COUNTERPLAY Intertextual references

In many thrillers they often make reference to other medias or often they shape their work around someone elses, this is a common theme in many thriller films. An example of intertextual references is in the film TheMatrix which contains many references to the Wizard of Oz such as when Dorothy goes Oz connecting to when Neo goes out of the matrix and into the real world with the others.

Intertextual references are used to enhance and extend the meaning of the film to the audience.

Intertextual references are also used make films more captivating, as the audience has to decipher and notice where they are and figure out where they have seen them before, whether in real life or in another film or aspect of the media. This is something have tried to include in our 2 minute opening.

Some of our ideas for our thriller COUNTERPLAY have been taken from the 1996 film Fear, starring Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon. The plot for the film Fear is that "When Nicole met David; handsome, charming, affectionate, he was everything. It seemed perfect, but soon she sees that David has a darker side. And his adoration turns to obsession, their dream into a nightmare, and her love into fear." This plot synopsis was taken from IMDB

In our film we wanted to give it a darker edge, we filmed all of it, except the cross cuts to the chess scene at night, the darkness of the shots raises more suspense and tension among the audience and it works really well.

The idea for the cross cuts came from the 2012 film House at the End of the Street. There is a scene in there where they use a few cross cuts to raise tension and create suspense amoung the audience and we decided that this was highly effective and that we should use something like that in our thriller task. The scene (the video of which I have included below) at 2.05 where Carrie Anne escapes and is running towards the house, lived in by Elissa and it cross cuts to Elissa on the phone completely unaware that she could be attacked at any moment. This is hugely effective and another part of the scene that is also highly effective is when we see the room through Carrie Anne's eyes and it flickers at cuts around and this is effective because it shows her perspective and we know how she is feeling.




It is also the ordinary and the extraordinary element that also helps to raise tension. We wanted to use that in ours when we have Grace leaving the party, normally as if nothing is different, then we have Lewis leaning on the car at the end of the drive which only the audience can see, this would raise tension because the audience will be wanting Grace to turn around and see him and not let him creep up on her. This is a contrast of the ordinary and extraordinary because leaving a party is a normal thing to do, but standing, hiding and waiting for someone to leave a party and then to follow them down a dark alleyway is not a normal thing to do.

We wanted to use aspects from both of these films and we took aspects like the shot of the feet walking along the ground from other films which can have different connotations depending on the stride and style of how they walk. In ours we had Grace stumble around to show that she was drunk and we also had her take long strides and not walk in a straight line to back up this.


This was written by Amy Roberts (me)