Film Narrative

Our psychological horror film’s narrative starts with our protagonist, Marie being physically and mentally abused by her parents at a young age. This abuse continues on into her adolescence and it begins affecting her mental capacity as she begins to have nightmares of herself being attacked or her attacking others. These nightmares have caused her to lose sleep and this causes her to turn to drugs and alcohol as a release from her torment and she soon becomes addicted to them. Her addiction causes her to have horrific hallucinations such as her taking a regular bath and it slowly filling with blood even though it is only in her mind.

Her boyfriend notices the change in Marie’s behaviour and attempts to help her through her struggles; but she ends up killing him violently in an unprecedented rage urged on by her excessive use of alcohol. This leads to her becoming more mentally unstable which we see as she starts hearing terrifying voices in her head whispering to her to inflict harm on others and Marie smashing her bedroom mirror because she imagines that the reflection in the mirror is of her dead boyfriend watching her. At the end of the film, her psychological torture becomes too overwhelming and she commits suicide by hanging.

In 1969, Tzvetan Todorov simplified the idea of narrative structure into five stages that he argues occur in all films. Firstly, the equilibrium – this is when everything is normal, the characters are living a normal life and the audience can relate to this. In our film, the equilibrium is her living her normal life at first, before all these problems occur. Then, there is a disruption; something happens to disturb this normality. In our film, the disruption is when Marie starts having nightmares, and turns to drugs and alcohol. Next, there is a reaction and repair; characters react to this situation and try to deal with it. In Todorov’s narrative structure, the problem gets resolved – however, with our film, because it’s a horror film, the problem does not get solved and Marie ends up killing her boyfriend. Next, there is a new equilibrium, where the problem is dealt with and there is a new normality. However, in our film, this does not happen as Marie becomes worse and worse in her mental state. In the horror genre, Todorov’s theory only works to an extent; this is because the problem can’t always be solved. This leads to a heightened scare for the audience, leaving them feeling hopeless and paranoid that this could happen to them.

The choices we have made for our narrative have been inspired by other existing media texts, like ‘Black Swan’. Our protagonist smashes her mirror when in a rage, as seen in ‘Black Swan’. This idea of Marie breaking her own reflection signifies the extent of which her psychological state has deteriorated. Another inspiration to our narrative is ‘Girl, Interrupted’. At the end of our film, Marie can’t take the pain anymore and hangs herself; this is similar to Daisy from ‘Girl, Interrupted’ who is seen to have hung herself in her bedroom.

We decided that the reason Marie became mentally unstable was her parents; the audience will relate to the character more as the experience may have happened to them or their friends. Also, the fact that Marie hangs herself is important within the psychological sub-genre as it doesn’t show too much gore, unlike the slasher sub-genre.