Evaluation Question 1

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



Previous to creating the film, i researched into the history of horror and looked specifically at how horror has progressed over the decades and the generic signifiers and conventions in each film. This helped me to ensure our film used conventions and signifiers of a typical horror film but also to develop our film into breaking these typical conventions and going beyond the audiences expectations of a horror film. The first 2 minutes of our film used many generic conventions and signifiers, for example: The use of Rachel being strapped to a chair was typical of a horror film because she is a young woman trapped and helpless that the audience will feel sorry for. She is also wearing a white dress which denotes to the audience her innocence. Also, our antagonist was dressed in all black and this explicitly warns the audience that the protagonist is in danger.

Our film starts with a heartbeat that gets rapidly faster and by us using lots of flashing images of newspaper headlines, pictures of Rachel and the male character, we created a sense of fear in our audience which is the intention of all horror film directors in the industry. However, instead of our film slowly establishing the storyline of the film, from the very beginining we had suspense building to create terror and dove straight into a torture scene. We got this idea from the film Saw (2004) and unlike most horror films, this film breaks the convention and scares the audience from the very start. This tests the audiences expectations of horror films because most audience members would expect a horror fim to start by semi-establishing a storyline or a character, for example we looked at the film "The strangers" (2008) And this film starts by establishing a storyline between the male and female protagonists. This is typical of most horror films and therefore audiences have grown to expect these conventions, our film defies these conventions by delving straight into suspense and horror and therefore setting the audience up for fear.