Throughout our opening sequence there are copious amounts of psychological thriller media stereotypes that we use, develop or challenge.
In terms of using the media products of a psychological thriller we can see the main ingredient that our film follows is the lack of a plain or simple narrative, our opening sequence is very difficult to understand which is intentional, commonly psychological thrillers are supposed to by the end of the film make you feel as if you are unsure or completely unsure onto what is going on, this gives you time to think about the ending and approach it with your own interpretation, as perception plays a key part in psychological thrillers, especially the audiences perception of what is happening. We carried over this idea as without this idea of a false or interpretive narrative there would be a very thin line between a normal thriller and a psychological one, this allows us to make a heavy distinction between the two.
Another key part that we conformed to in terms of ingredients for a psychological thriller is the presentation of the mind and mental illnesses. Throughout our film we can see many shots of Erik struggling with his mental health, these are shown through the shots where we added layers of the same clip on top of each other but each layer was a little further ahead than the others, this created an effect that seemed like a distortion of reality, we used this as a placeholder to show the audience when Erik was going through an episode regarding his mental illness. The reason mental illnesses are commonly used is because psychological thrillers are all to do with the mind and as such showing a broken mind creates an eerie and uncomfortable feeling in the audience and once again relates back to perception, as the audience is unsure whether or not how the character is seeing things is based on his illness or actual truth.
In terms of development we added on to the use of suspense and horror within psychological thrillers. Psychological thrillers aren’t necessarily supposed to be horror films, however, there can be some clashes here and there, within our film we tried to develop this by making our film have many elements of horror films, for example, there is a sequence at the end where our character Erik is going through a schizophrenic episode and begins to hear demonic, ghostly and distorted voices. This is typical within a horror film, but within a psychological thriller this is used very lightly, in our film we decide to develop on it to create an antagonistic atmosphere around our protagonist, this allows the audience again to use their own perception on whether or not Erik is a hero or a dangerous, selfish character who cannot be trusted.
Psychological thrillers commonly use the character’s mental illness as the character’s “super power” essentially, they must use the hallucinations and voices they see and hear to help them find out the truth, we challenged this idea. In our opening sequence we decided to treat the mental illness as an obstacle for a character, something he must overcome in order to find the truth he needs, the reason we did this is because of our audience. Whilst our audience is young adult and above, a main key audience we wanted to hit was teenagers, teenagers especially within modern times are very susceptible to mental illness, in our opening sequence we did not want to be a typical psychological thriller and glorify mental illnesses, we wanted to show it as something that can be overcome and challenged and eventually beaten, so our young teenage audience can relate and possibly apply to their own lives and overcome their own problems, in a weird way Erik is a representation of a extremely broken mind undergoing repair and we believe that the message of health and mental health is very important nowadays, especially for teenagers who may be unable to cope.
