Friday, July 28, 2017

The Family Way: Coming Home review

Another review came out for The Family Way: Coming Home. Not the best review we've gotten, but not horrible either.

Severed Cinema's Review of Coming Home

Honestly, this is the second time that a review has criticized my choice of a goth aesthetic for the character of "Crawford". (Although the first time the reviewer also mentioned that the decision made sense by the end of the film.)

I don't mind the criticism. I want honest opinions about these things because I am planning to direct the feature film associated with this short and it helps me to figure out what works and what doesn't with these characters.

In "Coming Home" Crawford is a scrawny, dorky, teen-aged boy who has put up with years of abuse from his classmates and has finally snapped.

He came up with a plan to get his revenge on the worst of the bullies. It's a horrific plan that leads him down a very dark path once he gets a taste for murder. But it all started as a power play. He wanted his victims to fear him, but he knew that no one was afraid of him at school.

So I got to thinking, What kind of look would a teenager think was scary?


I wasn't about to go with a mask. One of the things I like about villainous characters are their expressions, especially when they enjoy the horrible things that they are doing. (I'm practically in love with "Julian Slink" in the Blood Drive TV series for this very reason.)

I knew that the goth aesthetic was something that was considered strange and creepy to the so-called "normal kids" back in the day. I also knew that clowns rank pretty high up on the phobia scale.  So I told the wardrobe and makeup people to combine the two.

Not because I thought the audience would find it scary, but because Crawford would have thought it made him look scary.

Perhaps that didn't translate as well as I'd hoped on film, even with the contrast of the most dangerous characters in the story being incredibly normal-looking. It does give me something to think about for the feature.



No comments:

Post a Comment