Sophie Munden - Question One

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Psychological Thriller:

“A suspenseful movie or book emphasizing the psychology of its characters rather than the plot”

“In a psychological thriller, the characters are exposed to danger on a mental level rather than a physical one.”

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/psychological+thriller

In our media product we tried to use the conventions of a psychological thriller in the sense that we focused our opening scene on the representation of the characters rather than events that take place.

Click on the pictures to go to the opening scenes.

In our product we used mainly close-ups and mid shots of our two characters in order to capture their facial expressions. We edited our product so that it cut to shots taken from different angles of her face and hands to emphasise that she was the focal point of our film and to highlight the importance of her character and the letter she was writing. This was done due to the fact that we wanted to concentrate on the emotional journey of our stalker and her victim (Hip-Hop star, Craze). We see this done in the opening scene of Taxi Driver as we are first introduced to him with close-ups of his eyes and the taxi . It slowly develops to the job interveiw, leaving the storyline ambiguous, like ours.

For the credits of our film we used envelopes dropping onto a table which we had written on. This represents the letters our obsessed fan writes to the star throughout the course of the film. We deliberately chose to have the letters entering the screen from the right in order to create an unnatural and uneasy feeling since reading from right to left is normal. This effect links to the genre of the film.


We got the music for our film from a copyright free website and chose the beginning sequence of ‘Echoing Chemical Reactions’ by Theodore Kalantzakos. The slow continuous build up of tension in this particular song adds to the atmosphere and mirrors the slow build up of tension in the plot of our story. This repetitive music is used in the film Cape Fear. Furthermore, the voice over helps the audience to understand the character’s/obsessed fan’s emotional state, emphasising the importance of this rather than the events taking place. The repeated ‘I’m your number one fan’ (lyrics from the song by The Beautiful South) not only implies an unhealthy state of mind but links to the camera work as we see the obsessed fan writing these words in her letter, intensifying the suspense.