in our survey example so we have decided that the beginning of our opening will

start in black and white and fade into colour. We have also decided to set our horror film in a house in the present time

because it’s what our audience wants to see. Also, by having our film set in the present in a domestic setting, it becomes more

realistic to the audience and will play on their fears. We have decided to have a female and child in our film because the

audience said they wanted to see a child and we thought that by having a child ghost it would give the impression of

innocence, which would make the audience uncomfortable, as innocence is the polar opposite to horror; however, works well.

The overall summary of our plot is that a young girl is housesitting and in the evening she begins to hear strange noises

coming from upstairs so she goes to investigate. Once upstairs, she finds a doll that starts the haunting and throughout the

evening encounters more strange noises and a young girl with the doll who appears around the house. The haunting begins to

mess with her emotions and mind and eventually she tries to get out the house; however, doesn’t make it out.

Our film opening is going to be a non-linear opening, which means that our film will start at some other point in the film

rather than the beginning. We feel this would be the best for our film because it will give the audience a hint of what is going

to happen and will also enable us to fit in a lot more horror, rather than starting our opening at the beginning and not having

many conventions of horror.

Our horror opening is going to be a sub-genre of horror and fit into the psychological horror genre. The conventions we are

going to include are: relying on characters fears (the fear of being watched/followed), eerie sound effects (doors banging and

floorboards creaking), the supernatural and ghosts to build tension and the emotional instability of the protagonist once the

haunting starts. We are also going include dark places, terror of the unknown, vulnerability and a screaming victim.