The Importance of Costume

Costumes are extremely important in films, especially in horror, as they add to the mise-en-scene and help create a verisimilitude affect (the appearance of being true and real.) In my opinion, I think that having verisimilitude present in a psychological horror is highly significant as this type of horror relies on realism and the human psyche to frighten and unsettle its audience. Furthermore, if a film is placed in an urban setting, like my film was, the use of modern costuming may allow viewers to identify with the characters, and consequently scare them even more as they can relate to the people that they are seeing on screen.

Stereotypically, costumes in horror films are usually dark or covered in blood. However, as my film is of the psychological horror genre, it does not focus on gore and graphic violence, but instead focuses on atmosphere to exploit the viewer's fear.

Along with the rest of my group, we decided that each character in our film should wear the same red T-shirt, so we went to Primark and bought some.

 
We chose red as it is the colour that most attracts attention, and it is the traditional colour of warning and danger. More over, we thought that it was important for each character to wear red as it usually demonstrates to an audience who should be the centre of attention. However, because all of the characters in the film wear red, this demonstrates how all of them should be the centre of attention, as they are all technically one person, and the fact that they wear the same colour helps to express this idea to the audience.

As the plot of our film is so complex, we thought that this costuming arrangement was necessary in order to help the audience understand what was going on. The title of the film is 'Matryoshka' which is the Russian word for 'Russian Doll', therefore, in having each of the characters wearing the same t-shirt we see the Russian doll analogy come to life.

Like the Russian dolls in the photo displayed below, we felt that it was important that everyone styled their costume differently, to help convey the idea of Grey having 'multiple personalities.' For instance, for my character (middle) I decided to wear my favourite hat and put my T-shirt underneath a pinafore dress.



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