Evaluation Question 1

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

To establish what we what conventions we wanted to use/develop/challenge in our sequence we first had to be aware of what the original conventions were. The genre we decided to put our sequence in was horror, we researched the typical conventions of horror and found that they are violent, bloody, involve death, have chase sequences, some kind of iconic killer/monster such as ‘Predator’ from ‘Predator’ (1987, McTiernan) or ‘Michael Myers’ from ‘Halloween’ (1978, Carpenter), numerous victims and are usually set in very dark places. We were inspired by the ‘Saw’ (2004, Wan - above) films with the use of a green tint. We opted for blue rather than green as it seemed more appropriate and made the room look darker, colder and overall scarier. We decided that we wanted out sequence to be specifically horror rather than a thriller so we decided to use some blood in our scene as with the hand against the window at the end. This made it seem like a taste of what was to come in the rest of the film. More blood, guts and gore. Our narrative also follows a fairly typical narrative. I saw this scene as being one that comes later in the film and the rest of the film shows how our victim got there and then how he escapes. This is reflected in Todorov’s narrative theory. There is a status quo, the victim is happy where he is and nothing seems to be wrong. The killer then disrupts the status quo by kidnapping him, this then triggers a series of events that have problems which are solved to restore the original status quo where the victim attempts to escape his captor which triggers more obstacles. This can be applied in a large number of films. Such as in ‘House of Wax’ (2005, Collet-Serra) where the group are happily camping in the forest when the killer cuts the fan belt of one of the cars. This then sets into motion the sequence of events that leads the rest of the group to being killed with only 2 of them surviving and both the killers dying, thus restoring the status quo. What made our sequence different was that in most horror films, the killer/villain is not often shown in full until the end, maintaining some enigma. We decided that we would alter this and made the killer apparent in the first scene. This way, later in the film, there’s the possibility of using this to create tension between characters with situations like the killer luring potential victims into a false sense of security where the audience knows what is going to happen but can't prevent it. Because of this, we also decided to change how the killer acted towards his victims. At first, he seems really friendly and treats them well, then suddenly changes and acts very aggressive, this makes him more sinister overall and makes him seem more like a psychopath. More enigma codes are used when the hand hits the door at the end of the sequence. It makes the audience wonder who it is, why they’re there and what has happened to them which they will find our later in the film. A lot of the feedback we received from our audience screenings showed that the audience reacted exactly how we wanted them to.