Evaluation question 1

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My media product follows most forms and conventions of typical horror movie, but also challenges some of them. My horror trailer is called Obsession, and is about a college student who stalks girls who attend the same college; he confesses his love to these girls who then laugh at him. He takes his revenge by murdering these girls but is defeated by the final girl’s boyfriend.

I have followed some codes and conventions of horror films as the villain is male. The villain is male because my group and I thought that the typical villain is physically stronger and larger than his victims and also uses a phallic weapon (a knife), also, we had one shot where the villain seems very carefree, although he was chasing the final girl down to kill her. We used this shot because mental disorders are more common in males, and we felt that there had to be a reason behind our villain’s crimes. So, we designed him to have a mental disorder rather than just blindly killing people because we wanted to make our trailer as realistic as possible.

Villain's weapon of choice

The three locations used within my trailer were the forest, outside of the college and empty corridors. The forest and empty corridors convey isolation and loneliness because the victims are far away from other people, and ultimately, rescue. These isolated settings along with the darkened lighting work well together to convey tension and suspense within the trailer. The outside of the college shots were only used for establishing shots.

Forest

Establishing shot of the college

In the trailers I analysed, I found that there was a wide variety of camera angles, movement and positioning. My group and I imitated this, as we filmed each shot from a variety of angles and positions, we used the ones we thought worked best with the other clips we had decided to use. Close ups are one of the most effective methods to convey the emotions of the character to initiate a response from the audience. However, we didn’t use low/high angles within our trailer as we felt that the power of the villain and helplessness of his victims was portrayed effectively enough without them. However, low angles are used a lot to make the villain seem more intimidating and high angles are meant to make the victim seem powerless. The victims were always seen either from a distance or from behind when they’re running, which is used to portray the villain’s point of view. Another shot is filmed in the forest with the camera at a Dutch angle, this was used to disorientate the viewer as the obscured shot is different to how the audience is used to viewing things.

Close up of villain

An example of a shot we used filmed at a dutch angle

We used editing to our advantage, as we were unable to film at night because when we filmed the footage was too dark, so instead we used video editing techniques to emphasise the blue lighting and dim the rest, so that the shots looked like they were lit by the moonlight from outside. When the shots start to change at a faster pace, we decided to play a clip twice, one with less opacity, and play it over the top of the original slightly after the clip had started. This created a fantastic disorientating effect and revealed to the audience that the villain may have been using drugs to knock out his victim.

This was filmed on a sunny day, but by using editing we managed to make the audience believe this is at night

Another stereotypical convention of horror films is the ‘final girl’, theorised by Carol J. Clover, the final girl tends to wear boyish clothing and have a unisex name, she either defeats the villain or is saved by a male figure. The final girl also stereotypically has a good education and also tends to be rather conservative (no sex within the film, rarely they have boyfriends but there is no intimate scenes between them, they are shown as more of a team than a couple) My trailer does have a final girl, but we have broken some of the rules of the final girl theory. The final girl’s name is not unisex, and she also has a boyfriend who saves her from the villain. However, although these rules are broken, she does wear boyish clothes and she is a college student, which represents her good education, as any scenes shown with her in are in or near the college itself. 

Final girl (Left) and friend (right) differences in clothing reinforce which character is which

We used teenagers for all of the roles in our trailer, this is typical in horror films as teens are perceived as naïve and stupid. This makes them ideal victims as they will walk straight into a trap. Teenagers are also used most in horror films as the target audience of horror films is mostly teenagers, so the audience can relate to the characters, thus creating more of a ‘shock value’ in the trailer. However, usually, the villain is older than its victims. In our trailer, we broke this convention as we used another teen as the villain. This was to show that teenagers can still be evil and not so idiotic as they are made out to be in other horror films.

Inter-titles are very common in horror trailers, as they set the scene for the audience without giving too much of the plot away. Inter-titles are very useful if you don’t want to use dialogue, as they use declaratives, telling the audience what has happened, what will happen and that they could be the next victim. My group used inter-titles in a different way, we used them to tell the audience facts about stalkers in the UK “1 in 12 women are stalked in their lifetime”, we felt that this would scare the viewer more as this is a true fact, and isn’t a far-fetched supernatural plot.

Most horror trailers are themed with a colour, usually red, as it suggests blood or danger to the viewer. Instead, we used dark colours on the villain, such as grey or navy, so suggest that the villain is a very dark character. We also used dark blue tinting in a lot of the shots to imitate night time, so as to reinforce that they are in the college at night. We tried to use a red filter over some shots in the editing programme, Adobe Final Cut Pro, but we felt that the red filter didn’t match our plot very well, as it made the scenes seem very dangerous, we wanted them to seem more eerie and suspenseful than dangerous and fast-paced.

We also used climatic music, which begins with a crescendo to build suspense. This is very common in horror trailers, as the soundtrack used in the trailer can make or break the feelings conveyed through camera angles and positions. The soundtrack we used in our trailer is called Bent and Broken The song starts with a crescendo and has loud crashes and bumps over the top of the soundtrack. We used these crashes and bumps to our advantage, by mixing these sounds into the trailer where there is an eerie shot or a shot with the villain. For example, when the villain’s feet walk past the camera, we made sure to mix in a loud crash over this shot. This worked very well as it created more suspense and helped to reinforce that the villain is a dangerous character. We also mixed other sounds over the top of this soundtrack, such as creaking doors and a heartbeat sound. We didn’t use any sound that we had captured with the footage tended to have a lot of background noise which we couldn’t remove. The background noise we had was because all of the places we used to film tended to have a lot of people around, or the wind was very strong and distorted the sound we had.