Post Horror Assignment #2
‘You Were Closed When I Needed You’
Research Statement:
For this assignment, i created a world full of trauma, confusion, and deception in a way to horrify my audience. My short film is called ‘You Were Closed When I Needed You’ and follows the deceptions and tragedy of mental health and the trauma of dealing with it in a post horror way. The research i undertook to demonstrate and create this film were interesting to find out. In my research, my main priority was to inspire myself into these dark themes and scenarios but did not want to make it like a classical horror film, i wanted it to be dialogue heavy to confuse the audience even more. My research for this creation were three films that took my interest highly, these were ‘Shutter Island’ (2010) which involved the flipping of the antagonist victim into the perpetrator of the crime scenario and just the total mind breaking it did for myself i had to explore this idea of insanity in characters. Another film that was ground-breaking for my research was the 2020 film ‘The Father’ which show’s Anthony Hopkins character Anthony losing his mind and the audience with dementia, and it shifted my viewing into being so invested and then confused just like the character experiencing this breakdown in reality. Another film that brought the stalking scenarios into my film was definitely Hush (2016) it follows stalker stalking a deaf woman and it just gets really intense and he’s always in the background and that’s what i wanted to replicate the most. Moving away from just films, screenplays that influenced me that i researched upon were various post-horror films including ‘The Babadook’ written by Jennifer Kent, i feel like the way she writes helped me get words onto my page, her usage of technical elements made me feel comfortable writing. Another screenplay that helped me was John Krasinski’s ‘A Quiet Place’, its mysterious creatures that are described by Krasinski made me wonder how i could trick the audience into creating mysteries with the stalker. The tone of my script is although made to be dark and have the use of shadows, i was picturing it in my head as a sort of ‘giallo’ Dario Argento film while i was writing, i was trying to be artistic with the garage from mad max and the way it sort of hypnotises you. A final inspiration for my script was definitely The Sopranos, not in the mafia way but the psychologist way, the relationship between the patient and the professional is just interesting and the dreaming sequences Tony has in his coma just reminded me of what i was writing.
Reflection:
Reflecting on my piece, this script came to me because i wanted to haunt my audience, not in a scary classic way but just a mind-bending way. When i was writing my piece i kept thinking of stereotypical horror films and how i need to go as far away as possible while i was writing, i found myself deleting a lot of things and replacing them with post horror elements in order to make my piece stand out. The process of my idea was quite excessive, i have had many experiences with mental health struggles and seeing these in action like dementia through various people, i realised how scary it actually is from their point of view and the person viewing it, it made me realise that i don’t think that it’s really been explored and i could make this without really copying anything word for word, yes there’s clear inspiration from other sources, but not entirely. I think a big challenge i had when i was writing was how to make it scary. I feel that yes i am making a horror script, i should know how to make it scary, but i struggled heaps into making it original, terrifying, and realistic. I think an epiphany i had whilst writing was the ending, i was sleeping and i just woke up sort of cause i had this thought in my head into how to end it and i wrote it down and i was really happy with what i did cause i was half asleep and it just popped into my mind. I wanted an obscure ambiguous ending and I’m glad i went with it instead of a death ending or a good ending, the reader can decide what happens next, is she faking it? is she confused? did she kill her husband? I wanted to leave the audience with questions and i hope i, did no matter what about.
One Drive link to script: