Narrative Theories

Bordwell and Thompson defined narrative as “a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship occurring in time”. Syd Field supports this, as he claimed “a good film needs to interest the audience as well as inform them of the narrative in the first ten minutes”. With the teaser trailer format, we had a total of one minute in order to capture the attention of our audience. As our text was in trailer form, we used restrictive narration as it offered minimal information through the use of enigma. In addition to this, subjective character identification was used, as this is conventional for the horror genre due to the fact that they follow the characters point of view, which is about the events that occur during a documentary. This is important to the horror genre as it creates a sense of empathy from the audience, which makes the film scarier than it first appears.

Vladimir Propp’s theory of narrative comes from a comprehensive study of folktales, which suggested that characters took on the role of narrative “spheres of action”. He came up seven different character types including the hero, villain and princess amongst others. Our trailer both subverts and conforms to this theory, as we do not include all of the spheres of action. For example, we involve a hero (however, this is vaguely subverted due to the fact our protagonist is female), a villain and a helper, yet we subvert the other four types of characters. We can tell that the protagonists are not ‘heroes’ as Propp describes them as using cinematography to make it appear as though they are all running and hiding from the antagonist. In our case, the characters fulfil more than one sphere character type; our protagonists are also our helpers. In post-production we added a “REC” symbol over our documentary-style filming in order to emphasise ‘the quest’ (filming the outcome of investigating the woods) that the hero embarks on – therefore conforming to Propp’s theory.

Todorov’s theory of narrative suggests the idea that conventional narratives are structured in five stages: equilibrium, disruption, recognition, repair and final equilibrium. In our trailer, we conform to Todorov’s theory to an extent but only up to the fourth stage. We have a state of equilibrium in the beginning, as the characters know nothing of the occurrences that are happening. This is then disrupted by the news reports and journalism about the killings. Recognition takes place when the group decide to investigate then happenings and finally there is an attempt to repair the disruption when the investigation takes place about the occurrences. We deliberately excluded the fifth state, as we did not plan on revealing the ending within the trailer, as the enigma of the ending is an important convention for the trailer form. Our last shot is of the antagonists screaming into the camera – this leaves the audience wanting more and wondering what happens, drawing them in to see the full film.

Allan Cameron’s theory claims, “Modular Narratives articulate a sense of time as divisible and subject to manipulation” – this resulted in the identification of four different types of narrative; Anachronic, Forking Paths, Episodic and Split

Screens. In our trailer we conform to this theory with the use of the Anachronic Modular Narrative, which involves the use of flash backs/forwards. For example, at the beginning of our trailer, we used a quick flash forward to the height of the tension showing the attempted repair of the equilibrium through the use of close up and extreme close up shots, non-diegetic sound of low drones and tension building drones and off camera diegetic sound such as talking, heavy breathing and twigs snapping.  In post-production we used face pace straight cut edits in order to build tension and suspense for the victim. In addition to this, due to our documentary style filming, the trailer needed to take a traditional linear depiction of time hence the conformity of Aristotle’s Unities theory, but only to an extent as we used flash forwards within our trailer. We needed to use the traditional linear depiction in order to allow our plot to intensify as well as still allowing our audience to follow the plot perfectly.

Aristotle’s Unities theory suggests, “A narrative should be created with a unity of time, place and action” meaning there is only one of each. Our trailer is set in one location (Hallows Woods), in one time frame (a day of documentary filming) with one action (trying to fight/destroy this entity). We used this structure in order to show the audience how quickly things can escalate when the supernatural is involved. In addition to this, Levi-Strauss’ Binary Opposition suggests, “Narrative tension is based on opposition or conflict”. There is a strong sense of this within our trailer, as we have a defined protagonist and antagonist who display conflict throughout the trailer. We show this through the constant chase scenes (tracking shots, panning shots and close up shots), face pace straight cuts (post-production) and use of lighting (Mise en scene).

Finally Barthes’ Code explains how there can be two types of narrative – open and closed. Open is when the narrative is able to unravel in a lot of different ways whereas, the closed narrative theory suggests there is only one obvious thread to the narrative and this is the approach that our trailer takes due to the traditional linear style filming as well as the conventions of the horror genre.