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

Through research, I discovered that there was a group of expected conventions for horror films, a few examples being:• Isolated locations e.g. – woods, graveyards• Domestic locations• Violent iconography e.g. - weapons, blood, corpses, red, black• A subgenre of horror – psychological, slasher and paranormal• Stereotypical themes e.g. – murder, kidnap, isolation, religion,

serial killings• Typical sounds/noises e.g. – screams, footsteps, heavy

breathing, manic laughing• Suspenseful/ Jumpy Soundtrack• Common characters e.g. – male protagonist, male human

antagonist, male non-human antagonist, female victim, male law enforcers

• Dim lighting

• Our group decided that we wanted to stick to as many of the typical conventions for a horror film as possible.

• We decided to go with the subgenre of psychological horror as filming a slasher or paranormal horror film would prove very difficult. To keep to this subgenre we created a narrative that showed our protagonist walking in a deserted wood alone not realising until last minute that she is being followed by our antagonist. This keeps to the conventions of a psychological horror film as it makes the audience jumpy and ‘keeps them on their toes’ as they don’t know when the antagonist will appear next.

• The setting for our opening sequence is in a deserted wood so the protagonist appears isolated and the audience can see that there is no one around that can help her.

• Our protagonist is dressed in typical teenage girl’s clothes that would be seen as common in society today whereas our antagonist is wearing an outfit of all black, has porcelain white skin, dark black sunken eyes and blood smeared around her mouth which connotes that she is a non-human antagonist.

• At the end of the opening sequence, the screen goes black and there is a scream, this could connote to two stereotypical themes in horror films – kidnap as the antagonist could have kidnapped the protagonist, or murder.

• We use many stereotypical sounds in our opening sequence including diegetic sounds such as screams and heavy breathing made by our characters and non-diegetic sounds such as the suspenseful soundtrack in the background of the opening sequence. This soundtrack adds to the effect of a psychological horror film as it makes the audience jump and constantly keeps them in suspense.

• One convention of a horror film that our opening sequence does challenge is the gender of both our protagonist and antagonist. Commonly in horror films, both these characters are represented by the male gender as society has the stereotypical view that males are more powerful and intelligent as so would know how to either get out of a dangerous situation or create one. By using females for our antagonist we are showing that women too can be strong and aggressive and this may too attract more of a female audience as horror films typically attract a male dominated audience.