RESEARCH - Intertextuality

Intertextuality is the process of, essentially, movies 'borrowing' ideas from other movies. This happens more than you realise, as almost as modern films take inspiration from scenes in older movies, and it goes unnoticed as the younger generation of people are unlikely to have seen the older film.

Here are some examples of how a modern film has 'borrowed' aspects from the Hitchcock movie Psycho:

The Stepfather

An example of how this movie uses intertextuality is that when the man falls in to the bath, having been stabbed in the neck, he pulls the shower curtain down with him. There is a close-up of where the plastic breaks from the metal rings, which is also used in Psycho. The difference, however, is that in The Stepfather the character that falls in to the bath is a man, and the antagonist. This is a contrast of the female protagonist victim in Psycho.

In regards to our own film opening, we may decide to take types of shots or ideas from another movie, but show them in our own individual way, though it could still be easily linked back to the original.