Today I watched: Orphan

Orphan is a story about a seemingly normal orphan girl named Esther. Nothing is unusual about her apart from she is quite lonely and she paints fantastic pictures. She gets adopted by a family who are struggling to get over the loss of their third child who was unfortunately stillborn. As the film goes on Esther does increasingly evil things including purposefully pushing a girl off of a slide thus breaking her ankle, murdering a nun who might expose her secret and setting fire to a tree house with Daniel (another child of the family) inside.
She doesn't only put people in physical harm she plays with their heads. At one point she butchers a rose bush   that is planted in memory of Jessica, the still born child, and presents the bouquet to the mother Kate.

Don't be fooled by her innocent look, Esther is incredibly evil.

Kate is the only one who can see that Esther is clearly evil. With a bit of digging she finds out that *SPOILER ALERT* Esther isn't a small child she is a 30 year old dwarf from Russia who pretends to be a child to become close to family's. In the end she is always rejected and murders them, moving on to her next victims.

The opening of this film is fantastic, disturbing but fantastic. The way it sets the tone for the film. You know straight away that this is of the horror genre.
It starts with a dream Kate is having of losing her baby. She is taken through the hospital on a wheelchair all happy until she sees she is losing an extreme amount of blood. No one else seems alarmed but she knows that its not right. She has her baby but it is taken away from her, then she awakens from her dream relieved that it is over.

Similarities to my sequence:

• Starts of with a dream sequence depicting something that didn't in reality happen.
• Both characters wake up at the end revealing it was just a dream.

Differences to my sequence

• The dream sequence of Orphan is incredibly dark following conventions of the horror genre whereas mine is still conventional (chase scene, antagonist, murder) but it is no where near as disturbing.
• In my opening sequence the dream seeps into reality: the antagonist from the dream turns up at her bedroom door. In Orphan it is just a nightmare that has no truth in it.

I like the darkness of the content but Orphan is more of a psychological horror whereas I want mine to be more traditional horror. A film that makes you jump out of your seat, a slasher movie. When watching Orphan I wasn't scared, this is not the effect I am trying to create.