Our film represents an older generation, our characters are represented as business women from their demure style of dress. Its smart/casual as they are of a higher social class but are casual as they are at home.
Also the twins are represented as working/middle class through the mise-en-scene in the house when they are having dinner, the cutlery and china, the fact they are drinking wine with their dinner and the formality of the twins sitting across the table to each other. A lower class person would stereotypically eat their dinner off their laps while staring blindly at the TV, it wouldn't be an important family ritual. Stereotypically killers and the protagonists are normally lower class people who have a shady background, which is normally the reason for their turn to crime.
Our main convention that we challenged was that we used a woman as our main protagonist. An example of another film that also challenges this convention would be Monster.
This challenges conventions from most major films as well as thrillers because women are not seen as strong or clever enough, to be capable of murder and things associated in thriller films. A professional/working class woman would normally be seen as a victim.
A normal convention that we use is our flashback scene. It is not an obvious shot as we didn't want the audience to realise that the rest of the film was in the past. We wanted to confuse the audience by quickly showing the shot of Lily dead, then bringing in both twins. Twins aren't that common in most films so they are very rare in thrillers. I have found two thrillers that do use twins and are similar to ours using anger and revenge as their main themes. Another convention that we used was Lily being a 'damsel in distress'. In nearly all thrillers there is a victim, Lily is our victim and her twin sister Ivie plays the role of dominance over her. Ivie tries to poison her sister and the audience are made to feel slightly worried for Lily as she has no idea that her sister is trying to kill her.
The film 'Monster' compares to our film as it also challenges the main convention by having a female protagonist being the killer. The main character is also strong willed and dominant which is like our main character. Another film similar to ours is Dead Ringers, our titles are similar in the fact that they are the same name and that they conveniently portray the film. A dead ringer is another word for a twin, there is no difference between them. Our titles contrast as they have a darker tone than David Cronenberg's psychotic thriller although David sets the tone further into the film.
This our final film. We re-edited, changed our sound track and totally changed our film due to the feedback that we were given by the other AS media students.
This is our rough cut of our film DeadRinger. We thought that we had nearly finished our film at this point but after having feedback from other AS media students we realised that we had a lot of things that needed to be changed to improve the film. By having feedback this enabled us to have an outside view on our film and to review things such as our storyline, to see if others could follow it.
No list of suspense or thriller films can be complete without mention of English film-maker/director Alfred Hitchcock. He helped to shape the modern-day thriller genre, beginning with his early silent film The Lodger (1926), a suspenseful Jack-the-Ripper story, followed by his next thriller Blackmail (1929), his first sound film (but also released in a silent version). Hitchcock would make a signature cameo appearance in his feature films, beginning with his third film The Lodger (1926), although his record was spotty at first. After 1940, he appeared in every one, except for The Wrong Man (1956). Although nominated five times as Best Director (from 1940-1960), Hitchcock never won an Academy Award.
Alfred Hitchcock is considered the acknowledged master of the thriller or suspense genre, manipulating his audience's fears and desires, and taking viewers into a state of association with the representation of reality facing the character. He would often interweave a taboo or sexually-related theme into his films, such as the repressed memories of Marnie (Tippi Hedren) in Marnie (1964), the latent homosexuality in Strangers on a Train (1951), voyeurism in Rear Window (1954), obsession in Vertigo (1958), or the twisted Oedipus complex in Psycho (1960).
Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the wide-ranging thriller genre. However, this genre often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre in addition to the typical traits of the thriller genre. Also, occasionally this genre will border into the also wide-ranging Horror genre. Generally, thrillers focus on plot over character, and thus emphasize intense, physical action over the character's psyche. Psychological thrillers tend to reverse this formula to a certain degree, emphasizing the characters just as much, if not more so, than the plot. The suspense created by psychological thrillers often comes from two or more characters preying upon one another's minds, either by playing deceptive games with the other or by merely trying to demolish the other's mental state. Sometimes the suspense comes from within one solitary character where characters must resolve conflicts with their own minds. Usually, this conflict is an effort to understand something that has happened to them. These conflicts are made more vivid with physical expressions of the conflict in the means of either physical manifestations, or physical torsions of the characters at play.
