Narrative Structure

On November 2nd, a group of friends: Autumn, Casper, Regan and Luna are travelling to Englefield House for a last camping trip before they all head off to university. Along the way, their car breaks down. Repair services won’t be able to reach them until the next morning and they all set up camp in an abandoned school. They all camp in a classroom and have enough food to last one night. Casper tells a scary story of a supposed legend of the Mara witch. Luna is scared but they all hear the sound of something cluttering. A presence is looming around in the school. Weird girl giggles and whispers echo in the school. Luna is nominated to find out what is going on she enters many different classrooms and the final classroom she goes in, she discovers a chair placed in the centre of the room with the back faced to her. She closes the door then suddenly opens it after feeling a suspicious entity. When she opens the door the chair is swivelling slowly to face towards her. A porcelain doll is sat in the lap of a girl who is sat in the chair, Luna stares in shock and steps closer to her. The friends hear a blood curling scream and rush over to the sound and to see what is going on. They find Luna dead on the floor with the doll by her hand. Autumn thinks Luna is trying to gain attention so she takes the doll while she was with Casper. Regan reluctantly follows and tries to ask them to leave but they do not listen. Mara watches and gets a flashback of her previous life. She was a simple woman, married to a black man however one day a group of women came to attack her because she was doing ‘witchcraft’. Her husband stepped in to protect her but they killed him and buried her with the corpse of her husband. After her flashback she sees a resemblance of her Husband in the way that Regan looks. She does whatever she can do to save Regan and kills Casper by tearing his heart out. Autumn and Regan are left and Autumn smashes the doll which causes Mara to appear and kill her. She turns to Regan and tries to convince him to stay. Regan, unsure of what to do decides to help reunite her with her husband by performing a séance. He reunites them and the sun rises as he goes back to the car alone and drives home to go to university.

We will use the same narrative structure as the beginning of the film except we will not add the middle and end because it would give away too much of the story. Also the trailer goes along with the narrative of the film because we want to entice the audience and surprise them when they least expect it. Intrigue will be created by hiding Mara’s face in the trailer so people do not know what she looks like and feel even more threatened. There will be shots with the doll in order to confuse and entice the audience into asking “why is there a doll around?” We will not include all parts of the narrative in the trailer as it will reveal too much to the audience. We will include the important parts of the narrative such as establishing where the scene takes place and the important characters. We will include one jump scare so audiences are interested in going to watch the film and exploring the narrative. When creating the trailer we will make sure that not too much information is told so that the audience wants to see more however not too little is shown. Just enough information will be displayed so that the audience understands what is going on.