The hero’s journey and the conflict model of storytelling have had a strong hold on western screenwriting since the mid-twentieth century. Increasingly, this is being questioned, especially by feminist scholars and storytellers, who find the hero’s journey exclusive of women’s stories and narrow in storytelling possibility. Maureen Murdock, Kim Hudson and others have all developed models of the heroine’s journey, but do these go far enough? Are they still too closely related to the conflict-based model entrenched by the hero’s journey and not bold enough in their scope of change? In her 2019 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Screenwriting Guru talk, French writer/director Céline Sciamma proposed a new model of screenwriting emerging from her own practice that might more widely offer new possibilities for telling stories on-screen. Sciamma calls it writing through desire and argues for driving screenplays through desire, not conflict, especially when telling the stories of women and gender-diverse characters. Her three-step approach involves identifying the desires of the writer, working at the scene level and mapping the scenario. Sciamma used this method to develop and write the screenplay of her breakthrough film, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) (2019), which won the ‘Best Screenplay’ at Cannes in 2019.
Review of: Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Story , John Yorke (2026) London: Particular Books, 466 pp., ISBN 978-0-24163-108-9, h/bk, GBP 25.00
This study applies computational sentiment analysis to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) to reveal the mathematical precision of its emotional architecture. By quantifying sentiment polarity and subjectivity patterns throughout the screenplay, we uncover evidence of deliberate emotional engineering that contributes to the film’s enduring psychological impact. Our analysis identifies several key sentiment mechanisms: Jack Torrance’s mental deterioration follows an exponential emotional decay curve rather than linear progression; archetypal narrative frameworks produce mathematically distinct emotional signatures that activate deep psychological responses; strategic escalation of subjective language systematically undermines the distinction between actual events and psychological projection; interpersonal dialogue creates quantifiable emotional contagion networks through which characters influence one another’s affective states and symbolic repetitions establish consistent emotional reference points that guide viewer psychological experience. The spatial sentiment mapping reveals how the Overlook Hotel operates as a psychological landscape where emotional intensity corresponds precisely to physical location. Results demonstrate that psychological horror achieves its power through systematic emotional patterning calibrated to archetypal structures rather than through shocking visual content alone. This research bridges computational linguistics and film theory, providing insight into how cinematic storytelling constructs emotion through mathematical calibration. The findings advance our understanding of narrative emotional design while illuminating the technical mastery underlying Kubrick’s psychological horror classic.
Review of: Writing and Producing for Children and Young Audiences: Cases from Danish Film and Television , Eva Novrup Redvall (2024) Cham: Springer Nature, 256 pp., ISBN 978-3-03167-072-5, h/bk, USD 139.99, GBP 119.99
It has been over twenty-five years since Buffy the Vampire Slayer first appeared on our screens. Pitched as a feminist icon in a distinctly 1990s mould, Buffy Summers grew to become the defining heroine of her generation. Now, in a markedly different decade, one characterized by a rightward swing into neofascist politics, the legacy of the series can be re-examined as a structural masterpiece, a study in character, a pop cultural phenomenon, and, with revelations about the show’s creator, a misleading statement of intent. This article will examine the history and development of the series as well as its tiered structure, which became a blueprint for subsequent forays into fantasy television. It will then expand into a discussion of Buffy ’s position as a cultural artefact, how that dissonance between the politics of the show and the politics of its creator has impacted the framing of the series, and whether Buffy should be dismissed (as conservative critics have long hoped for), valorized (as legions of fans demand) or simply recontextualized. As we head deeper into the new millennium, will this modern fable continue to resonate with audiences? Is Buffy ’s premillennial idealism passé… or do we need slayers now more than ever?
