Monster Project Pitch - 'Umbra'

For our second assessment, we were assigned to pitch a film idea based around a particular monster. In groups, we had to come up with the monster, the film and how we were proposing to pitch it. Initialy, we liked the idea of a darker version of someone being brought life be it through physical change or their dark side actually becoming a separate being altogether.

Wander, the protagonist of the game 'Shadow of the Colossus', physically changes subtly as the game progresses due to exposure to darkness.

The idea of a person's dark side was something we did dive into a bit more with examples drawing from the idea of dark doppelgangers, also drawing video games.

Link, Protagonist of 'The Legend of Zelda', with two dark doppelgangers.

Ultimately, we dropped the idea of the doppelganger when we looked deeper at the doppelgangers and noticed that they could be drawn from shadows. We began to think about what forms of media had used shadows effectively for horror and since we had video games in mind already, we foudn that many horror games made great use of shadows. The first thing that came to mind was an indipedent game called 'Limbo' which is displayed entirely in silhouette with no detail or colour at all.  

It's interesting that we would look at 'Limbo' as the main antagonist of the game is a giant spider who stalks the protagonist. We had the idea that a shadow could morph itself into any form based on what its victim fears. The spider in 'Limbo' captures this idea as it is concealed in shadow and embodies a very common fear that even I have with arachnophobia being one of the most commonly occurring phobias. Now that we knew we were looking for shadows, we looked up evil, sentient shadows and I instincly thought of the Beast from the animated series 'Over the Garden Wall'. It is often debated whether the series is a metaphor for limbo with the Beast representing Death.

After looking for inspiation, we finally came up with our film idea. We dubbed our film 'Umbra' which comes from the name we gave our monster, meaning it would be an eponymous title. The term 'umbra' comes from one of three distinct parts of a shadow (the other two being penumbra and antumbra). Importantly, the 'umbra' is the innermost and darkest part of a shadow. The 'Umbra' as a monster would only be seen physically as a shadow. Any other time someone would see it is when it has already transformed into its victim's darkest fear. An example we had of this was a character standing in an open field yet believe that they are in a claustrophobic environment. A close film example would be the antagonist, Pitch, from the 2012 Dreamworks film 'Rise of the Guardians' who has an ability very simpler. He can turn dreams into nightmares (both figuratively and literally as he is followed by demonic horses) as well as consume anything in darkness. The difference being is that Pitch does have a physical form that he uses to interact with other characters.

We prepared a power point presentation after discussion of how to turn this idea into a film. Our plot involved a reporter (who we envisioned being played by Jospeh Gordon-Levitt) who follows a trail of murders and suicides caused by insanity. He partners up with a cop (Zoe Saldana) and the narrative goes away from the generic crime film into an actual horror film with the focus being solely on the Umbra and how it affects the protragonists. The climax would see the cop killing herself out of fear and the reporter facing his fears and burning down a building where he, and presumably, the Umbra are killed. The ending would reveal that the Umbra has simply moved on instead of perishing in the fire reinforcing that you can't kill fear.