History of Horror
After researching the history of horror films, I have seen
how horror has adapted and changed through time. For example, the genre began
as silent films in the 1860’s, with one of the most famous films being ‘Cabinet
of Dr Caligari’. Looking into the history of the genre allowed our group to
make our trailer keep to its conventional roots and adapt on what the audience
would find scary.
Genre Conventions
When creating a media product, it is extremely important to
carry out research. Without doing research into the product you are creating,
you do not have the information necessary to create the product to real
industry standards. When creating a film trailer, research needs to be done to
make sure you understand the genre you are going for and its conventions. This
is exactly why I conducted research before the production of my horror trailer.
Since I was planning on creating a horror trailer, I did
research on the genre which also helped our group decide what kind of
horror/subgenre we wanted to create. One of the most important aspects of
horror I needed to research was the conventions of the genre. Researching old
and new horror trailers allowed me to see the different conventions you see
across them all including things like location, characters, props, and narrative
which highly influenced many aspects of our trailer.
Narrative
Our research into different narrative theories helped shape
the narrative direction of our trailer. We looked at multiple horror films such
as ‘Halloween’ and ‘The Crazies’ which both follow Todorov’s Narrative Theory
which looks at how all stories follow the same structure. We also looked deeper
into the two films and compared other parts of the narrative structure. We also
looked into how this narrative theory plays into horror trailers which helped
us structure our own trailer. Research into narrative was needed to establish
our trailers conventional plot that fits to its genre.
Research into narrative also helped our group come up with
the synopsis of the trailer and influenced other pre-production work for our
main trailer product. It helped us structure the story and way our trailer was
shot and edited.
Representation
Representation is another important aspect we researched. We
mainly looked into the way women are represented in horror films and trailers.
We looked into the final girl theory though of by Carol Clover in 1992. After
researching this theory and seeing it used in the horror films we analysed, it
helped us decide what kind of character conventions we wanted to follow in our
trailer. Another theory was the male gaze theory though of by Laura Mulvey
which talks about woman being portrayed as a sexual object in films just for
the male audience to look at. We decided that we wanted to include a
conventional final girl character in our own trailer.
Audience and
Institutions
We looked at the marketing campaign of ‘Woman in Black’ which
was very useful in helping us figure out who our target audience is and how to
reach out to them. It also gave us a good idea on how important budgeting is
during the marketing stage of a film. This research taught us that almost all
media platforms could be used as a way of distributing and marketing a film.
The film also showed how succesful a film can be with a good marketing method.
We also conducted our own primary research through a
questionnaire which was a good choice as it allowed us to gather results
directly from our trailers target audience. Now that we knew more about our
target audience, it highly influenced the way we created our trailer.
Trailer Conventions
We analysed multiple trailers in order to learn the
conventions of horror. This was one of the most helpful and important part of
the research in my opinion as it allowed us to adapt and follow certain
conventions to make our trailer look professional and like a real media text.
