Horror Trailer Evaluation

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

For our horror trailer we tried to conform to the codes and conventions of horror films. We did this through our use of paradigms and use of theories such as Todorov’s theory of narrative, Propp’s character types and Carol Clover’s final girl theory.

When looking at different types of horror films, as a group we decided to do a slasher horror film, doing a trailer like this means we could use the stereotypical conventions and paradigms of horror. After deciding to do slasher, we started to research existing slasher films, such as Scream and Halloween. We decided to base our trailer on the two horror films Scream and Sorority Row, so we incorporated the storylines and paradigms used throughout both.

Our trailer first starts with a preview card and then a production logo, these are conventions of real media products. For our production logo I chose Dimension Films, because the Scream series were all produced with Dimensions.

We also added end credits to our trailer to make our media product seem professional. We also found that all existing film trailers had these.

PARADIGMS

When choosing our locations for the trailer, we decided to set it in different settings, while trying to follow the paradigms seen in other horror trailers. However, the first scene is set in the school’s dance studio to establish a sense of equilibrium, this challenges the setting paradigm as not many films are set in a dance studio; we also created the moment of disequilibrium in this scene.

For our second scene, we chose to set it in the woods showing the disequilibrium be continued, we chose this setting because it is a very stereotypical setting in a horror film. For our third scene, the next setting we used was a bathroom, we chose this, because we were inspired by the infamous shower scene from the horror film Psycho, linking our trailer to this may attract more people to watch it.

The main prop we used for our murder weapon was a fake knife. We chose this because knives are stereotypically known to be used in slasher films. We also used blood in our trailer, which made our trailer look more realistic and professional, at first we were worried about using fake blood, because if it was not done well it would not look realistic.

Another prop we used was a mask. We decided that we wanted the villain to be wearing a mask, because in horrors they keep their villains identity hidden. We used a mask for the villain as slasher horrors keep their villains anonymous and, because when looking art our questionnaire results it showed that our audience preferred it when the villain stayed anonymous.