Research: Codes and Conventions in Existing Teen Horror Film Openings

Please find below the title of the essay you need to complete by 3pm on XXX. This essay will be valuable for your planning and evaluation.

• This essay should be done as a post to your blog. You can, if you wish, punctuate your essay with screen shots from the openings.
• The word count should be targeted at 750 words
• You should select appropriate examples from the openings to illustrate the points that you make. You do not have to write about everything that you see and hear.

Analyse the codes and conventions of horror films as shown in the openings of 'Dead Wood', 'Dead Mary' and 'Wrong Turn'.

Research : Codes and Conventions of Existing Teen Horror Film Openings (Wrong Turn)

The opening of 'Wrong Turn' which we have analysed in class.

Research : Codes and Conventions of Existing Teen Horror Film Openings (Dead Mary)

The opening of 'Dead Mary' for you to analyse.

Research : Codes and Conventions of Existing Teen Horror Film Openings (Dead Wood)

The opening to 'Dead Wood' for you to analyse.

Research: Conventions Commonly Found in Horror Films

Secluded Location

Most of the time horror movies place a character in a location where nothing is around them an example of this would be the woods, a ghost town, a summer camp or a house in the middle of no where. This is done so it makes the viewer of the film feel on edge and make them feel like something is going to happen.


Characters Forget about any threat

Most of the time in a horror film there is a danger that people know about but they carry on and go to that place anyway. This is almost always a negative part of the movie and you know that something will happen later on in the movie.


Power is Cut

At the perfect time the power is always cut. This is so the viewer knows that something is going to happen. When the lights first go out the character in the film usually goes to check what did it. This is also to build intensity.


Phone Lines Are Cut

The killers always take out the phones. This is so the victim can have no connection with the outside world. In nearly all horror films at least one of the phones are cut. Since the introduction of mobile phones they have had to change the way it works. They had to make sure the mobile dies just before the victim tries to call the help that they needed.


Someone investigates a strange noise

This is one of the most overused horror film conventions. A lot of horror films use this to try and build tension. If there was someone screaming then someone would stupidly go over to the noise to try and find out what it was.


Someone Runs Upstairs Instead of Outside

People will always run upstairs instead of outside. This is to try and build tension in the crowd. If they are unable to do that then it will be harder to scare the audience.


Victim Cowers In Front of a Door or Window

They sit and cower in front of the doors or windows so that the villain can break there hand through the window or door so that the victim will get scared. This could also be a jump scare.


Victim Falls Over at the Worst Time

They do this to try and build tension.


Car Wont Start

This will always happen with any car or bike. This is also so you can build tension. They do this very well in most of the films.


The Fake Scare

A fake scare is a very old and over-used convention in a horror film. They use this just before a jump scare. This works really well and can scare people a lot when it is used well.


Warning Goes Unheeded

It is natural if you get told not to go somewhere then you don't go there. But with this convention even if they do get warned then they will still go into the haunted forest or something like that with the warning still in their head.


Someone is killed in the first 5 minutes

When this is done well it can be very effective. But if it is done wrong then it can make it look like a parody film. This if done wrong could ruin the whole film for the viewers of the film.


X Years Before/Later

This indicates a prologue of the film, setting up the events that will happen later on in the film. If it says 15 years later for example then it means that the prologue has ended and the main film will start.


The Stormy Night

This is to try and build tension. It is also so that they can add thunder as part of a jump scare.


The Short Cut

This is so that the person is put in to a dark alley. This is to try and build tension in the audience which could lead to a jump scare.

Research: Things about fear

We were asked to get into groups and write down what some of the worst fears are that you can have. We also had to write down the reasons for people being scared of that particular thing. Then we also had to write down why we thought that these fears came about.

The purpose of this was to research in to different peoples fears. This is so that we can use it in the main task as and when it comes to doing that. These fears that are on the picture above are seen a lot in horror films as it seems a lot of people are scared by the same sort of things.

Research: The History of Horror Films:A Journey Through Time (1980)

The Thing(1982)


Little-seen on its release but now hailed as a classic, John Carpenter's masterpiece is actually a remake. He took the Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi thriller (based on a short story by pulp author John W Campbell calledWho Goes There?) The Thing From Another World and turned it into a gorefest that has never been equalled. Retrospectively, The Thing has proved itself to be one of the most important horror movies of the 1980s, despite not being a box office success at the time. It is now seen by many as visionary, from a technical (the special effects far outstripped anything previously seen and certain scenes are horrifying to watch even today, nearly three decades on), and from a philosophical perspective. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers it offers a discourse on what it is that makes us human, by examining what happens when our humanity is engulfed by alien biology.


The Shining(1980)


The Book

Stephen King's 1977 bestselling novel is a spin on the traditional haunted house story. When King and his wife, Tabitha, paid a late-season visit to The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, they found themselves the only guests in residence as the staff packed everything up for the winter. King was spooked by the silent, empty corridors, and, after a nightmare featuring his son running screaming through the hotel, came up with the bones of his novel.






The Movie

Stanley Kubrick's movie is substantially different to the book. Rather than being about a family, it's about a location. The Overlook, as imagined by Kubrick, is a series of nightmare-inducing spaces that simultaneously cause claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Kubrick eschews the supernatural explanation that the hotel is an evil entity which manifests via a spectral corpse in the bathtub or topiary creatures that come to life. Instead he suggests it's an extreme case of sick building syndrome: something rotten in the architecture and the carpet designs burrows into Jack's brain and sends him over the edge.





Child's Play(1988)

Another serial killer with a smart mouth and a not-so-snappy way of dressing appeared in 1988, launching another successful franchise. Child's Play(1988) introduced horror audiences to Chucky, who, as well as drawing on the long tradition of malevolent dolls on page and screen, provided an interesting nexus between the monster children of the 1970s and the serial killers of the 1990s. The self-aware irony pre-empted the tone of the post-modern Wes Craven movies of the1990s.





Nine...Ten Never Sleep Again:A Nightmare on Elm Street(1984)

Wes Craven, the former college professor responsible for two of the darkest and most deranged movies of the 1970s (Last House on The Left and The Hills Have Eyes) unveiled a brash, commercial franchise in 1984: A Nightmare on Elm Street. The monster, a hideously scarred Freddy (named after a kid who bullied Wes Craven at school) Krueger represents a successful blend of humour and horror, a deranged killer who doesn't lurk silently behind a hockey mask but menaces in full view, spitting one-liners as he sharpens his trademark glove.

Main Task Set Brief

The titles and opening of a new teen horror film, to last a maximum of two minutes.

All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source.

Preliminary Task Evaluation

Preliminary Task Evaluation

Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.

Continuity is the idea of a continuous scene or concept where everything must be correct. For instance clothing, and location must not change throughout the scene to create a effective continuous scene.

Match on Action is a cut to another camera to show the important object in that particular scene.

Shot/Reverse Shot is a shot with is mostly used when dialogue is used. Most of the time this shot is an over the shoulder shot.

180-degree rule is a rule in filming. Imagine an imaginary line through the middle of the scene. If you cross the line then you change the viewers perspective on the scene completely.

Pre-Production

At the start of pre-production we sat down as a group and spoke to see i we had any similar ideas. We seemed to know as a group where we were going with this task.  We knew what we wanted to happen. We had the range of shots that we wanted. These were the long shot, establishing shot, mid shot and the POV(point of view) shot. We knew from the start who our cast would be and we knew who would be waiting and who would be walking into the school.  We also knew what our knock knock joke would be be. We then had to write down the first ideas. We did this on an A3 sheet. To the right you can see the picture where i am holding the sheet. 

 
We then had to do a storyboard so we knew where each one of the scenes that we were doing. We had 20 in total. It also gives you a lot of information that you can also use in the clips that you record. This was very useful. This is because we then knew why we needed to do for every shot. These were then posted on to the blog as well in  different post. Here is an example of one. Once we felt that we had done and we had a good layout. 

Overall, having a pre-production where we could right down our initial thoughts. We could also right down all of the different techniques that we had. This is shown in the picture to the left.

 Production

We filmed our Task on an IPad. This made the audio really bad. You can get around this by putting the audio up on the editing software. Some of the audio on this was so bad. Most of the audio that we had we had to get rid of completely. Also during filming we could see some reflections of the team as we were filming. This could not be helped. The day that we decided to film was really windy. This was a really bad idea and if we had the option we would have filmed on another day.
On the right you can see a picture of one of our POV shots. This is what i meant about having shadows on the ground.  You can also see the IPad in the picture and this is also a part that we didn't want in the presentation. 




Post Production 


In this stage we used the clips and cut them down to the right size. We then put the clips into iMovie. This is shown in the picture below. 

 

Once the clips were in iMovie i dragged the clips into iMovie and cut the clips down to the size i wanted.

 

Once the footage was in the timeline i then edited it down to size by simply dragging the edge of the clip down to the size i wanted.

You could then add audio to the Movie if you wanted to. The green boxes on the picture below are the audio files.

Evaluation

Here  is The Joke as a final product. In my opinion i did pretty well for a first task. We thought of some good ideas from the start but i didnt know how they would end out. We only encountered a couple of issues.

The first problem that i found was the clips could have been wrong. We should have filmed the clips more than once from the start. One problem that i also found was the panning shot wasnt very good. This is due to the camera man having a shaky hand. Another example would be when filming a P.O.V shot of our actor walking into the main building you can see the shadow of the camera, which could be prevented if we took more time to sort it out.

Overall, i felt that the task was an overall success. The planning and filming of this was all round good. Next time there would be a few things that i would change. This was good for my first try.