1) In the first screen shot from my movie opening you can see my hangman pictures motif. When we done our initial film research we found that often production companies were involved that were specific to the genre. Therefore this 'Hangman Pictures' production company motif is one of the key conventions of the horror genre; it is a way that the audience can sit down and immediately tell what genre the movie is without having any prior knowledge of the product. To make it genre specific the name of the production company and the way it is presented is vital. In ours we named it 'Hangman' Pictures because it has a strong associating with death and we then used the noose as the obvious graphic choice. This is similar to movies like 'Saw' where the company 'Twisted Pictures' is used to give the audience an idea of whats to come. To see how we decided of the motif click here.
This shows Twisted Pictures Motif.
2) The second shot shows how we used our inter titles. You can also see other examples of how we used the titles in the shots 6 and 7. We found this inspiration in a Film called Insidious, released in 2011. As you can see in the video below the titles are in red and they float away like a ghost. We developed this idea by making our credits black and making the float over one another. We didn't use the conventional red colour for the typography because we felt it slightly cheapened it. What I mean by this is that with our title screen shots being in black and white we didn't want to draw attention from the scene, this is also why we made them fairly small. Big enough to read but not big enough to distract attention. Another thing that we used as inspiration from Insidious was the still life scenes, instead of houses and architectural scenes we used scenes of the 'aftermath' to great effect.
This shows Insidious credits
3) In this scene you can see the victim is being clearly overpowered; you can also clearly see the expression on the victims face due to the medium close up. The high angle is used to create a dramatic feel, the cut between the low and high angle shots helps to build tension in the opening and speeds up the pace of the editing. Allowing the audience to look into a victims eye whilst they are in distress is a very powerful tool, it helps the audience to empathise with the character and feel bad for not being able to help in any way. Other movies that have done this well include saw and final destination. One particular scene from saw shows a close up of a victims head just before the bear trap opens, ripping his cheeks open. Its interesting to note in this scene that stereotypes are completely switched showing the woman in power dominating and terrorising the male victim.
Ending of Saw VI
4) In this shot we wanted to turn something not very interesting into something that could be interpreted as quite unnerving. When I placed the knife down in this shot we made the decision that it should be placed down at the same angle as the television remote controller. This could then be interpreted as normality for the killer, just as anyone would sit down and watch television he would wield a knife and use it to kill people. Its this type of psychology that is used as a convention throughout the horror genre to unsettle the audience.
5) As we have noticed in lots of horror movies, the victim almost always fights back. By allowing the victim to fight back you are allowing the scene to be much more dramatic it also gives the opportunity to show how much more powerful the antagonist is. We also noticed that when the victim fights back they almost always use objects that are unlikely to inflict any significant harm on the antagonist. For example in Scream you see the victim hit her attacker with a phone.
Opening Scene of Scream
6) This shot is another example of how we were using a background scene to display the title credits. This scene is quite different from the others because it really does reflect the violence that has taken place and it is one of the most critical conventions of the horror genre; to evoke fear in the audience. Make them wonder what happened as they can clearly see the violent path left behind.
7) In this shot you can see that we show a close up of the victims hands on the floor. This scene is before it shows what happens to her so it uses the mysterious convention of horror which, for a split second, leaves the audience wondering what happened to her. Following this is a close up of the knife penetrating her abdomen and being withdrawn. This close up of the knife entering her has been seen on many horror films, we deliberately cut to her face when it entered to show the blank, lifeless look, come over her. In the start of Halloween you see a little boy murder his older sister, in this long shot you can see him stab her several times and she then falls to the floor.
Shows the opening credits of Halloween
8) As before, inspiration for this shot came from the opening of Halloween. After she had been killed she lay there in her own blood. Blood is a main component in horror films, without blood and gore there simply wouldn't be a horror genre. In our shot we try and make it look like she has a gaping wound as we know that this is associated with being fatal and consequently it is more realistic, realism is also another attribute that horror would fail without. If something is too unrealistic it will lean more towards being funny than scary. This is what the 'Scary Movie' franchise do; they use conventions of horror in an exaggerated way to make the audience laugh.
Here is the opening scene to Scary Movie.
9) This shot shows our title screen and the typography we chose to use. We realised right from early research that the typography of the title in itself is enough to give the genre away. For example in the horror genre dependent on the script you could see anything from dripping blood to knives in the typography such as the Blade title below. Also we chose to place our title at the end of our opening sequence even though it was unconventional, we thought that it would make ours stand out from everybody else's movies. After we made the decision we came across Blade II and found that they do the same thing. This showed us that even though it was unconventional it could still be done successfully.
This is the Blade 2 Title Screen
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