Horror Films

‘Horror films are movies that strive to elicit the emotions of fear, horror and terror from viewers. Their plots frequently involve themes of death, the supernatural or mental illness. Many horror movies also include a central villain.’ – Wikipedia Nov. 09
Horror films are originally based on classic literature such as Dracula and Frankenstein. They often are based on a serial killer or a supernatural presence such as aliens or a ‘monster’.They are very usually set in a haunted house, or in a lodge in the middle of a forest, they concentrate on isolated locations or suburban American homes.

The narrative of horror films according to Propp are as followed:
Equilibrium – Disequilibrium – A new state of Equilibrium

Also, that each character in the film has different functions to create the narrative:
The Hero – who saves the day
The Villain – evil one who causes the disequilibrium
The Helper – who helps the hero on their quest/the sidekick, the helper usually ends up dead
The Victim – this character can also be seen as the hero, they are the result of the villains evil but also go out to destroy the evil
The Donor - Extra quality to help the hero

Typical Camera shots –
EXTREME CLOSE – UP = creates tension, shows facial expressions, connotes the victims distress.
CLOSE – UP = subject fills the frame, shows more about the actions of the character but also shows emotion.
DUTCH TILT = Often used to create disorientation.
EXTREME LONG SHOT = creates the scene, can also connote someone watching from a distance.
LONG SHOT = can be used to show someone in a surrounding but also see the villain approach from behind, creates tension.

Lighting is very important in the making of a horror film; it usually is the key in what creates the tension in a scene along with sound. For example if you have a young women in a room and have a killer approaching from behind to attack her, it would be more affective if the room was dimly light than if it was very bright.

To prepare ourselves for the project we set a day to watch the following horror films: The Strangers, The Ring, Scream trilogy and An American Haunting.
These are all typical American horror films, with a killer/monster and victim that doesn't have any particular pyscological thriller sense that you get with most horror films, we did this on purpose as we didn't want our own film to be portrayed in this way so we thought it would be best to keep to the classic horror - we no hidden story or twist but just pure terror and fear. With these type of films you can easily guess what happens in the end, but I think that with a horror film you aren't going to watch some cleverly thought out, big-twist, shocker of a film, but something that will scare you witless and hide behind your cushion to.

We are going to look at all these typical horror conventions, and make sure we can put as meny into our own project as possible to make it as professional looking as we can. We aren't looking to over complicate it with any over ambitious story, but just a pure good horror trailer, which does what it sets out to do - SCARE!!

Ancillary Texts Film Poster

Film Poster


Here is a presentation that I created to aid us in creating our film poster. I analyse a series of five posters and afterwards conclude.

Analyzing Film Posters

View more presentations from The Cherwell School..

So now we have analysed some film posters, which are within the horror/thriller genre we can look at how we are going to make our own poster.

Research into teaser trailers.

To help us come up with our teaser trailer we decided to research them but more specifically horror trailers. Here are a few that I looked at:

Scream 4
The Strangers
Mirrors
Paranormal Activity
The Haunting In Connecticut
The Unborn
Halloween 2

Scream 4

This particular trailer is very similar to how we want to make our own trailer, the trailer itself isn't as fast paced as the others, and is showing more of a story but then still cuts up the scenes from the film to only show snippets of what is going to happen. This makes it look like a trailer, rather than the beginning of a film which is what we have to be careful not to do when making our own.

From the horror ones I can see that they are very quick paced with flashing images of short clips, usually screaming or the main scary parts. However before this they build up tension by usually displaying some sort of text, sometimes a question. In my group we decided that we like that text appearing and will be doing the same. They also quickly change the pace and atmosphere to engage the audience and to give the shock factor. The non horror trailers have a similar template. They again choose the main/exciting parts of the film and flash them up, however they don't seem to use the text technique. The horror ones always seem to have some sort of non-diagetic sound to create tension and atmosphere, we will again be using this technique.

This research has definitely helped us to decide what our content our teaser trailer should have.

Starting point..

For our teaser trailer we have ultimately decided to make our genre horror/thriller. We decided this because a genre such as this is easy to portray for such amateur work, to create a tense and sinister atmosphere is relatively easy as fear is a feeling that is quite simple to bring out in people. The equation for a horror trailer, is fast snappy shots, in a domestic area, not much dialogue and as a general rule of thumb is set at night time, and because we have only home video cameras, the technique of hand held camera, can be justified with films such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. But this is just the beginning to our planning for a trailer, as we have seen plenty of horror films ourselves and horror trailers we know what generally makes us scared when we see these texts, and so we already have the basic knowledge of what is going to make this project good; we still need to do more research. We need to look more closely at teaser trailers, and then specifically at horror trailers, but also horror films.

Pitch

Rosie has a secret..something that no one in her present life knows about until now. Betsy has been a phycatrist for over the past 20 years and for all her time served to estranged patients from the St Mary's hospital she has never come across a story like Rosie's.
The Cult is the previous home of Rosie where she lived with her mother and two brothers.. at the age of 16 she'd finally had had enough of the abuse and torture her elders oposed on her and managed to escape to a new life and new world outside the religious bounds this cult has given her. 10 years later she comes across her past that never fails to haunt her, and has to fight to save herself and everything she has built around her.

The content of our A2

When in class we were given 5 objectives and had to choose one to complete. We picked the one to make a teaser trailer. This is the main task to complete. There were another three as well well which we had to complete two of, the three were to do a design of the homepage of the film, the second was to design a poster for the film, the third is to design a magazine front cover advertising our film. We decided to make a film poster and magazine cover.