The Treatment

Synopsis of Film



William Groven is a seventeen year old teenage boy. He has lived a normal life through the majority of his teenage years up until a few days ago when his friend Alan Summers was found murdered in his own bathroom. Tainted with the fear of death himself, William proceeds to become more and more of a recluse, slowly finding the apparitions of a shadowed figure haunting him to be something more sinister than post-traumatic stress. Something else lies behind it, and as much as Will doesn’t want to investigate it, he fears he is being drawn to. In the night he finds he can't sleep and in the day he is haunted by a mysterious figure, and soon Will begins to question his surroundings. Will first fears that the person following him is responsible for the murder of his best friend and that he is next, but as the hallucinations become more and more unexplainable and vivid, he begins to suspect that all is not how it seems. In a final confrontation, Will is chased around his house, knife in hand by the mysterious figure and in a desperate attempt to save himself he stabs at the mysterious figure. Blood trickles from Will's mouth, and the knife is in him. The mysterious figure who has been stalking him was in fact a personification of his own guilt, leading him eventually to his own death. The film ends with Will lying on his bathroom floor, much how his friend Alan was found, in a pool of his own blood. 



Props

-Mobile Phones for Will and his friend Sean.
-Alarm Clock, digital. One with easily visible numbers in order to make filming easier.
-Newspaper articles.
-Mask for Antagonist.
-Knife







Character Development



Will Groven is 18. He lives a simple life, wake up, go to school, come home, go out, sleep. He lives like any other typical teen, drinking and socialising with friends and focusing on school work. In his four bedroom house lives both his mum and dad, Will’s relationship with his parents is slowly deteriorating, his parents are always out working and going away on business trips.

Since the discovery Will has tendencies to cure his stress via cigarettes and marijuana his parents have lost all faith in him, hardly talking to him or seeing him. Due to this, Will suffers from depression and anger issues, he continuously feels lonely and slowly spirals into a state from which he is un-retrievable.

This state causes Will to act abnormally and lose sight with what is logical and real. The recent murder of his friend Chris has effected Will to such extents that Will begins to imagine things and see things, forcing him to bunk school, lose sleep and form such a paranoia he begins to fear his life.

His character carries a heavy internal conflict which is personified in the form of a mysterious stalker. His guilt drives him into creating an entirely new being who he believes is responsible for the death of his friend. This plot element is similar to one used in Fight Club.



Influences; American Psycho, Halloween.

The concept of a character with hallucinations and “in the head” events are drawn from the influential Thriller American Psycho. The character of Will Groven is somewhat akin to Patrick Bateman, albeit less flamboyant. His constant conflict of character values and paranoia is a trait that is somewhat relevant to the overall genre of “Psychological Thriller”.

The other character concept was for the "Stalker" or the follower of Will, which was a mysterious masked man, was from the 1978 John Carpenter Horror/Thriller Halloween. The scene that features the most heavy use of the infamous "Stalking" that Michael Myers was famous for was in the street walking scene in our film. A camera feature that we are deciding to use is the "Depth of Field" approach for the stalking scenes for a sense of ambiguity. This feature has become more common in more recent thrillers such as Insidious as opposed to the old classics but we feel giving the antagonist more of a sinister, unclear presence would cause a more unhinged effect on the audience.