Thriller Opening Ideas

Idea 1 –

Storyline
• Set in a abandoned house at night
• Group of teenagers exploring
• A joke becomes real
• A killer takes a victim
• Others run out of the house.
• Filmed in a point of view shot from a camera
(Blair witch project)

Key Thriller elements-
• Gives a dark feeling
• Puts viewer in the characters shoes.
• Unexpected


Idea 2 –

Storyline
• Starts with a chase scene of a girl running up the street.
• Runs into a cornfield
• Killer approaches girl she screams then cuts to black screen.

• The use of diegetic sound to create the atmosphere of being watched.
• Filmed from the point of view of the attacker, add sound of breathing to create tension.

Key thriller elements-
• Chase
• Distortion of reality
• Paranoia



Idea 3 -
Storyline
• Start with flashing images of blood and knives
• Introduced to a crime scene in a bedroom (no body)
• Detectives processing the scene, taking photos
• Discussion of what happened, any witnesses etc.

Key thriller elements-
• Death
• Flashbacks
• Disturbing outcome


We decided on idea 2 -

The reason we have chose this as a final idea as it gives us some interesting camera shots to work with e.g. Point of view shot. The idea will capture the interest of the audience and will give the audience an idea of the film from the killers perspective as well as creating tension and showing fear from the victim. The film uses interesting techniques in camera work as when the screen goes black it creates tension and suspicion of the killer as he remains mysterious showing no facial features. The chase scene creates tension as this will make the audience scared for the girl and capture their interest in the film. When the girl is trying to escape through the cornfield this creates paranoia as the killer is nowhere in sight but at the same time could be very close.

After further discussion into the idea we found that it was easily adaptable and we could change parts that would be difficult to achieve. Elements such as a cornfield would be hard to find so we changed it to a woods. We could also add other thriller elements into our idea such as flashbacks to give a false sense of time and show the events leading up to the present day, the past tense will be shown in black and white to show time movement. We talked about maybe including a music overlap and not having any dialog which maybe harder to get a storyline across.
To add more affect of the killer we decided to add a more stalker feel rather than a serial killer, we would do this by showing flashbacks of bloody weapons, pictures of his victims, washing blood off his hands, camera shots of him stalking etc. The chase scene will mostly include a point of view shot from the stalker to create tension. We thought of adding stills to the film to show interruption and give it a dramatic feel.