In what ways does your media product use, develop or

challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

SettingDuring my research into horror films I discovered that they’re two main types of setting

used in the genre. The first, is a familiar or ‘normal’ surrounding, such as the start of The Ring. The other is the abnormal setting, which is confusing and causes the audience to think such as, Saw. We choose too use both a normal setting and an abnormal setting. This aims to disturb the audience, and build tension. Through the use of hermeneutic codes.

CharactersAgain through our use of characters we have

shown one very stereotypical stock horror movie character of the ‘defenceless teenage girl’ which is very common of horror movies, such as; Jaws and Piranha 3D. However during my research I noticed the lack of Women acting as the villain of films. Therefore the Cannibal is archetype.

Tension Building Through Editing

The purpose of the opening two minutes of a horror film is to build tension, whether this is through a build up of false tension leaving the audience on there toes such as, Scream; or whether as in the case of our production the film opens with a gruesome and scary opening. We have used fast paced parallel editing to create pace. As with many horror films the audience is ‘lulled into a false sense of security’, we did this by extending some of the eating scenes this made the hunting scenes more shocking and scary.

Lighting

As with most horror films we have taken advantage of humans natural fear of the dark. It is a classic horror movie convention that, ‘bad things happen in the dark’. We wanted to show this but in a different way, due to this we choose to add the night vision goggle effect our hunt scenes. This creates dramatic irony because the audience knows that someone or something is watching the girl, but the girl doesn’t know who is with her or where she is due to her pitch black surroundings. This will be frustrating for the audience and will create empathy for the girl because they know, inevitably something bad will happen to her. This technique is often used in Jaws, with the audience seeing the shark in the dark waters before the victim, it is also used in Piranha 3D, both using a teenage girl as the helpless victim. This is also done, because through our target market research we found that teenagers and young adults watch horror films the most meaning they can empathise with the same types of character easier.

Sound

We also used our music to build suspense with the sound growing louder, we have chosen to use a soundtrack with unexpected bangs and an unrepetitive beat, this will shock the audience and make them vulnerable, which will make watching the rest of our production more thrilling and frightening. The sound track to horror films in vital in informing the audience of bad things that lie ahead, creating false shocks and setting the scene. We wanted our music to fit with what was happening on the screen. The best examples of dramatic use of sound in horror films, is in Jaws and Psycho.