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

My horror trailer fits the horror movie genre partially through the use of mise-en-scene. We filmed The Awakening in a gloomy basement, which allowed for the use of low-key lighting to create a mysterious and tense atmosphere, and a creepy, enclosed location to enforce the idea of being trapped. We used restricted narration for the scene where Bex hits me around the head with the pole because we felt that it would allow our audience's minds to imagine her hitting me, rather trying to pull it off ourselves and having it look cheesy. We included the ideology of Sadism with the appearance of the pentagram and the idea of  possession. We got inspiration from the film Devil, because we liked the way that it was all filmed in one location and kept the audience guessing who was actually the Devil.



As is a generic convention of horror narratives (as seen in the end of Henry where it seems like he has killed his partner) we left the trailer for The Awakening with an open ending. It is intentionally unclear who the real evil one is until the very end, and therefore who lives and who dies is a mystery; as is what the evil character does next. Writing about my trailer in relation to the horror genre supports Thomas Schatz's view that the best way to analyse films is through genre. He established this idea in his 1981 book Hollywood Genres. In the book he says that filmmakers and even auteurs can’t make a movie specific to their audience without understanding what it is that the audience wants in terms of generic conventions.


Our horror trailer fits the horror trailer conventions partially through our use of montage. We gradually built up pace by going from us walking slowly in to the basement, to having flashes of obscure images, with the intention of shocking our audience with the contrast. We used collision cutting between all of our faces in order to confuse viewers about who was actually the evil one. At some point we all drop hints with our facial expressions that we may be the one possessed, just to keep everybody guessing, which was emphasised in the frequent use of close-up shots. Other cinematography features included point of view shots, for example the one which we shot from over Bex's shoulder when she is trying to strangle Em, which enables the audience to almost imagine themselves as the attempted murderer, making them feel uncomfortable. We took the idea of slowly building up pace from The Blair Witch Project trailer because we liked the way that it gradually got more tense.


Having always been a fan of thriller/horror movies, as the main auteur of The Awakening's trailer I really wanted to do a trailer which confused my audience and kept them guessing. I think that the use of gore makes our trailer distinctive, because often even the goriest films like Saw save the gore for the actual movie and leave it out of the trailer so that the film exceeds the audience's expectations. However we thought that we would show some body horror in our trailer in the hope that people would think they had seen the worst before they saw the movie, and then we would take it even further in the actual movie to shock them. I felt that this needed to be done because horror audiences are becoming desensitised, so filmmakers need to keep coming up with new ways to push the genre further in order to be able to give people something new. This can be seen in how graphic and troubling films like Hostel and A Serbian Film are. Real life auteur George Romero influenced me because of his dislike of sexism, especially towards women. And this is reflected in my trailer by the fact that the characters are all girls.