Ronald Barthes had a theory when it came to audiences and understanding the narrative codes that they will pick up and decipher when watching a film. His theory was that all narratives would include codes (signs and symbols) that an audience would be able to decode, understand and interpret, therefore calling them narrative codes.

He outlined that there are three narrative codes:

• The enigma code – What is mystery/enigma element in the film?
• The action code – What is the one event or action that drives the narrative forward?
• The Semic code – What connotations do you imply about the place and characters and how will you encode the meaning of these?

For this task, we had to look at a few examples of student thrillers and try, as an audience, to see if we could gather the narrative codes from them. The three films that Ellie and I chose to look at were REC, Baited and Megan. We selected these three for variety in narrative style, which upon analyzing them would hopefully help us get the most out of this task as it means that we can easily spot and understand narrative codes in different styles of thriller, benefiting our own thriller.

Linked below is our copy of the analysis of the narrative codes: