This document discusses three films or series that provide inspiration for aspects of the student's thriller/horror film project about high school students in a forest. The Blair Witch Project inspired the setting of a forest, the idea of leaving hints about bad things happening without revealing details, and the psychological element of playing with the audience's mind. Unfriended provided inspiration for using technology and social media as the filming technique, targeting a younger audience, and portraying characters feeling trapped and relying on each other. Storytellers inspired the campfire scene setup and cinematography techniques for establishing characters and scenes.

1. The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project is an American psychological thriller, released in 1999, directed and
written by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. The film is in the style of a documentary and
was one the first films of that genre, establishing new genre conventions. This has inspired
other similar films and documentaries an example of such films is Paranormal Activity.
Contrary to the genre The Blair Witch Project is a psychological thriller that doesn’t have
excess blood or violence in it. Many people argue that is even scarier than many horror
movies as it plays with the minds of the audience and their feelings.
The end of the film was evident from the trailer and the film gives large hints and
foreshadows many things such as to the students meeting their end. It reveals in the
synopsis that the students die and therefore we already know this information when
watching the film and therefore the appeal to the film is not whether the students will live, but
rather how they die and what happens to them while they are in the forest. This is why I
picked The Blair Witch project because our thriller/horror is very similar because of the fact
that we heavily leave hints that bad things will happen to the students as they take part in
this high school traditions but we do not reveal how they go from sitting talking in a field to
lost in a forest and the fact that one of characters will be kidnapped. It is also set in a forest
which is well matched to our storyline and the struggle of having to escape from a dark forest
in a group is one of the elements of inspiration I received from this particular movie.
Unfriended
Unfriended is a mystery/horror/thriller. It was released in 2015 and directed by Levan
Gabriadze. A group high school teenagers are on a group skype chat and find that they’re
dead friend comes online and begins to haunt them, mysteriously through possessing each
teen one by one, leaving the girl that used to make fun of her till last so she can watch each
and every one of her close friends die one after the other. The genre convention is enforced
through the characters and the way they act and the blood, gore and supernatural activity
that appears in many aspects of this movie. The target audience is shown as the movie

2. opens the teens are all on skype. This is shown through the protagonists computer screen
and this would therefore appeal to a younger audience because the majority of young people
are very competent concerning technology. The storyline is not so relevant to what we are
trying to portray, but some of the genre conventions in unfriended and the idea of a group
feeling trapped in a situation where they are terrified and have to rely on one another for
support is a key element in our storyline. There are also a lot of interesting camera shots
such as low angle shots and head on shots that we will be using to portray our characters.
The cinematography in this film is all conducted through the teenagers computer screens.
There are many close ups showing that we are diving into a very personal secret that the
teens have been keeping to themselves all of this time. The film also involves some
As part of Mis en scene many of the teens are wearing young and youthful clothing. In one
of the scenes a girl is joking around and holding a knife up to the camera on her screen, this
foreshadows the violence that is to come.
Storytellers
Storytellers is a YouTube series created Joey Gracceffa. Our inspiration from this particular
series stemmed from the campfire scenes and we took this as inspiration as we found the
technical side of this series and the cinematography related to our story board and also gave us
other ideas for our opening sequence. The camera work and the editing and cuts used in this
series was perfect for the betrayal of our plot and is useful when filming the sequence we have
planned. We found that the mis en scene and the idea of teenagers sitting in a circle discussing
things could open up an opportunity to be
really creative with our camera work. We
like the series shots used to establish both
the scene and the characters. We liked the
way the series was conducted and how to
editing was conducted.