Planning - Documenting Of Influences

Malevolent Phantom

Documenting Of Influences 

During the production of the Malevolent Phantom, many things influenced our choices as to the direction of the way we wanted to take our film. A film which inspired us to go with horror as a genre was 'The Cabin in the woods'. This film uses a setting similar to our own and has the same target audience; although the plot was slightly different we felt this gave us an understanding of what to include making our film suit the horror genre and the typical male dominated audience which would be our main focus in terms of target audience. Another film which influenced our film was 'Scream' as we used the same fear of the unknown aspect which we thought would engage our audience more with the film. In scream when a character dies it usually takes place in a remote location, this was an idea in which we imitated and used in our film Malevolent Phantom. Both films gave us different ideas and themes that we incorporated in our film to appeal and suit our audience.

The costume of the actors was not an influence from a specific film. It was an idea we saw featured in many horror films, this where the antagonist where dark colours to camouflage into the darkness. Films such as scream use an antagonist with a black costume as this emphasises that the identity of the antagonist is hidden and increases the tension and makes the audience more fearful. The costume of the protagonist wearing a bright light coat was to show the innocence of the character and make her stand out from other characters, this was not really an influence from a film but rather a decision we all felt was necessary to give the protagonist most prevalence the shot.

As a group we thought of many settings which all were similar as they were in a remote location, this idea we was influenced by other horror films which always feature a remote location as the setting. This type of setting creates tension and hints that something will happen. The audience are always left not knowing what is going to happen as this presents a mystery as its unknown and usually deserted. As the setting does not contain other people this means when the victim dies, no one be there to hear the screams.

The characters we hope to include will be the stereotypically innocent young girl who finds herself trapped in a dangerous situation which she will regret. She comes with the not so stereotypical antagonist whose identity is unknown and is known as the Malevolent phantom. The young girl stereotype has been influenced from a number of films; this is a major connotation of the horror genre.