What are the conventions of your chosen film genre and which aspects of trailers in the genre influence you?

What are the conventions of your chosen film genre and which aspects of trailers in the genre influence you?

I have chosen to use the hybrid genre of psychological thriller, famous films that represent this genre are ‘Donnie Darko’, ‘Black Swan’ and ‘Shutter Island’ recently. The classic and original psychological thrillers pioneered the genre, this films being ‘Mulholland drive’, ‘A clockwork orange’ ‘Physco’ and ‘American Physco’. The director that mostly inspires me is David Lynch, films such as ‘Eraser Head’ and ‘The elephant man’ especially grabs my attention because they have an element of completely absurdity.





This simple yet very effective trailer, has a bold image and only really contains shock factor and complete mystery, I would hope to include the idea of shock into my teaser trailer. I think only going down this route would be a mistake as a trailer like ‘Black swan’ give more of an eerie essence and promotes the vibe to the film. In the trailer you are made to feel uncomfortable and feel like you are sat in the wrong chair- I like this feel that the genre has and I want to pick up on this.





The idea of isolated perplexed central character is used in every psychological thriller, Natalie Portmans’ character in ‘Black swan’ is similar to many- they start out seemingly human and as the course of the film continues the spiral of mental decline is inevitable. The audience are made to sympathise with this character and are made to be in their shoes, this makes you as a viewer almost undertake the Psychological part of the thriller.





‘Shutter Island’ really portrays this ‘solo’ mental quest in the thriller, you are made to toy between the opinions and powers of others in the film, this make it entirely thrilling, with a good strong concept behind your film it can really involve your audience. ‘Shutter island’ has a hyper reality inbuilt into it, I would love to try and tackle this idea and involve into my film trailer. This concept has proved to be very successful with films such as ‘inception’ and ‘The Matrix’- two huge block buster films of our lives. Again this central character is completely vital in ‘shutter island’ played by ‘Leonardo di Caprio’.

‘Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the broad ranged thriller and Horror genres. However, it often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre, in addition to the typical traits of the thriller genre’-definition-Wikifilm
The genre includes many elements this means you can have a strong influence of one genre over another to create an individual feel and concept. An example of the dominance of another genre is drama in ‘Mulholland Drive’ which although is a Psychological thriller, has a very raw and dramatic feel as opposed to a film like ‘Scanners’ which has more of a futuristic vibe to it.


I would like to inject my film trailer with a horror aspect to it, as I have done previous research about horror I understand how I could interlink both drama and horror together. In psychological thrillers the horror is more from the mind rather than reality- this allows creativity to a concept. One of my favourite examples of this is Kubricks classic ‘The Shinning’.





The trailer in my eyes is very effective, the story line is simply explained and gives a real feeling of panic and horror with the added Psychological breakdown thrown in amongst it, the idea of a character alone in their own mental world is again shown here. The music is far less background in this trailer compared to the others as clearly ‘The shinning’ is more Horror based as we here the classic screech sounds. A great deal of the trailers use similar effects to establish the genre, one of the key ones is flashing images, this give off a feeling of confusion and lack of control- everything that a Psychological thriller should be about.





Although now it seems very dated ‘Rosemary’s baby’ was once incredibly disturbing for a modern audience, the idea that in our normal world a paranormal event can overwhelm our lives is common in many of these films. I am really attracted to the religious twist some films use, especially in this as a woman is impregnated by the devil- it adds controversy and the core audience it really excites them. Also ‘the wicker man’ has a similar vibe I would love to try and re create something modern, that has the same aesthetics of these films.

The Main themes I have come across whilst researching the genre are:
Reality
Perception
Existance
Identity (often confusion with identity)
Life and Death

These are constant themes that can be applied to all Psychological thrillers, one film that explicitly shows these films is 'The Machinist' featuring Christian Bale- the story of insomniac, who ploughs throgh a banal life but in his own sense of reality.



This fantastic film particularly cares for the identity theme as he doesnt know himself or can trust himself I would like to apply this to my film, as it adds a create deal of drama to the genre.