The Opening of Our Thriller

For homework we decided that each member of our group would come up with three ideas for opening of our thriller so that we could discuss the ideas as a group and decide on an idea we were all comfortable with. The three ideas that I came up for where as follows.

1. 'Amnesia.' This story would follow the captivity of a man suffering from increasingly drastic amnesia. The man is being held against his will and his been given an ultimatum of time he has to escape. His capturer willing to let him go if he is able to work with a trail of clues that will grant him to a realisation of how he is living his life incorrectly, with the acceptance of his sins being his ticket to escaping captivity. 

We discussed this idea thoroughly but eventually decided against it to do to main reasons. The first reason was that we thought people might think that the story line is to similar to that of Memento, a Christopher Nolan film in which an Amnesiac follows a trail of clues in order to find the man that killed his wife. We also likened to the plot to that of the Saw movie in which the antagonist 'Jigsaw' holds prisoners against there will and plays games on them that judge how sacred their lives are to them and help them realise the importance of life.

2. 'Inhumanity.' The second idea that I came up with was about the rejuvenation of twisted but intelligent convict in jail whom has frequent meetings with a woman visitor, he is passive aggressive towards the woman and she at times is hostile towards him. However they built up a friendship upon trust and both eventually confide in one each other sharing secrets that haunt both of them. It is revealed later in the story that the convict is in jail for the murder of the woman's brother who was only 18.

We went against this idea for the pure reason of it leaning towards more of a drama than a thriller. We also thought that it would be very hard to represent the relationship between the convict of the woman successfully in such a small period of time, when the relationship is the most vital factor of the movie. We also thought that the movie could perhaps be to similar to that of Tim Robbin's 'Dead Man Walking.'

3. 'Secrets.' The third idea that I came up with was a detective movie following the harrowing death of an eight year old boy. The movie centres around a detective haunted by a troubled past following a case that reminds his of his own past. The stepfather of the child who is portrayed to look like a protagonist throughout is eventually unveiled as the murderer.

This is the idea that as a group we finally decided on. We believed that out of all the ideas it was the most original and that was best suited for the thriller genre. We came up with an idea of an opening for this movie that we are going to stick to. It is that of a diary being altered by a the stepfather in order to to try and frame the child for suicide. Inspirations for my idea were Clint Eastwood's 'Mystic River' as well as Roman Polanski's 'Chinatown.'