Question 1 – In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real media products?

The conventions of our chosen genre, which is horror, are that there is a theme

of good vs. evil, the iconography is very dark and uses props such as blood,

knives and other forms of weaponry, the settings used are abandoned buildings,

dark environments, settings are key as they create the mood. Common narrative

devices are that there is some sort of evil being trying to kill or scare the hero or

protagonist or hero. Common characters in horrors are the stupid teenager that

gets killed, the villain and the hero.

The research we concluded prior to our construction was that we found out

about the conventions of horror, we did this by analysing films, such as

Halloween, Insidious and The Conjuring etc. we found out about the conventions

and learned how they are used in a title sequence. This also gave us some ideas

on what to include in our film and how to do them correctly and properly.

Our work fits with these conventions well; there is a protagonist in our film and

also a villain who is trying to kill him. This also challenges the conventions as in

most horror films it is the female character who dies earlier on in the film, but in

our film it is a male character therefore this stretches and challenges that specific

convention of horror.

A good example of this is the film ‘Psycho’ by Alfred Hitchcock. 30 minutes into

the film the films antagonist kills off the leading lady, Janet Leigh. This was

effective because is was shocking in world of film as it has never been done

before so we tried to this in our film, to break away from convention.

In this scene in P