Audience Profile

Female, 16 and a half years old, still in education. Doesn’t have a job, but has enough pocket money to see a film about once a month.
Is interested in wearing what’s in fashion and keeping up with what’s cool. Likes to shop at H&M, Topshop, and Primark and listens to XFM.
Like’s to go to films with friends or on dates, but rarely with family. Enjoys comedies and horror films, especially ones with teens in, as she can relate to them. Her favorite film is Blair Witch Project, and Shaun of the Dead.

Analysing the opening two minutes: Halloween

Analysing the opening two minutes halloween

View more presentations from Maria_6681.

Secondary Research: Codes, Conventions and Sub Genres of Horror

Codes, conventions and sub genre of horrors

View more PowerPoint from louise1577

Analysing the Opening two Minutes: Cloverfield.

Analysing the opening 2 minutes cloverfield

View more presentations from Maria_6681.

Feedback for our film

To gather feedback for our final film we decided to post the video onto Facebook and get an audience response through the comments. Comments we got when posting our clip on facebook were:

'I like the lighting! It looks awesome where everything is black around her, and when she runs into blackness, because there could be anything there, and your imagination runs away with you. And loads of people are scared of the dark so it makes it eve more scary! x'

'I like when she falls over and then it cuts to her looking at her leg. It looked painful! Was it real? I liked how it wasn't gore-y, it looked like a sore cut but there wasn't legs coming off everywhere. It was more mysterious, as you didn't focus on whatever was chasing her, it was the possibility of what was chasing her'

'It was gooood! :) :) I don't know if i liked that there wasn't any sound or not... It kinda made you feel like it was real more, but it might have been more scary and tense if there was some dramatic music'

'I wanted to see what was chasing her! ^^ '

'The radio bit was good it made it seem professional'

'I think you should have had more shots of her running? it was kinda scary but she didn't really do much'

Narrative Theory

Narrative

View more PowerPoint from louise1577

Institution Research

Institutions research

View more presentations from Maria_6681.

Halloween

Halloween

View more presentations from Maria_6681.

The Thing

The Thing

View more presentations from Maria_6681.

Aliens Title Analysis

Aliens

View more presentations from Maria_6681.

Sub-Genres of Horrors

Sub-Genres of Horror



Supernatural: can include ghosts, monsters, dark forces, zombies, or pretty much any creepy thing that can’t be found in the real world.
Dark Fantasy: contains fantasy elements with a horror twist, or horror with a distinctly fantastical setting, like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.
Sci-fi Horror: mash-up of science fiction and horror, usually where the sci-fic aspects (aliens, robots, space travel) are used to precipitate the overriding horror. Like in the movieAlien.
Psychological Horror: driven by characters’ fears and focused more on psychological dread than on murder, mutilation, and gore. Could be supernatural, but is more often associated with those twists where the protagonist turns out to be insane.
Lovecraftian Horror: yeah, Lovecraft is so awesome he gets his own genre. Includes stories of a dinstinct aesthetic involving either Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythology or similar ideas and situations: i.e., ancient secrets, giant monsters/aliens in the bowels of the earth, and a profoundly unsympathetic universe. Could also be called cosmic or atheistic horror.
Gothic: involves psychological terror in historically romantic settings, usually including mysteries, ghosts, castles, decay, madness, hereditary curses, and death. Pretty much dominated by Edgar Allan Poe.
Splatterpunk/ Slasher: the horror extreme, with graphic and gory violence intended to gross you out. Includes cinema’s torture porn category, in movies like Hostel.
Satanic/Religious/Occult: horror derived from certain belief systems and the evil aspects that they fight against. Usually involves demonic possessions, exorcisms, or explorations of the darker side of pagan religions and the use of ”left hand” magic. The Exorcism is a stand-out example.
Erotic Horror/Paranormal Romance: for some reason that I can’t fathom, sex and horror seem to go hand in hand. There’s plenty of erotica involving horrifying situations/the supernatural, and (unfortunately) paranormal romance (which I’m not even going to consider a genre of horror, because it’s NOT) has gotten huge among the tweenieboppers with the unfortunate success of drivel like Twilight.
Suspense/Thriller: does not involve any supernatural or otherworldly aspects, instead relying on real-life situations to generate horror through serial killers, deadly situations, natural disasters, and psycopaths. Good film examples are Se7en and Jaws (even though it’s pretty unrealistic that a shark gets so hung up on eating people).
Weird Fiction: a primarily historical term for fiction of the 1930s, it predates genre fiction and blended the supernatural, mythical, and even scientific into stories that were ultimately strange, uncanny, or unreal in nature. The term is popularized by Weird Tales magazine.
Speculative Fiction: not a subgenre but an umbrella term encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero fiction, utopian/dystopian fiction, apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history literature. For a story that doesn’t necessarily fit into one genre, or blends several (maybe a post-apocalyptic horror/sci-fi piece with elves?), you can always just call it speculative fiction, since these genres often overlap.

Preliminary Task

Codes and Conventions of a horror

Supernatural: can include ghosts, monsters, dark forces, zombies, or pretty much any creepy thing that can’t be found in the real world.
Dark Fantasy: contains fantasy elements with a horror twist, or horror with a distinctly fantastical setting, like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.
Sci-fi Horror: mash-up of science fiction and horror, usually where the sci-fic aspects (aliens, robots, space travel) are used to precipitate the overriding horror. Like in the movieAlien.
Psychological Horror: driven by characters’ fears and focused more on psychological dread than on murder, mutilation, and gore. Could be supernatural, but is more often associated with those twists where the protagonist turns out to be insane.
Lovecraftian Horror: yeah, Lovecraft is so awesome he gets his own genre. Includes stories of a dinstinct aesthetic involving either Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythology or similar ideas and situations: i.e., ancient secrets, giant monsters/aliens in the bowels of the earth, and a profoundly unsympathetic universe. Could also be called cosmic or atheistic horror.
Gothic: involves psychological terror in historically romantic settings, usually including mysteries, ghosts, castles, decay, madness, hereditary curses, and death. Pretty much dominated by Edgar Allan Poe.
Splatterpunk/ Slasher: the horror extreme, with graphic and gory violence intended to gross you out. Includes cinema’s torture porn category, in movies like Hostel.
Satanic/Religious/Occult: horror derived from certain belief systems and the evil aspects that they fight against. Usually involves demonic possessions, exorcisms, or explorations of the darker side of pagan religions and the use of ”left hand” magic. The Exorcism is a stand-out example.
Erotic Horror/Paranormal Romance: for some reason that I can’t fathom, sex and horror seem to go hand in hand. There’s plenty of erotica involving horrifying situations/the supernatural, and (unfortunately) paranormal romance (which I’m not even going to consider a genre of horror, because it’s NOT) has gotten huge among the tweenieboppers with the unfortunate success of drivel like Twilight.
Suspense/Thriller: does not involve any supernatural or otherworldly aspects, instead relying on real-life situations to generate horror through serial killers, deadly situations, natural disasters, and psycopaths. Good film examples are Se7en and Jaws (even though it’s pretty unrealistic that a shark gets so hung up on eating people).
Weird Fiction: a primarily historical term for fiction of the 1930s, it predates genre fiction and blended the supernatural, mythical, and even scientific into stories that were ultimately strange, uncanny, or unreal in nature. The term is popularized by Weird Tales magazine.
Speculative Fiction: not a subgenre but an umbrella term encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero fiction, utopian/dystopian fiction, apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history literature. For a story that doesn’t necessarily fit into one genre, or blends several (maybe a post-apocalyptic horror/sci-fi piece with elves?), you can always just call it speculative fiction, since these genres often overlap.

Codes and Conventions of a Sci-fi

Codesandconventions

View more presentations from Maria_6681.

Synopsis Research

I found a few synopsis' from other films which are similar to our film to help us and give us ideas as to how we should write ours.

This is the synopsis from The Blair Witch Project:
In October of 1994, three student filmmakers hike out to the woods of Blair, hoping to find evidence of a local legend "The Blair Witch". At first, they find nothing except a pile of stones arranged by hand. As the sun goes down, they realize they are lost, but there is little panic. They camp out, and in the middle of the night they see and hear things, things that are not normal. When they awake, they find wooden dolls in cross-like formations. They were not there that night. Then one of the students, Josh, is separated from the group. The other two finally realize that they are in a very serious situation, and that they are being stalked, stalked by something that may be the very thing they were looking for...

This is the synopsis from the film Super 8:
In the summer of 1979, a group of friends in a small Ohio town witness a catastrophic train crash while making a super 8 movie and soon suspect that it was not an accident. Shortly after, unusual disappearances and inexplicable events begin to take place in town, and the local Deputy tries to uncover the truth - something more terrifying than any of them could have imagined.

This is the synopsis from the film Monsters(2010):
Six years ago NASA discovered the possibility of alien life within our solar system. A probe was launched to collect samples, but crashed upon re-entry over Central America. Soon after, new life form began to appear and half of Mexico was quarantined as an INFECTED ZONE. Today, the American and Mexican military still struggle to contain "the creatures"...... Our story begins when a US journalist agrees to escort a shaken tourist through the infected zone in Mexico to the safety of the US border.

This is the synopsis for the film Scream 4:
Sidney Prescott returns home to Woodsboro on her last book tour stop. But, when she arrives, everything is not all great reuniting with Gale and Dewey as Ghostface lurks in town as well. When Sidney's cousin Jill's life is threatened, and her friends are being picked off one by one, Sidney, Gale and Dewey need to figure out who's reinventing the deadly game before it becomes too late.

Location Research

Once we had sorted out our storyline we went out and looked for locations which matched our ideas.
Here are the images of the location we had chosen:

Here are some images from the location of The Blair Witch Project:

Here is one location from the film Super 8:

Here is one location from the film Cloverfield: