Heavenly Creatures
(Historical Reading)
Heavenly Creatures is a film about a true story that occurred in Christchurch in the 1950s. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh had lots of court records and newspaper clippings as well as a play and a book and many articles to use as source material for their film. Many people are alive who will remember the event and so they needed to keep fairly close to the facts. They managed to do this well and people I know who remember the event and the period say it was just like that and New Zealand was just like that, conservative and boring. There are some things in the film which make the modern audience laugh like the Doctor saying ’Homosexuality’ like it was a dirty word. Jackson uses an ECU here to show his horrible teeth which shows him in a very bad light. We find him and his attitude revolting but people in the 1950s found that issue revolting! Peter Jackson is using this historical story to tell us how far we have come in society and how much more accepting we are.
The reading explains the historical context and how a modern audience responds to this.
(Idea: Fantasy World)
Heavenly Creatures is about the power of the imagination and how that power can be exciting and dangerous at the same time. The girls are very imaginative. They make up their own world and populate it with personalities and places in a vivid way. Peter Jackson wanted us to really get inside this fantasy world and experience the wonder of it so he created the plasticine figure sequences and castle set to bring it to life. However, this world gradually takes over the girls’ world. At first they use it to imaginatively remove obstacles to their happiness like the priest, doctor and John. Later they spend more and more time in it and it becomes quite sinister like when the blood burst out of the tower just before they decide ‘what to do about mother!’ Jackson was concerned with showing us how it is both exciting and...
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