THE ENVIRONMENT:

General Environment: Dunedin in winter; grey, cold, wet, muddy, foggy, always raining. Low cloud and high hills convey a constant sense of claustrophobia; every scene is cluttered with landscape–native bush, old stone buildings, student ghettos; very little deep focus–everything is close and towering on top of the characters. Clutter pervades–junk, rubbish, useless household stuff. Very little signs of heat, no reds, the flatties have only a one bar heater and are always cold; the basement in contrast will be depicted quite warm and cosy–soft red lighting with verdant green plants. The pallette is cool and dirty; grey, black, olive green, slime sickly green, ice blue, muddy brown, dirty white, charcoal, light brown. The steep and angular gothic architecture of Dunedin is integrated inside the house with sharp angular lighting-creating a stalagnite effect throughout the rooms, which will be enhanced with mildew and water stains on the walls. A new genre - Gothic Grunge; dirty, cluttered, irregular, chaotic, jagged.

THE HOUSE:

A House of Chaos: This abandoned house has successfully managed to deter inhabitants for a long time. The naiveity of our student freshers, replete with rose-tinted spectacles, has enabled them to overlook the obvious: the house is uninhabitable. We find it in a state of dilapidation–broken windows, paint peeling, wallpaper and scrim falling of the walls, piles shifting, holes in the roof, dripping ceilings, mouldy carpets, etc. Previous inhabitants have left a mess–rubbish litters the house, food scraps are ‘growing’ in the kitchen, street kids have left their glue-bags, the furniture has been torn by straycats, the coalrange has left the kitchen black with dust, etc. It is a site of disorder, chaos, clutter and derangement–particularly the lounge, kitchen and bathroom. The bedrooms are dusty and dark, but slightly more inhabitable, being mainly dry (not so many drips).

An Organic House: The overgrown garden creeps into the broken windows, ivy and creepers are beginning to trace up the walls. Tree branches continuously threaten to burst through other windows. Mould and mildew climb down the wall from the roof, as water stains creep up the walls from the sodden floors. Several rusty old iron buckets litter the floors, they are full, even though the drips appear to have moved. Slimey sludge drips overs the sides, breeding fungi in its wake. It is often raining heavily, and the drips are a constant annoyance. Mud cakes the floors at the front and back doors. The organic nature of the house are all preludes to the discovery of a living basement: which is alive with thriving growth. The house cocoons this hydroponic nest with a spirit almost maternal; it is damp and wet, but warm; filthy, but with fertile soil.

THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE CHARACTERS

The best and most memorable characters of film or fiction are those which have emerged truthfully from their environment. The landscape, the weather, and the shape of the physical world are what create good characters.

The Cultivater [Intruder] and the House: He incapsulates the spirit of the house - a chaotic, angry, mad, deranged, crude, green, rustic, agrarian, bucolic peasant of a man. He is the Father, the house is the Mother, and the plants are their spawn. He is at home there in the cosy basement, despite his incarceration [within the womb?]. This gives him the edge–a right to be there–which is what makes him formidable. He can’t be released because of his anger over the death of his ‘children,’ which would be released upon them. They are also, through the Cultivator’s imprisonment, containing the incontrollable/inhabitable force of the house which he incapsulates. Although they managed to make the house livable, it was only for a short time... the house eventually gains ascendence, returning throughout the duration of the film to its ‘normal’ state of chaos as they fail to gain control of the situation/environment and therefore the cultivator.

EMMA is 18, intelligent but not an ‘academic’. She is friendly with a warm personality and has a natural calm about her. She enjoys a beer and is the kind of person who gets on well with anyone.

EMMA AND THE HOUSE: Emma never really settles into her room. She spends most of her time in the lounge and the kitchen, eventually ending up sleeping in the lounge on the couch. She has very little stuff, which ends up scattered from one end of the house to the other with the rest of the clutter as she becomes more affected by the chaos. This reveals that her personality has disintegrated which causes her to make the fatal decision, dissolving her sense of value completely. She integrates herself again as she packs up her belongings into her backpack and moves away.