Eden Lake analysis

Eden Lake is a 2008 and British horror film , directed by James Watkins.

• Steve and Jenny meet after work
• They travel to Steve's favourite location a scenic abandoned quarry to spend the weekend there
• They are harassed by a group of teenagers
• Conflict between the young couple and the teenagers occurs and Bret's (the 'leader' of the group) dog is killed
• Bret wants revenge and chases them , the couple drive off but crash their car , Jenny goes to get help since Steve is trapped.
• Steve is gone when Jenny returns 
• The teenagers torture Steve , Jenny rescues and hides him as she once again goes for help
• The teenagers capture both Jenny and Steve , Steve has died she escapes
• Jenny finally reaches the road and gets help from a stranger who gets out the car to look for his brother
• She drives off thinking she will be caught again
• Jenny crashes the car in the Bret's father's garden but doesn't realise
• The parents of the teenagers force Jenny into the bathroom and the film cuts to black

In the film Eden Lake there are significant binary opposites throughout. The main characters are a young couple named Steve and Jenny. The couple are what the audience would refer to as the 'good' characters due to their innocent and friendly appearance , this is later reinforced when they are attacked in the woods by a gang of youths. They're constantly trying to defend themselves from violent teenagers. The fact that they need to defend themselves from them shows that the teenagers are the opposite of the couple the 'bad' characters. The gang are out of control , violent and controlling. They try there best to prevent the couple from leaving the forest and often take things to far.

Cultural codes play a vital part in the film , it helps the audience relate to issues currently happening around them in their own lives. It uses typical representations from the British culture to show the British horror genre. In the film a few members of the gang carry around with them a knife/blade , this is bringing up the issue that in reality knives are often associated with gangs. There is peer pressure present throughout the film. Bret seems to be the leader of the gang , he often forces younger members of the group to do unpleasant things they don't want to be part of. If they disagree or refuse he threatens them , this results in them giving up and doing what he says. James Watkins the director gives the teenagers a extremely negative representation , in the film the youths travel in gangs and harass others around them. There loud , rude and inconsiderate towards the couple causing tension between them from the start.

Enigma codes are used to make the audience want to keep watching , they want to know whats going to happen even if they aren't particularly enjoying the film. In Eden Lake various questions the viewer could think are 'will the young couple escape?' , 'why are the teenagers doing this?' , 'who is the little boy?' , 'will she live?'. This film is successful in that as a viewer I wanted to know what was going to happen even though I wasn't really enjoying the film.

Eden lake is what people would call a paranoid horror , as the ending is left for the viewer to decide what happens. Although the way Watkins ends it , it influences the viewers decision as to what happens.

In most horror films , women tend to play the 'damsel in distress' and are often stereotyped as helpless , weak and scared. However in Eden Lake the role is reversed where Jenny becomes a completely different person compared to her previous self at the beginning of the film. At the exposition of the film Jenny is seen as innocent and caring , gradually as the teenagers disrupt her weekend away more and more she grows into stronger character. As a viewer we see her physically change as she becomes covered in mud , blood and other things. Steve is in-fact the weaker character constantly needing help throughout.

There is an idea of class throughout the film , we an see that the teenager's are from a working class background due to the way they dress and behave towards the couple. The teenagers and the couple are opposites to each other and this is what makes the film more realistic as the couple are in the teenagers area now.

Why it came to an end

In retrospect, Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) marked the beginning of the end for the New Hollywood era. With their unprecedented box-office successes, Steven Spielberg's and George Lucas's films jumpstarted Hollywood's blockbuster mentality, giving studios a new paradigm of how to make money in the changing commercial landscape. The focus on high-concept premises, with greater concentration on tie-in merchandise (such as toys), spin-offs into other media (such as soundtracks), and the use of sequels (which had been made more respectable by Coppola's The Godfather Part II), all showed the studios how to make money in the new environment.

New Hollywood excess culminated in two unmitigated financial disasters: Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) and Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart (1982). After astronomical cost overruns stemming from Cimino's demands, Heaven's Gate only earned $3.5 million in box-office sales after costing $44 million to produce. The loss was so great that it forced United Artists into bankruptcy, resulting in its sale to MGM. Coppola, having flourished after the near financial disaster of Apocalypse Now, plowed all of the enormous success of that film into American Zoetrope, effectively becoming his own studio head.

The audience of New Hollywood film

By the early 1960s, an estimated 80 percent of the film-going population was between the ages of 16 and 25. At first, the major studios largely ignored this audience, leaving it the hands of smaller studios like American International Pictures, which produced a string of cheaply made horror movies, beach blanket movies like Bikini Beach (1964) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) and motorcycle gang pictures like The Wild Angels (1966).

Key names associated with new Hollywood

Actors

Brooke Adams Jane Alexander Woody Allen Jane Fonda

• Goldie Hawn
• Dustin Hoffman
• Robert De Niro

Producers and executives

Steven Bach Peter Bart Michael Phillips Lew Wasserman Robert Evans Gary Kurtz

Writers and directors

• Woody Allen
• George Lucas
• Mike Nichols

Cinematographers, editors, and production designers

Dede Allen Bill Butler Walter Murch

The types of films produced

Perhaps the most significant film for the New Hollywood generation was Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. Produced by and starring Warren Beatty, its mix of graphic violence, sex and humor as well as its theme of glamorous disaffected youth was a hit with audiences, and received Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress and Best Cinematography. Its portrayal of violence and ambiguity in regard to moral values, and ‘shock’ ending, divided critics.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story "The Sentinel". The story deals with a series of encounters between humans and mysterious black monoliths that are apparently affecting human destiny, and a space voyage to Jupiter tracing a signal emitted by one such monolith found on the moon. Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood star as the two astronauts on this voyage, with Douglas Rain as the voice of the sentient computer HAL who "seems human" and has full control over their spaceship.

The period of time it covers

The 1950s and early 60s saw a Hollywood dominated by musicals, historical epics, and other films that benefited from the larger screens, wider framing and improved sound. However, audience share continued to dwindle, and by the mid-1960s had reached alarmingly low levels. Several costly flops, including Cleopatra, Tora, Tora, Tora, and Hello, Dolly!, and failed attempts to imitate the success of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, put great strain on the studios.

By the time the baby boomer generation was coming of age in the 1960s, 'Old Hollywood' was rapidly losing money; the studios were unsure how to react to the much changed audience demographics. The marked change during the period was from a middle aged high school educated audience in the mid 60s, to a younger, college-educated, more affluent one; by the mid 70s, 76% of all movie-goers were under 30, and 64% had gone to college. 

The desperation felt by studios during this period of economic downturn, and after the losses from expensive movie flops, led to innovation and risk taking through allowing greater control by younger directors and producers. Therefore, in an attempt to capture that audience which found a connection to the “art films” of Europe, the Studios hired a host of young filmmakers and allowed them to make their films with relatively little studio control. This, together with the breakdown of the Production Code in 1966 and the new ratings system in 1968 (reflecting growing market segmentation) set the scene for New Hollywood.

What New Hollywood refers to

New Hollywood or post-classical Hollywood, refers to the time from roughly the late-1960s (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate) to the early 1980s (Heaven's GateOne from the Heart) when a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in America, influencing the types of films produced, their production and marketing, and impacted the way major studios approached filmmaking. 


The films they made were part of the studio system, and these individuals were not "independent filmmakers", but they introduced subject matter and styles that set them apart from the studio traditions. New Hollywood has also been defined as a broader filmmaking movement influenced by this period, which has been called the “Hollywood renaissance”