Wednesday, 12 July 2017

Sub-genre: Psychological horror

Common conventions of psychological horror films:



•Flashbacks. This is evident in a variety of psychological horror movies. For example in the film ‘The Uninvited’ where the main character sees flashbacks of dead people. We will use flashbacks in our product to show our main character has experienced something bad in the past, which leads her to be a serial killer with a pseudo identity.

•Killer looks normal. No signs of a bad psychological state. This is evident in the horror film ‘Split’ by Blumhouse Productions. The main character looks normal when he takes the girls into his car but then throughout the movie we can see that he has multiple identities. In our product, our main character will look normal too. For example, I plan to have a scene with her waking up, and eating breakfast like a normal person, whilst reading the newspaper.

·         Close ups to show the emotions on the characters faces. For example in the films ‘Case 39’ and ‘Split’ there are a lot of close ups on the villain’s faces to show that they are the bad characters. We can use this in our film to show our character is not mentally stable.

•Psychological horror focuses on everyday life. This is shown in the movie ‘Case 39’ where the main protagonist is a case worker and when she adopts a devil child she still has t try and carry on with her normal life. This creates verisimilitude, which means our target audience would get more scared easily, especially to those who have a similar life style to our character Spencer. This is the aim of horror films.
·         Editing: Jump cuts and continuity cuts to show everyday life and to connote a complex character (such as in Split). We can use this in our film as we can portray our character to be normal when in fact her other identity is a killer.

•Setting: reality. Again this creates verisimilitude. For example, the two main settings in our horror film is the home and school. An example from a real media text would be from the film ‘Orphan’ where it is based in the home, school and park.


·         Contrapuntal sounds – sounds that don’t match the screen, for example when there is happy music playing when someone is dying. Again an example would be from the ‘Orphan’ trailer, where there is music playing over a murder case.

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