A look into how my research throughout my course will effect our final product.

1. How research has impacted
our ideas

2. Key genre conventions
There are many key genre conventions of horror such as darkness and blood and isolated scenes. These
conventions are often very stereotypical and when used too much or too often can cause a horror film to be
too typical and slightly over exaggerated. Although at least some of these conventions are important to use
within a horror film otherwise the audience will not be able to recognise the genre of the film to be horror.
Throughout my research I learnt about many things to do with these typical conventions such as where horror
films take place and what type of locations are considered to most scary to audiences. I also learnt about the
character types of many horror films and how the filmmakers use these to the best they can to cause the
scariest outcome possible, a lot of this involved the ‘final girl’ theory created by Clover, this is where the main
character is a female who survives to the end of the film and may or may not survive the final fight they have
with the villain who is praying on them. There are many other character types that are important throughout
horrors mainly including the villain, I learnt about what is the scariest villain to the audience, this mainly turned
out to be more human villains than any supernatural ones as this seems more realistic to them as though it
would be more likely to happen to them. Iconography such as props are very important in horror as many films
base the whole narrative around these such as knifes or masks. I also learnt about themes like binary opposites
such as good vs evil and dark vs light and how these help a film to create the complete opposite throughout
the narrative. Technical codes such as camera angles are important as they help to build tension throughout.

3. Narrative
I learnt a lot about narrative throughout my research, classic Hollywood narrative was something I learnt a lot
about and how this developed from Todrov’s narrative stages. I think this structure is accurate to many films as
there are a lot of mainstream films that follow this type of structure, therefore I class this theory as
stereotypical as it is linked to mainstream films mainly. However there are some films out there that convert to
these stages due to them ending unresolved/starting unresolved and many other ways.
Propp’s narrative stages was also something I learnt about and how this relates to many films we studied such
as Halloween and The Crazies. This is a very stereotypical way to explain characters within a film but is used in
a lot of mainstream films narrative’s.
I also learnt about Bordwell and Thompson were theorists that believed the chain of events within a media
form cause effects on a relationship occurring in time and space and the narrative shapes this material in terms
of time and space such as where and when things take place. This is shown through things such as flashbacks
and slow motion.

4. Representation- Cabin in the woods
Representation was an important part that I learnt through my research as it is greatly used
throughout all genres as well as horror greatly. Representation can be used very commonly to
create stereotypes such as the ‘dumb blonde girl’ in horrors and this can also be used for the
opposite to create representatives that convert to the well known types which may cause the
audience to have more interest in something they haven’t seen before. I have learnt from this that
women are often used within films to stereotypes as they can be used mainly for the view of the
male gaze and have least importance against the other male characters.
We looked into Jeremy Tunstall’s four character roles for women which are: Domestic, sexual,
consumer and martial. We also looked in Clover’s ‘final girl’ theory and how these are both used
greatly within the horror genre. We used this theory when we started writing our film as our main
character (a girl named Charlie) is the only one surviving at the end of the film and she is shown as a
more masculine feminine character.

5. Audience and institutions (Woman in Black/our feedback)
I learnt the importance of target audiences and how finding out these targets for our film helped
use create a film that is most likely to interest them. From looking into The Women in Black I learnt
the importance of finding actors which are well known to the audience you are looking to attract as
this can bring them to watch the film alone. I also learnt about how this film used marketing
massively to their favour and how they used things such as radio adverts, billboards, posters, ect.
This has highlighted the importance of the magazine cover and film poster as they are two main
things that help attract the target audience to the film. I also learnt about how these two things
need to be adapted to the target audience in how they look as we have selected young adults as our
target audience the marketing needs to be niche and creative looking to catch this audiences eyes
as they’ve seen the stereotypical type of film and marketing many times before.
We used a questionnaire to find out our target audiences opinions on our trailer ideas, this included
questions such as their favourite horror sub-genre, this helped us to chose the genre which would
reach the widest audience due to the one most people picked. We got feedback for our plot such as
suggestions that it needed to include more subplots into each of the characters which I think is a
very valid point and is something we intend to use within our full story plot.