Evaluation of Coursework movie: Reworking the familiar, part 1b) Looking back at preliminary task what has progressed from it to the full project?

At a Macro 'Symbolic' level, our fiction film reflected the conventions of a pyschological horror. We wanted to portray the sense of what your mind replaces of what you see and hear with their own personal thoughts. The way we wanted to portay this was having the psychopath watching and following the victim from far away, but not too far so you can't see their body. Having a mask in our movie really added to the pschological point of the genre. This is because not seeing the face of a psychopath keeps the audience on the edge of their seat as there is an unknown identity. The fact that it was obviously a home made mask made the more scarier as it was very rough and had a bloody hand print on it. The music also added to the tension as it was a build up on the strings so it drawed the audience in as they wanted to know where the music was taking them.


Our film did fulfil the contractual nature of the film genre as it did feel very psychologically scary. This was because it matched the expectations of a typical horror genre. However we did slightly subvert waver along the lines of a possible thriller. this was because we had the dead body at the beginning, which could have resorted to a optional murder mystery/thriller where the brother of the dead victim goes out to find the psychopath who killed his sister.

There were not really any elements of deliberate parody or pastiche in our movie. this was because we wanted to be original with our movie and we thought we would make it more scary if there wasn't any type of pastiche in it.


There were definate hints in our movie that hinted to another film. The film we wanted to base our own movie around was the film 'The Strangers'. this was because it met all the needs of a pschological horror genre that we also wanted to use. For example The mask we used was inspired by the main mask used in 'The Strangers' as it

was a home made mask that was obviously quite crudely made, with stitches and paint. The one used the film was a lot more neat and tidy compared to ours as we made our mask dirty and had a bloody hand print on the right eye.

Another part that we may have hinted to the film 'The Strangers' was the part where the Victim answers her phone and is standing there saying: "Hello!?... Hello!?...Hello!?" The masked Psychopath steps out from behind a tree and stands there watching her. In 'the Strangers' when the woman is standing in her kitchen when the man in the mask steps out from behind the corner from the dark. we thought that using this effect would work perfectly to fit into our genre.







































The kind of audience that we are tying to pleasure with our movie are mostly horror loving fanatics that love films to be full of suspense. This would mainly include teenagers and young adults that are up for a fright. I am confident that 'Sorrowful Footsteps' delivered its promise for this age range as we followed the results of the questionnaire. The questionnaire was given to a group of 16-17 year olds. This should make it accurate for teenagers to enjoy watching this movie.