Practical: Mise-en-Scene Experiment Children's Drawings

A Common Horror Convention: Children's Drawings 

When thinking of props to use in our horror film opening, I looked at well-known possession horror movies including The Ring and Insidious and found things that they had in common. Having children's drawings foreboding events that later happen in the film is a common horror convention. 

Advantages:

• Good way of creating tension and creating enigma. 
• Cheap to create
• Can be used in every storyline
• They can be edited

Disadvantages:

• Sometimes hard to think of ideas to draw
• Can't accurately represent a child's drawing 

I decided to make a range of drawings, some based on drawings within films. Others are from my own inspiration for the plot of our film opening. 

Drawing from Children of the Corn (1984)

• This drawing is in coloured pencils on plain paper. 
• The scene shows two children that have killed 2 adults, presumably their parents. 
• We could use this to show future events, whether the children killed the parents or whether they were blamed. 

My own drawing

• I used coloured pencils to draw the character 
• I coloured the paper using a teabag and water
• I screwed up the paper to make it seen old and used 
• I thought this could be an imaginary friend of one characters in our film opening 
• The character is seen with a knife covered in blood, this creates enigma for the audience as they do not know how it ties in with the story line.

The Ring (2002)

• There is a scene in The Ring in which a child is seen drawing multiple pictures of a ring. 
• The rings are different sizes on lots of pieces of paper. 
• Children drawing is often represented as something that they see/hear that no one else does and the symbols are usually used throughout the film i.e. the ring - on the video, drawings and title. 

I drew some symbols that we could use throughout our film opening so the audience can link certain locations or characters to events throughout. The symbols need to be simple (like a ring/circle) but also eerie and something that creates unanswered questions. 

A spiral may be too similar to the

circle in the ring 

An eye is eerie and can be used 

throughout with costumes i.e. 

contact lenses

 A face is a good thing for a child to 

draw as it could represent the voice

or face that they see in their head

A crucifix is a good symbol as it is 

religious which lots of horror films 

have bases on

I came up with the idea of the following drawing myself. I based it on the make up I did in previous posts. My thoughts behind this photo is that it represents the events following the character in the picture, whether that be the character who drew it or a relative. Later in our film opening we would have the character with make up representing the picture below. 

Another drawing I did without a film inspiration is the one below. I decided to base this on clowns, a fear in which lots of people share. By including a fear in which the audience have our horror becomes more of a psychological horror and our costumes will become important. In this picture a normal female child outfit is used with a clown head. This could also be represented as an imaginary friend or the person within the child's head speaking to them. I prefer the effect I made with the paper to the actual drawing. 

1. I used a tea bag and water to dab the page with brown to make it look old. I drew the drawing before this so the drawing is smudged and covered slightly with the colouring the give a more accurate look.
2. After that had dried, I used a tooth brush to spray fake blood onto the page to create fine splatters. 
3. I also added large blobs of fake blood to the page by dropping large amounts at a large height. Some of the blobs i left, others I dragged with my finger to create the affect of someone touching the page with blood on their hands.

Evaluation:

What went well:

• The effect on the drawings looked effective i.e. the fake flood and stained effect
• The drawings could look good under dark lighting 
• The drawings I did could forebode the story for our film opening

Even better if:

• The drawings looked too precise and not like a child's drawing
• Some of the fake blood looks too fake which could ruin the effect
• We could use different coloured paper to have a range of drawings