How has research into key media concepts and theory impacted our ideas?

Genre:

Genre conventions for horror have impacted almost every element of our film plot and trailer. Starting with the setting. We chose somewhere that is easily recognisable with the horror genre – a grave yard. It incorporates several elements of a common horror setting such as darkness and association with death. The graveyard setting also has a history that is shocking and horrible (we discover that it is the home of a mass grave of prisoners of war in the film). We also set parts of our film and trailer in a normal household, this helps with creating a false-equilibrium, that all is well, before the graveyard setting helping with the disequilibrium.

The technical codes that we are using, such as camera shots, have been specifically chosen because they are common within the horror genre and hep with suspense. For example, several of our shots in the trailer are going to be POV shots, either subjective or objective, they both help create suspense equally as well. We are not going to use a tripod or dolly for some of our shots, and use the camera handheld instead, to allow shots to be slightly shakey and irregular to create a sense of chaos. This will dominantly be used in our trailer when we are portraying the paranormal activity that is going.

The iconography of our trailer will also adhere to some horror conventions. Lighting will often be dark, (we will be using a night mode filter to help with this), and colours like red and black will be featured heavily. The props in our film will also be common in horror, such as grave stones, crosses, and a mental asylum/hospital gown. The subgenre of our film/trailer is paranormal, which is a common theme for horror films also.

There are several themes running through our film/trailer that are common in horror, such as religion, binary oppositions such as good v’s evil, the super natural and madness. This is shown through the cross identifying the mass grave, the ghost v the main character, and the final girl going mad.

Narrative

Narrative theory has helped and impacted our ideas from planning where to film to the shot lists. Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss has helped us pick out the film characters and who they would be representing in the film. With Propp he has 8 character roles that we could choose from and potentially have within our trailer. For our characters we have a final girl ‘Kendall’ who in the ends up surviving, however, we made it so that it’s unconventional and that she ends up being mentally scarred from what had happened throughout the film. We have only thought about having one main character which is Kendall, but for the rest of the characters they’re mainly in the background or are hardly in the film/trailer. For the villains in the film/trailer we have thought about it being a spirit from a mass grave who wants a proper burial – this is when Kendall decides to bring the body back up, but then she is accused of being a grave digger by the police. For Levi-Strauss there are binary opposites from the character types and the setting point of view – the final girl, Kendall and the spirit would obviously be Good/Evil. In the film trailer we have planned the only normal thing about it so far is the main character Kendall, everything starts to go pear shaped and strange after she has visited the grave yard the first time and then goes home to see that the news is talking about that grave yard she visited and others all around the world - Normal/Strange. When Kendall has visited the grave yard for the first time, she realises that when she’s in there it’s a mass grave, but doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her and doesn’t know what’s going to happen for it to be on the news – Known/Unknown. The mass grave and the people who are buried are from the past (WWII) and Kendall and the rest of the characters such as the police etc. are in the present – Past/Present.

Representation:

Our film/trailer has several elements that relate to the various theorists in terms of representation.

Jeremy Tunstall stated that women are shown in one of four different ways: Domestic, Sexual, Marital and Consumer. Our final girl character is not shown as marital and sexual, due to us wanting her to fit into the ‘final girl’ character type, not the whore. Saying this, she could be seen as showing the domestic role, as the beginning shots are of her in the kitchen making coffee. She is also shown to be a consumer, as in one or two of the first few shots, she had a fresh bunch of flowers, to put on the grave. These would’ve had to have been bought that day, but we never actually see this. So it is not directly shown she is a consumer, but implied.

It is also common for women to be shown as weak or unable to defend themselves in horror films, but our character, Kendall, is the one who decides to try and help/fix the ghost situation by digging up a grave and dealing with dead bodies. This is not a usual plot point the would be associated with a woman.

Laura Mulvey’s male gaze is something we have thought about when coming up with our shot list and discussing shot types. We have decided to not make the audience voyeurs in any way (by revealing her in a sexual way or by making her be being watched by another character while she is unaware). This was done purposefully in order to emphasise that she is the ‘final girl’ character, and is androgynous, and so should not be seen as a sexual object.

In ‘Men Women and Chainsaws’ by Carol Clover, she states that ‘masochistic identification’ is key for the horror genre, as men identify with the female character. We decided to have our main character, that gets harassed and bullied by the spirit be female, to allow this identification to happen. Although there are other elements of Clovers research that we have not embraced in our film, such as a repressed sexuality of the murderer. We don’t have a murderer character in the plot line of our film, the closest thing is the antagonist spirit, which had not been given a proper burial, causing him to cause havoc, rather than a repressed sexuality. The final girl, gender fluidity of her and her being empowered are all ideas embraced by our film/trailer. Kendall represents the final girl. We purposefully gave her an androgynous name, adding to the gender fluidity of her character, and she makes decisions, such as digging up bodies, that would usually be associated with men making. She is empowered as she takes the situation into her own hands, and doesn’t include anyone else to help her do the task. We can’t determine if Kendall is saved, or saves herself, as the paranormal activity is never resolves, as she gets caught and accused of being a grave robber before she can complete her plan to lay the spirit to rest.

Audiences and institutions:

Firstly, we thought about what age range we wanted our film to be. In order to make our target audience as wide as possible, we decided our film should be a 15. This is because research shows that the biggest horror audience is males aged 15-24, so making it an 18 age rating would cause the film to not be available to 3 years of the target audience. We made the film appropriate to this age by not including any explicit scenes of death or murder, as if these were included, it would’ve been sure to be an 18. We also decided that the language used in our film should be relatively mild, and not included any ‘F’ or ‘C’ bombs, to allow us to be appropriate to a 15-year-old audience.

The release date of our film was also crucial when thinking about audiences and institutions. We identified that the most popular time of year for horror films to be successful is around Halloween. This was proven by the success of other horror films on and around Halloween, so we made the release date the 31^st of October. Not only does this help with the scariness and appeal of the film, it is long enough before Christmas that people aren’t tight up from buying presents yet, and therefore can still afford to go to the cinema.