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

forms and conventions of real media products?

In tearms of theory, I annalysed statements made by Laura Mulvey, Tzveton Todorov and Vladimir Porpp. From Vladimir Proop’s prospective he identifies seven different character

types. However I’ve only followed and developed three of these character types, as my trailer challenged the others.

Firstly, Propp states that in a trailer there is always a hero present. This is to immediately let the audience know that the film contains

some type of struggle between good and evil and almost inevitably, the hero will be triumphant. Propp further elaborates on this by

saying that the hero is usually represented as a male character, which ultimately emphasizes the fact that men are usually the ones who are seen to ‘save the day’. My trailer challenged this view, because I did not make reference or feature a hero type of character in any way. I

made this creative decision because in most modern horror films aimed at my target audience, the equilibrium is not restored at the end of the film, as an attempt to make the audience feel unsettled, and consequently make the film seem scarier. Thus I did not show

evidence of a hero in the trailer to remove the possibility, in the audience’s minds, of there being a ‘happy’ and resolved ending to the film, and make them more curious to go and watch the film in

order to see exactly what happens and how it ends.

Vladimir Porpp

As well as this, I challenged the thought of the men being dominant figures, by having all the main protagonists featured in the trailer to be women. As the male character was not prominent in the trailer, this suggests that he is

not as much of an integral character in the film as the women. However, this decision can be interpreted in two ways that, depending on the

interpretation, can either be a development or contradiction of Laura Mulvey’s theory. If we are to apply Mulvey’s theory of women being

portrayed as passive whilst men presented as dominant, this could be interpreted in such a way to suggest that my trailer has the opposite effect and only shows the females, because they are the only ones in the film that become possessed, due to the fact that they are more submissive and thus

more susceptible to these types of things, whereas the males are more strong willed and thus not so easily taken over by outside forces.

Laura Mulvey

Relating my trailer to Tzvertan Todorov’s theory of the five stages of conventional narratives, my trailer possesses all the qualities to suggest that the actual film would follow the first stage of this theory, because it would have a happy start. It is

important that I followed this first stage of the theory, because I did not want the audience to categories the little girl as the

villain, but instead identify with her as a girl who had been corrupted by something evil. This is to ensure that the

character is more relatable because according to Mulvey’sfemale narcism theory, the female audience members would

put themselves in her shoes.

Vladimir Porpp