Fatal Attraction vs Retribution

Although our opening doesn't contain the same main theme of Fatal Attraction (stalking) I feel that the end shots of our opening do contain a lot of influences from Fatal Attraction. In Fatal Attraction there is a point when Dan's wife (Beth) is running a bath and she goes to look in the mirror to clean up her face. Then when she closes the bathroom cabinet door Alex appears. You expect her to be there, but that only adds to the suspense and enigma of the situation. With our opening the build up to the last shots contained the door being left open, the hand on the banister and the footsteps as well as her washing her face and you realise how vulnerable she is that she hasn't realised he is in the house. Then when his feet walk into the shot of the bathroom floor and her feet the audience is willing her to turn around and see him, much like in Fatal Attraction the audience sense something isn't right and are willing Beth to realise this.

There are obvious differences in that with our film it is a revenge attack, whilst in Fatal Attraction Alex is just jealous, however both attacks are in order to gain something for the attacker (Zak wants to hurt Trent and Alex wants to hurt Dan and get him for herself). The fact that in Fatal Attraction you don't see Alex come into the room works because the whole entirety of the film allows the audience to build up an understanding of Alex's character so you expect this sort of behaviour from her. However, as our sequence was just the opening we needed to build as much enigma and suspense as possible whilst introducing the situation and characters (even if some of the characters you do not visibly see fully).

Fatal Attraction also differs from ours as there is an attack as the next section of the scene, we originally planned to have Zak attacking Eva Trent, however when we filmed it we found that it looked tacky on screen and very amateur, so we decided to leave it out and have our last shot of both of the characters feet as this also kept the suspense and enigma up, whilst the attack pretty much took away the suspense and with it the intrigue of the audience. As the whole point is to make the audience want to watch more of the film, I feel by leaving out the attack sequence it helps to give the audience more questions that they want answered from the film.

I feel that because we watched Fatal Attraction as preparation for this project then it influenced us in including a bathroom sequence in the latter stages of the opening sequence.