Evaluation: Part 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?


Our film trailer seems to fit the genre of horror very well. In his book "Hollywood Genres" Thomas Schatz came up with the idea that the film's genre is the best way to analyse it. Schatz saw genre as one of the most powerful things to do with films. It’s what helped sell the film in the best way, as it puts the film into a specific category with reliable generic conventions that help the audiences select a film more easily. Overall, a film genre tries to get an strong emotional response from its audience. A comedy is there to make us laugh or an action film makes us feel excited. With a horror film, I knew I had to shock and disturb my target audience.

My film trailer contains low key lighting, gore, canted angles and lots of different angled shots to make the trailer seem crazy and strange. All of these generic conventions play a big role in the success of a horror film. Our trailer contained all of the things that you would expect to see in a horror film. Lots of gore in a cold and dark looking barn helped create tension for the viewer. It was also paced with a countdown which helped to add tension to then build into a shocking shot of Jack hanging from his hands by chains. After looking though a number of different horror trailers, we decided to combine parts of different ones to come up with our final idea. Parts of the Saw trailers were involved in our planning and helped us to come up with some of our ideas. The location and the use of a camera videoing a torturing session were both ideas that we used in our trailer.

My own Auteur influence (based on the ideas of Andrew Sarris’ “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”) was really the idea of an audience viewing a torture, while it is actually being videoed on screen and being broadcast on the internet. In this way it challenges more safe horror films like Cabin In The Woods, and appeals to only an 18+ audience. I wanted Live: Stream to give the idea that what is happening is really happening in real life. This can really leave the audience feeling uneasy and thinking about what they have seen for a very long time after. For me it is an updated version of Hostel, where killers pay to torture their victims. I would like to feel that what the audience is seeing isn’t just a film experience, but it haunts them for a time after, making them wonder if it is really happening. This is all based on horror coming from the word "horrere" which means to shudder. I definitely think my trailers uses the conventions of the horror genre to create this.