How Research Has Impacted Our Ideas Horror Theorem

1. By Daniel Ball

2.  Setting – Typical Horror films are set in an isolated place
where it is away from normalities, this is identified usually as
creepy and eerie creating the tense atmosphere. This helped us
come up with the setting as the main character may be in a
college which is full of people and may not seem isolated but
the girl herself feels that way.
 Technical Code – This is the camera work and from this
we have used more creative shots in our composition to make
it feel awkward and weird to our audience leaving a lasting
effect of shivers.

3.  Iconography– This involves how the audience sees or
connotes colours, lighting and props/costumes . We used this by
using dark footage and low key lighting where possible to bring
the fear factor into our work. The costumes we used mainly dark
with a light highlight such as the girls top as this gives a sign of
hope which will be diminished later in the piece.
 Themes – We concentrated on the good vs evil theme that most
horror movies take due to it being liked by the audience and we
could easily plan the camera shots with this showing power
through camera angles. However the evil is not apparent in our
feature as a character or anything we see but we see people
possessed by the evil. This is unlike other horror films due to them
usually having certain characters that take the evil role.

4.  Our horror trailer does not fit Todorov’s theory
of Classical Hollywood Narrative as the trailer
has an unhappy ending but our trailer does
follow the typical narrative structure as it starts
with an equilibrium.
 We have many different characters that could
follow the character types proposed by Propp.
Such as the Virginal final girl who survives but
the villain being the demon and the misfit
being the surgeon.

5.  The villain in our trailer cannot be seen than
other in the actions of innocent people being
possessed by it.
 The final girl is a blonde girl which goes
against convention due to blondes usually
being conceived as dumb and usually the
wanton of the film but this is not the case here.

6.  We looked at The Woman in Black and how
they advertised the film and presented it in this
way with a release date. This was a unique film
in how it advertised as it used so many
different mediums and usually films only use
one or two methods of promoting their film.
They used half their budget on this and it
worked out for them as the film was a hit and
was very profitable.

7.  Our findings in our audience research was that
most young people would go to see our film at
around the age of 18. Most participants liked
comedy horror over any other. From the plot
synopsis over 66% of people said they would
watch our film. They tend to go to cinema’s
monthly on a special occasion. They mainly
look for excitement out of horror films along
with going for actors and the narrative over
anything else.