Final Project

CONCEPT FOR FINAL PROJECT

Your final project should be either a short story (10-20 pages) or a short film (5-10 minutes).

If it's a short film, you need to make sure that you shoot all footage yourself and/or create it yourself. Do not use stock footage. You may use music that is copyrighted, but you should then make your film private when you put it online otherwise it will get taken offline. Make sure to have plenty of different scenes, and to illustrate strong creativity. Consider the aesthetic choices of the horror films you've been watching in class--jump scares, musical scores, lighting, etc--when you make the choices in your film.

If it's a short story, it should be 10-20 pages, double spaced, and should follow the formatting here: https://www.shunn.net/format/story.html and the dialogue formatting here: https://firstmanuscript.com/format-dialogue/

On Tuesday, bring with you to class your concept for your end-of-term project. It should essentially be a proposal that is around 1 page, double-spaced and typed. It should have numbered responses to the following questions. The proposal should include the following:

1) What is your story or film about? What “horrors” will it contain? Be specific. Give us the setting (time and place), main characters, and central dilemma for the story. Make sure not to copy other people's stories. You may reference other horror you have read/watched at certain points in the story, but you will be graded on how imaginative your story is.

2) How do these horrors in your story relate to real life horrors in our world)? Be as specific as possible. A particular problem of our world might be a good place to start. For example, the automization of workers is a specific problem. People are and will continue to lose jobs due to robots and machines taking them over. A horror story that deals with a subject like this could be about a possessed self-driving car, for example, or a serial killer Uber driver who had his job taken from him.

*Please note that this is the most important aspect of your story and I will be grading you on how well-developed it is.

*Please also note: in the past I have asked people to stick to our contemporary condition for their stories. However, in this case, if you have a historical time and place you would like to create a horror narrative from, you may. That being said, make sure you research it thoroughly enough to make your narrative strong and compelling and related to the cultural conditions of the time. Keep in mind as well that you will be taking a contemporary view of the problems, as we are never free from our own time period. Similarly to the Witch, a film which takes a very modern view of the Puritans, you will be taking a modern view of the past.

3) What is the basic plot idea for your story? What will happen?

4) What horror sub-genres does your story fit into? Why did you pick those in particular? (You may wish to revisit the list on the blog for ideas; you need not use one of the sub-genres we've covered in class).

5) Which aesthetic affects or common horror tropes might your story possess? For example, The Woman in Black uses a gothic atmosphere (fog, isolated houses, etc) to evoke a feeling of "spookiness." The Witch uses natural lighting to do something quite similar. Rosemary's Baby, on the other hand, takes a more subtle approach, where the horror occurs just out of the corner of her eye in a cheerful setting. Each of these strategies evokes different effects.

6) Consider possible endings to your story. What possible endings might the story have? Now, here is where you should consider the horror at the heart of the story, the horror that relates to the cultural condition that produced the horror. The ending will entirely depend on the horror you are dealing with. For example, to use the self-driving car example from above—it’s generally been decided that it’s inevitable that self-driving cars are coming and will replace the jobs of truckers, etc. So, in that story, you may want the ending to be quite negative, as you may be making a point about the reality of automization. Just as Thomasin has little choice at the end of the Witch in becoming a witch, due to the cultural conditions of her time, you may wish your ending to be quite bleak if the cultural conditions deem that the situation is quite dire.

Please note that you will likely change many things after your workshop on Tuesday, and that is totally normal and encouraged. This project is a work in process, and will require thoughtful revision throughout.

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