Narrative Essay

Todorov was one narrative theorist, he came up with the theory that in most movies there is an equilibrium which is the normal story, for example in my trailer this is the main character (jennifer) trying to sleep at night peacfully as she would usually do every other night, then comes the disequilibrium which refers to a distruption in the peace usually by the villlian, in the case of my trailer this would be my villain entering her dreams making it hard for her to sleep then impacting on all her friends by killing one of them. Then last the resolution, this is how the situation if fixed, in the end of my film the villain would be killed my the main character who is the final girl. However for my trailer we would not include the resolution as that would kill the ending of the film and no one would want to go and watch it. My trailer does conform to these rules to a certain extent as I have the equilibrium, and the disequilibrium, the only thing it does not include is the resolution but I dont believe that should be included.Many horror movies follow this method to make the movie make sense, I believe that this method is the most effective with horror movies as they are certain to have a disequilibrium and a resolution. One movie I recently watched that follows this method would be 'Get Out'. Equilibrium - It all started when a couple decided to go to visit the girlfriends parents house. Disequilibrium - The parents were racist and had powers to sink people into a 'sunken place' which they tried to do to the black boyfriend. Plot twist - The girlfriend tricked him along with many other black boys by making them fall in love and bringing them to her parents house. Resolution - Black boyfriend managed to escape and kill her parents.This set of rules is very crucial to horror movies as it helps them to make sense and to flow nicely, without a disequilibrium it wouldn't be a horror movie as something always has to go wrong and there always has to be a resolution or we would just be left to guess and it wouldn't be very entertaining. The next narrative im going to discuss is Levi Strauss, he talks about the comparison and the importance between Good and Evil, Male and Female and Youth Rebellion vs Adult society. Personally I believe that these are all very important factors of creating a horror movie, without good and evil, we wouldn't be able to identify the hero from the villain therefore destroying the concept of horror, without identifying the role of the male and female we wouldn't be able to include ideas such as phallic and yonic weapons, and we wouldn't have characters such as the final girl. My trailer follows some of these methods, such as Good and evil as my main character, Jennifer is good and the villain is evil, this is key in every horror movie, we also made use of the male and female characters, as we planned to make ours a slasher, we wanted our villain to be male so we could make use of phallic weapons. We chose to make our trailer base around the youth as it will appeal to our target audience more. Halloween 2  is a film where we can see a variety of binary oppositions. With it being a horror it displays all the typical oppositions that you would expect to find, we see the opposites of the healthy and the injured. The injured subject is also extremely distressed and therefore this could also be an opposition between the insane and the sane. This theory is pretty relevant to my trailer as I have made use of good/ evil and male and female, also I used the youth rebellion. The next narrative is the Domaille 8 types of narratives, Achilles, Candite, Cinderella, Circe, Faust, Orpheus, Romeo and Juliet and Tristan and Iseult, the one I think most suits my trailer would be Archilles as the villain leads to my main character having to become destructive as a final girl and become very agrressive. I feel like Domaille's idea was smart however i dont think you can catergorise every movie the way he does as sometimes there are plot twists meaning his points wont fit all movies. Last narrative I will talk about is Propp, he studied russian fairytales, According to Propp characters have a narrative structure. I feel like my trailer follows this structure to a certain extent I have a hero and a villain however I don't have the rest, I think mine follows the teenage punishment genre.