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

Using
My media product is the opening 2 minutes to a horror film, the first steps once the genre had been chosen was to get a definition of the forms and conventions that are in a horror film the definition I found was:

'Horror Films are unsettling films designed to frighten and panic, cause dread and alarm, and to invoke our hidden worst fears, often in a terrifying, shocking finale, while captivating and entertaining us at the same time in a cathartic experience. Horror films effectively center on the dark side of life, the forbidden, and strange and alarming events. They deal with our most primal nature and its fears: our nightmares, our vulnerability, our alienation, our revulsions, our terror of the unknown, our fear of death and dismemberment, loss of identity, or fear of sexuality'

I then used this definition to base the foundations of my film on to achieve a true horror film by following the conventions of all stereotypical horror genre films. The first convention that I was drawn to by this definition was to ‘invoke our hidden worst fears’ the thought our children being taken away - although through our research and questionnaires we found that our target audience would be older teenagers to young adults and that this image of your children going missing may not be an initial worst fear but one that we can all empathise towards hence why we carried on with the narrative of the children going missing.

This theme of children going missing contains those conventions of a horror ‘terrifying’ especially later on in the narrative when the mother has to chose which child would survive. It also contains the ‘dark side of life’ that something or someone has the ability to take those most innocent – children. At first we concerned that the narrative of our film may not be seen as a horror film but through research many films have also used this theme and have also show these conventions of the ‘dark side of life’ and ‘terrifying’ scenes, showing our film used these conventions of a horror film.

Developing

We then had to put our research into film making and had to use it to develop our film, how we used this definition to adapt our own film to fit in with the horror genre.

Here are screen shots from horror genre films showing a similar theme and conventions to my own film:

Taken – although not fully a horror film but a mixture of suspense and action as well uses the same theme as my film.

This shot here makes the audience aware that someone is there to hurt the two girls.

We then used this foreshadowing technique to make the audience aware that someone is there to hurt the children, by this close up of the gate swinging even though you haven’t seen anyone walk through it showing that someone is there that shouldn’t be.

Another convention that we used of horror films is the ‘vulnerability’ but also


Through the questionnaire the audience likes to see reality, something that could happen to anyone.

We used this to develop our film by having the little girl sing

 To highlight her innocence and how the scenorica is ‘normal’ and could happen to anyone– a common convention of a horror film.

Challenge

I believe that in our film we don’t challenge generic conventions of a horror film because they are set conventions. You need them to make it a horror genre and if you stray away from these it could stop being a horror film, therefore we decided to not challenge these conventions and to make our film the correct genre.