In what way does your media product use, develop, or challenge the forms and conventions of real-life media products? Cold Blood Evaluation Part 1

1. Cold Blood
Evaluation Part 1
Beth Quittenton

2. In what ways does your media
project (trailer) use, develop, or
challenge forms and conventions of
real-life media products?

3. The horror trailer that I helped to create is called
Cold Blood. Cold Blood follows the story of a teen
that has been bullied all his life, and becomes fed
up with constantly feeling down and irrelevant.
Michael’s interest in lizard and other reptiles leads
to a fascination with the subject of herpetology.
After doing a lot of research into the subject, and
taking a test tube of lizard DNA from his science
class the day before, Michael sets about his mission
to create a liquid that can turn people into lizard-
like creatures. After experimenting on 5 of his
bullies, Michael finally gets the mixture right when
he kidnaps Jason and injects the mixture into him.
Jason becomes the lizard-like creature that Michael
wanted, and befriends him in order to get revenge
on his other classmates.

4. Horror films that inspired Cold Blood include
Spider-Man, The Toxic Avenger and An American
Werewolf in London. The film Spider-Man
influenced the idea of the lizard, and how a
human could mutate from a human into a lizard.

5. The Toxic Avenger influenced our trailer through
the whole idea of transformations that are seen
throughout the film. We have also been
influenced by the use of cross fades throughout
the transformation in order to add blurriness to
the transformation, and also to try and hide the
overall experience.

6. We came up with the idea of the transformation
scene (the character Jason changing from a
human into a lizard) with the influence from An
American Werewolf in London.

7. When researching how we could do the make-up for the
transformation scene, we came across the makeup artists Tom Savini,
who is famous for his gory body horror in the film Day of the Dead
(1985).
My trailer fits into the horror genre because it contains scenes which
could be considered as gory, a scene that shows body horror is when
Michael is injecting the needle into Jason’s neck. Some viewers may
find this scene disturbing because of how realistic it looks. The trailer
also intentionally contains generic conventions of both sci-fi and
psychological thrillers. Science fiction is evident because the whole
aspect of a lizard-like person could not be possible, therefore the
concept would be alien to the audience; meanwhile the psychological
thriller genre is indicated by how we see Michael, as well as Jason, are
both going mad. Michael’s mental state is shown throughout the
trailer by the use of parallel, jumpy “break-beat” music.

8. Thomas Schatz and his ‘genre theory’, allows the audience to analyse whether to watch a
particular film or not through the branding of ‘genre.’ Thomas Schatz wrote about genre theory in
the book Hollywood Genres (1981). We felt the vital importance to include certain characteristics
that are used throughout the horror genre, such as body horror, phallic weapons, and characters
that follow particular character conventions. Our trailer also contains low-key lighting during the
transformation scene in order to make the scene darker and to increase the tension. I used my
studio lights and decided to put some green tissue paper over the light bulb so that the light that
was projected in the injection scene had a slight green tint to it. We also used a lot of canted
angles in order to give the audience a sense of confusion; this would therefore reflect the main
character’s state of mind. An official horror film that uses this technique is Evil Dead 2 (1985), the
canted angles are used to represent Ash’s cabin fever and subsequent insanity. This can be scene
when Michael goes to kidnap Jason when he is walking across the road. Consequently we used a
lot of close-ups in order to allow the audience to get a sense of how the characters are feeling,
and the overall atmosphere of the trailer. We used a lot of close-ups during the scenes were
Michael is beginning to inject Jason with the lizard DNA.

9. My trailer contains horror like conventions through
the choice of character conventions, as well the as
props and costume used. Michael, the bullied
victim, is intentionally very skinny. We, as the
audience, would expect to see him bullied because
of his size and the way that he acts. Jason, the
antagonist, is thickly built and has a loud mouth,
therefore the audience would realise that he is
superficially dominant over Michael. However, the
characters challenge the conventions of these
characters halfway through the trailer. Michael
becomes dominant, and Jason becomes weaker.
Props such as the needle could represent a phallic
symbol, and the masculine iconography shows how
Michael is becoming dominant over Jason.

10. My trailer fits the typical conventions of an official horror trailer throughout. This is most readily
evident through the use of a jump scare at the end. Jump scares are typical in official horror
trailers; this is because they want to scare the audience into watching the film when it is released.
An official horror trailer that uses this technique is Sinister (2012), at the end of the trailer the
fast paced editing suddenly stops, along with the music, then a face appears after a few seconds
of silence. Our trailer also has parallel music because when we were researching trailers that
used both parallel and contrapuntal music, but found that parallel music was more effective
because it allows the audience to feel heightened tension; whereas contrapuntal music very
rarely works. Contrapuntal music is used in the Day of the Dead trailer and does not connote a
horrific feel, but rather a comical atmosphere; therefore it does not represent the genre of the
film correctly. We have linked key moments such as when the music becomes faster; we have
matched the editing to the same pace so that we are able to project a more direct sense of
tension into the audience. We have also placed sound effects over the music (when Jason is
cracking his neck) so that the audience get a sense of the non-diegetic sound effects, and also
gain an emotional effect – they would feel repulsed by the cracking of the neck.

11. Elements that make my horror trailer distinctive are the pace of
editing, as well as the music used throughout. The use of quick,
short takes make the audience slightly confused, as well as
making them focus more on what is happening throughout the
trailer. An example of this is during the classroom scenes, we see
Michael being bullied by Jason and other class mates, and when
the music suddenly stops, not footage is shown. This is because
we wanted to make the footage fit with the music, so that it built
a tense atmosphere throughout the entire two minutes.

12. Ultimately, we wanted to mimic the style of the Evil Dead (2013) trailer. As a group, we loved how it was
tense all the way through, and how well the jump scare at the end worked. We were going to re-create
this style by using short takes, and finding music that would build tension all the way through, and allow
us to create a jump scare at the end. Collision cutting also works well with the pace and tone of the
music, placing short takes next to each other to build tension, then dragging out scenes in order to trick
the audience into thinking that all of the horror elements of the trailer are over and done with, makes
the jump scare even more effective.
We decided to follow the Classical Hollywood Narrative structure with our trailer for Cold Blood. We
wanted to show the narrative throughout the trailer in a way that didn’t confuse the audience;
therefore we followed Vladimir Propp and Tzvetan Todorov, the two men that defined the Classical
Hollywood Narrative. We began our trailer with scenes showing Michael getting bullied, we then
progressed to show his rage, and how fed up he was with the same everyday insults and psychical
injury. He is then shown experimenting; quick flashes of his past victims are shown throughout the
trailer to show that Jason is not his first victim. We then see Jason’s transformation into a lizard.
Therefore, our trailer follows this prototypical narrative structure by having a beginning, a disrupted
equilibrium, an established quest, an achieved quest, and an ending.

13. Lastly, our trailer fits the historical context
because bullying is a topic that has always been
evident through high school. The topic of
bullying also can reach extremities such as
suicides or murders, but our auteur twist was to
channel the main characters (Michael’s)
negative energy into a scientific experiment.