Our Project

Inspiration for our Edward opening title sequence project.

Genre of Horror
When first thinking of a film concept, we chose to adhere to the genre of psychological horror, as we felt as a group, that this particular genre would be a lot more sinister, and we could choose a much more personal topic to create a horror around.

Films that explore psychological states and psychoses, including criminality and serial killers. Examples-Psycho, Peeping Tom and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

Inspiration
We gathered the inspiration for Edward from many areas.
Dexter (2006)

Heavenly Creatures (1994)

After watching the opening title sequence in class, my group decided to incorporate the idea of girls running through the forest, however used 3 girls, rather than the original 2. We felt that this would add a thriller element to the opening, and capture the audience's attention. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) We suddenly came upon the idea of a split personality disorder, which we thought would be a good overall concept for a horror film. This idea lead us to the novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. We consequently incorporated this idea into the personality of our protagonist, Edward.

This TV series presented us with the needed inspiration for the title of our horror opening. We liked how this series was named after the killer himself, and also felt it was effective to have one single word. We therefore chose the slightly traditional, yet mysterious name of Edward as it is not a typical, modern name.

Decisions for the Opening

We brainstormed many different ideas as to how our opening would look, however we came up with our final idea, focusing on inspiration from Heavenly Creatures. We have decided to film several girls running, (possibly 3 or 4), through a forest, so they appear to be running away from something, or someone. We felt this would look more effective if we shot the girls from various different angles to make the sequence look more chaotic, and horror like. This significantly draws on the opening of Heavenly Creatures which we as a group, found to be very effective. Next we decided to include flashbacks, like we had wanted to include previously, when first drafting our film idea. This was to focus on the idea of a split personality, (seen in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ) as we combined the past with the present action. We wanted to film one specific girl running through a field of barley. This was fairly easy to do as we located a nearby field on the school grounds. We hope that these shots will add mystery to the opening and add a more intriguing element of horror. We also wanted a sharp ending, so decided that a flash of the word Edward would appear at the very end, on a black screen- making a bigger impression on the audience.