Evie VIJAYAN

George gets an SOS call from Mikey, but Mikey is fine when George meets him until George realises that the Mikey he is with isn’t the real one.

George and Mikey are best friends. One night, George calls Mikey to ask about some maths homework. About an hour after they hang up, George gets a call from Mikey, saying that Mikey needs help and to come over immediately. George runs over to Mikey’s house, but when he arrives, everything seems fine and Mikey says he never called George and he’s okay. Mikey can’t find his phone, and while they are looking for it George gets a call from Mikey’s phone. They pick up and it’s Mikey again, saying that he has been kidnapped but the kidnapper doesn’t know that he still has his phone. George tells the phone Mikey that he is with real Mikey, but the phone Mikey says some sort of secret that only George and Mikey would know, so George knows that the person he is with is not Mikey.

Filmmakers intentions in chosen filmmaking role (500 words max)

As this short film's writer, I used group discussions to devise our story and essentially bring it to life. Using experiences from storytelling in other subjects too, I can use techniques from different genres and bring them into my narratives. There are different subcategories of the Horror genre, the most popular ones being gorry or psychological. Psychological horror plays on the audience's emotions and being a very visual type of horror leaves a lot of information to the audience's imagination. To accomplish this, towards the end, I cut out any dialogue that wasn't necessary for the story, so I wasn't giving away so much information. There were changes from the original script to the final product, cutting out lots of the dialogue (as mentioned before) and completely changing the ending in the final film. These edits were to add to the suspense and eeriness that a horror movie is supposed to convey, and from our first draft we knew that we needed to change something. Taking inspiration from previous horror movies and clips that I have experienced, I know that psychological horror plays on the audiences built in fight or flight. To use the flight instinct I made sure that I kept the “unknown” a bit part of my writing, editing to cut out unnecessary information, only what was absolutely needed for context (even if the actors might not have paid enough attention to that part).