RESEARCH THAT IMPACTED OUR IDEA

REPRESENTATION (OF WOMEN) The representation of our characters, especially the ‘Final Girl’, was something that was

important to our group as soon as we started to piece together. We knew we wanted a ‘Final Girl’ in our trailer as this is quite a typical convention of the horror genre. We also decided later on that we needed a ‘stereotypical’ group of teenagers including an ‘athlete’ and a ‘prankster’ much like ‘The Cabin in the Woods.’ These representations were important to us so they all had their own distinct representation.

With our knowledge of the ‘Final Girl’ written by Carol Clover, which suggests that this character is represented in a masculine, androgynous way. Our character who will represent this stereotypical figure is ‘Charley’ we decided this as her name is androgynous. We will represent Charley with the three traits that are shown through the ‘Final Girl’ such as virginal, masculine and androgynous. We will do this with costume; making her wear basic, plain, masculine clothing. Also with Charley surviving to the end, she will be seen as the final girl, we decided that the final shot is of Charley being dragged, this way we are unaware if she survives or not. This is shown in ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ which we analysed, where the final girl throughout is not shown to be killed but foreshadows her death.

We also decide to give one of our masculine traits so that he fits into a certain stereotype. We decided that ‘Chad’ who is an athlete and comes across as arrogant will be represented through his clothing to show the definite distinction between the female characters and male characters and their different representations.

Our other 2 characters ‘the academic/realist’ and ‘prankster’ were also given traits whether that be clothing or names that help to portray their character properly to the audience.

NARRATIVE Narrative is the key element for our trailer because the whole thing is based around a story and

ensuring that we include all the typical narrative conventions of a horror film. We had to ensure that our whole narrative followed a conventional horror narrative which meant there were a few elements that we needed to change as we came up with a detailed narrative.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to base our horror story on revenge but really struggled with coming up with ideas that would fit well and that would make sense. We had the idea of a mum making somebody kill themselves and then at a party 20 years after the incident the boy begins to kill all of the teenagers, but we couldn’t decide the reasoning behind why he would kill random teenagers. We also had the idea of the mum being possessed by the spirit of her son who wants to get revenge because of what she said to him – but once again this idea didn’t make sense logically.

To help us come up with a more concrete idea once we had a rough plot, we decided to go back and look at some trailers and clips from movies that have a similar plot idea. We really liked the idea the ‘The Woman in Black’ had and decided to make our idea more similar to this and we intertextualised from the trailer. By using this film as a basis for our idea it helped us put together the logic of our film. We also used this to come up with ideas for location; such as graveyards, and open areas with marshland and water as this suits our idea and style more than filming somewhere more modern.

NARRATIVE THEORISTS (PROPP/TODOROV/LEVI-STRAUSS) Firstly, we looked at Todorov’s CHN theory and whether our story was going to follow this or

not, we decided against a CHN because in most horror films there is not a new equilibrium, which we learnt when analysing John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween.’ Todorov’s theory also helped us to split our narrative into the 3 different sections of the ‘realist narrative’; equilibrium, disruption and new equilibrium, as we were struggling with the order of some of our story elements.

Propp’s theory allowed us to apply different character types to our main characters, therefore helping us decide what sort of role they would have in the film. For example ‘the helpers’ are those who help ‘the hero’ while they are on their final quest. We decided that our ‘Final Girl’ would also have to be our ‘hero’ as she survives until the end and is the one who solves the mystery and how to end it, the other characters simply just help her before they are killed.

Finally, Levi-Strauss helped us build relationships between our characters and what our binary opposites would be in our film and whether any of our characters would be the opposite of each other. For example the ‘non-believer’ VS ‘the believer.’ His theory can also help with dealing with hidden meanings and symbolic values in the paranormal setting and atmosphere.

GENRE Having studying conventions for horrors, we knew from the beginning that our sub-genre

was going to be paranormal/supernatural. This helped us when creating our story because it meant that our options were more limited due to the conventions of a paranormal horror. It meant that we had to have some sort of ghost and haunting but we just needed to decide how we were going to do this and why this was happening (the context behind the trailer).

We have chosen this idea as we researched multiple trailers which will help to support our trailer and idea. Trailers such as ‘The Woman in Black’, ‘Blair Witch Project’, ‘Insidious’ and ‘The Conjuring.’ All of these trailers matched the sub-genre conventions that we wanted. Another reason for our genre choice is the fact that every idea we came up with seemed to be related to ghosts, haunting and revenge so it seemed logical to stick to this sub-genre because it is where most of our ideas were generating from.

AUDIENCES AND INSTITUTIONS The last piece of research we done was looking at how distribution companies advertise and

create a hype for their film. This was something that was important as we have to create a poster and magazine cover to go alongside the trailer to promote the ‘film.’ Things such as ‘Star Theory’ was something that seemed important to us because this is how many films do so well in the box office. An example of this is having Daniel Radcliffe as the lead role in ‘The Woman in Black’ because it drew in all of the fans of the Harry Potter franchise. Although this is a good way of having large success with a film it is not something we can do due to not having access to big stars.

We also looked at the different ways of advertising to attract different types of audiences. Horror films that spend all of their time advertising to their main audience through TV adverts and social media typically do well in the box office due to their mainstream ways of advertising. However, distributors can also attract other audiences by advertising through other mediums such as newspapers, magazines, online and radio. Distributors can spend their budgets by releasing spoilers and teaser trailers months in advanced to create a hype before the main trailer is even released, which ca help with how well the movie does in the box office. Although this research is useful it is not directly helpful with our project as this is not a real movie that will be released in the cinemas, which is why this did not impact our idea as much as the other elements.