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Bing Lu

Professor McClure

Writing 39B

03/07/2018

RIP Essay

The short film that our group makes is called The Last Package. The film is mainly about a

girl who has isolated herself from the outside world and always shops online. One day, there are

some anonymous text messages sent to her phone which tell her the directions that lead to her

package. The sender of the texts seem can see what she is doing and where she is. Due to her

curiosity and scare, she decides to follow the directions and she is killed and put into a package

box at last. The settings of our film are designed to take place at an apartment’s hallway and the

protagonist, Monica, is a college student. The monster of the story is representing the bad

consequences of the internet and the isolation that indulging in the internet will bring. Since our

short film has a horror genre related theme, we transfer the bad consequences into a figure of a

mysterious killer to stick to the horror genre. I will be analyzing our film and discussing the

shooting process in the subsequent texts.

The scene that I want to analyze in this essay is when the protagonist first receives the

anonymous texts. What we designed for this scene is that Monica receives a message when she is

browsing on the online shopping and she checks outside her apartment door to see if there is any

package that she expects. When she finds that there is nothing there, she goes back in and returns

to laundry. Then she receives a text message says, “Stop washing your cloths and go outside.”

This implies that there is an invisible monstrous figure that can see her. The main trope in this

scene is called “Nothing is scarier”. This trope creates a fear that “is not caused by a traumatic
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visual element or by a physical threat but by the sole lack of event.” (tvtropes.org). One of the

outcomes that this trope can lead to is that there seems nothing but after further observation, the

fact that something is there cannot be denied. This trope can be very terrifying with the absence

of the things that the audience highly anticipates. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, one of the best

horror fiction writers in the world, says “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,

and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" (Lovecraft 1). Therefore, I think

this scene is a very important scene that increases the horror and sets the film’s tone.

In the film making process, I find a determining point to make our film a horror movie is

to create the lonely situation but with some potential threats to the protagonist. The most

difference of horror films and other genres is that the protagonist always keeps the curiosity to

dangerous things that people in real life will tend to avoid exploring. Therefore, the loneliness of

the protagonist will render the atmosphere of fear better because being alone will make the

protagonist more helpless and vulnerable when encountering unexpected situations. Most scenes

in our horror film are not based on the daily logic of people because horror genre consistently

reveals impurity and according to Noel Carroll, one of the most influential American

philosophers on contemporary philosophy of art, says in The Nature of Horror, “casual

background of the reaction of impurity operates the raising of the emotion of art horror” (Carroll

56). In the scene of the protagonist in our film entering the empty stairway and the sound of the

closing door makes her panic even if the sound is inferentially caused by herself, she presents

fear because her loneliness intensifies her sensibility. Her impure reaction to the normal

background strengthen her fear and the features of the horror genre.

The main audience group of the short film is our classmates and the professor who are

generally UCI scholarly group. Therefore, we choose the main plot of the short film to be the
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daily online shopping so it will be more understandable for most of the audience because online

shopping is trending more as the technology and internet develops. Using features that reflects

our audience’s daily life makes more straightforward connections to the audience because the

scenes in the film are mostly familiar to the majority of the viewers. When the scenes correspond

to the daily lives of the audience, it is easier for us to assume that the audience will make similar

reactions and inference as we do so we can make the plots more natural by considering ourselves

as the audience.

My contribution to this project is my creation of the main plots of the story and the

representative monster in the film, and my ideas of how to edit the film to achieve the best result.

As the director of our group, I look for the proper place to shoot and decide what we should film

to make the story scarier and flow better. We are not professional film makers, so we have many

situations that make our film do not express what we expected. I improve our scripts and try my

best to change things to reduce mistakes as many as I can. After our shooting process, we modify

most of the scenes from our scripts because what we discuss to film cannot be achieved by our

planning. For example, we plan to film all the walking scenes from the protagonist’s view, but it

turns out that we cannot make scenes that are identical to our imagination because if we film

from the protagonist’s view, the pictures will be boring and cannot show the fear that we expect

to create. Therefore, I come up with the alternative idea of filming from a third person’s view

and add some visual and sound effects to achieve our expectation. In the editing process, I find

that details both visually and acoustically are the most important elements to creates a horror

atmosphere. For example, in the scene before the protagonist enter the stairway, there is a

hanging sign says “EXIT” on it and I think shooting the dangling sign and editing it with slow

motion will intensify the fear of the scene. Since we don’t have professional filming equipment
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for the sounds and there are a lot of noise that we cannot avoid when shooting, I decide to

eliminate all the sound in our footage and add sound effects, like sounds of footsteps, door

opening and closing, intense sounds when something unexpected happens, and light but creepy

music through the whole film will lead to a more realistic acoustic surrounding. Our other group

members also have great advice for our filming and provides important details to support the

whole story. We combine our ideas into a better way to present our story and make better

progress. Because our group only has three members, we actually do not clearly divide the works

for different person because we think working together may be the most efficient way. So, we do

most of the work together with each other’s support and advice.

Our group has very good corporation so far because we are friends and neighbors and it is

very convenient for us to discuss and to plan what we should do for each group work. Each of

the group members contribute evenly to the project because we always have our strength and

weakness in different areas. The most efficient way for us is to put together what we good at and

help each other to improve the weakness of our assigned portion. The most challenge we face is

the editing because none of us has edited a video professionally prior to this project and we

spend a lot of time on learning how to edit. We film the footage very quickly and we think the

editing will be done quickly too. However, it turns out that our assumption is wrong and the time

is very tight for us to finish editing before the deadline. What we need to improve in our

collaboration is to plan out our schedule and shooting with a more specific plan, so we will not

face situations like revising many of the scripts and the editing in a hurry. The only struggle we

encounter is that our group only have three members unlike most groups that contain four

people. We have relatively less opinions and sometimes we can be stuck at some point that we

can’t solve due to our less variety of ideas.

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In conclusion, I have a very good time cooperating with my group members and I learn a

lot about film making. Most importantly, other than analyzing a horror fiction I Am Legend, I

have a more comprehensive understanding on horror genre by another mean of horror literature.

It is a challenging project for both my group members and me but I really enjoy this film making

process.
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Works Cited

Tvtropes.org “Nothing is Scarier”http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NothingIsScarier

Accessed 07 Mar 2018.

Howard, Lovecraft. Supernatural Horror in Literature. May 1927.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx. Accessed 07 Mar 2018.

Carroll, Noël. “The Nature of Horror”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol.

46, No. 1. (Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00218529%28198723%2946%3A1%3C51%3ATNOH%3

E2.0.CO%3B2-Z. Accessed 07 Mar 2018.