Character and Narrative Research

In my research I didn't view any horror films for characters similar to ours, mainly protagonists that are mentally unstable. The two main films I looked at were:
 'The Fisher King'
and
'Spellbound'

Both films feature an unstable character that is similar to ours in that they have visons and don't believe that there is anything wrong with them. In these films I looked for how the character was portrayed, what techniques could be used in our film and how it makes the audience relate to the character.

The first thing I noticed is that both characters are paired with a character who is very stable. I feel this has been done because mentally ill people are hard to relate to for an audience so they are given a normal person to relate to and through them see what the other character is like through a relationship that they build and also learn about both characters.

Another similarity is that in both films the mentally unstable person suffers from amnesia and their hallucinations are caused by their memories, however they don't know that they are memories and neither does the audience. They learn about it as the characters do. I think this way of telling the characters' story will work well for our horror narrative and we can include a mystery where the audience can't tell whether the hallucinations are brought on by the character's memories or brought on by the paranormal.