First question of my Media Evaluation for my A2 Horror Project.

1. Media Evaluation
Question 1: In what ways does your media
product use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?

2. Before creating the final product of the film
trailer, I conducted a wide range of
research to help choose the type of horror
film me and my partner Anila wanted to
create a trailer for. We watched a wide
range of horror films and analysed them in
order to inspire us with ideas for our own films
and how we could turn these into a real
media product. Three of the films we
watched which most inspired us were
„Psycho,‟ „The Shining‟ and „Donnie Darko.‟

3. Psycho
„Psycho‟ (1960) directed by Alfred Hitchcock really inspired us to create a
psychological horror. Although Psycho is a slasher film, we were intrigued at
how much Alfred Hitchcock was able to create tension and fear using the
mind in this film. One of the ideas in this film, which really caught our
attention was how the film made us feel scared to walk into our own (or
any) bathroom. We were both intrigued at the idea of the social psyche
and how we could make an audience feel scared and anxious in their
own home. This is why we chose to create a psychological film, as it is a
more interesting and intriguing way of scaring an audience. Psycho also
gave us the idea to set the film mainly inside the couples house, as this was
a setting that is supposed to make people feel safe, secure and
comfortable and we wanted our film and our trailer to make people feel
uncomfortable and unsettled which we felt the house was a perfect
setting to do this in order to disturb and scare.

4. Donnie Darko
We were also inspired by the film „Donnie
Darko‟ released in 2001, directed by Richard
Kelly. This is personally one of my favorite films
and it really interested us in creating a
psychological horror. Donnie Darko is a
strange and uncanny film that focuses on one
man who keeps seeing an imaginary figure.
This helped us to create the idea of the
imaginary stalker in our trailer who turns out to
be a fragment of our protagonist‟s
imagination due to his schizophrenia.
Jake Gyllenhaal, the main actor in the film,
said that the director “used the mainstream
style of film making against itself, to be
subversive.” This reflects the style of the film, as
it was very disjointed, weird and mysterious
and nothing like any other films I have seen.
This type of style was very influential for us as it
made us think of scenes that we could use in
our trailer that were different and unique.

5. The Shining
The final film that inspired us was, „The Shining‟ (1980) directed by Stanley Kubrick.
This classic horror movie gave us the inspiration to create a trailer for a film linked
with mental illness. The Shining showed how one person can decay through being
mentally ill and this we believed was powerful and scary, again linking with our
thoughts on having a psychological horror. We also felt like doing a trailer on a film
with a man with a mental illness of schizophrenia as we thought this was an
interesting theme and it was one that both myself and partner really enjoyed doing
and creating ideas to portray this theme within the trailer.
Although we enjoyed creating a trailer out of the theme of mental illness, we
questioned why mental illness induces horror in some films, even though it is a serious
medical illness which people cannot help. I looked at a couple articles online and
found different answers. The most common was the fact that there is a stereotype
on people with mental illness for being violent thus being scary. Also, the thought
that many of us could develop a mental illness may be scary in itself causing us to
subconsciously separate ourselves from “them.”
On Halloween, many people dress up as psycho patients or a deranged ax
murderer. This shows how mental illness today has been stereotyped into a negative
context. Films have used this as an advantage to play with peoples minds and
reconfirm these negative stereotypes by creating scary films based around mental
illness. For example, Michael Myers in the slasher classic „Halloween‟ (2007) directed
by Rob Zombie who is a homicidal escaped psychiatric patient or even psychiatric
hospitals used as a backdrop for a horror film or programs like „American Horror
Story.‟

6. To help our trailer look real and believable we
searched on YouTube to find other trailers of
horror films to get ideas on what needs to be
included to make a good trailer.
We looked at trailers for „The Descent‟ (2005),
„Orphan‟ (2009) and the „Saw‟ series. In these
existing trailers, the first thing we noticed was
that they all had a production title sequence.
The most common production company
seen was „Lionsgate‟ featured in both the
Saw series and The Descent and many other
horror movie trailers.
For our own trailer, we felt like Lionsgate was
such a huge company that it would not suit
our trailer. That is when we came across
smaller production companies such as
„Twisted Pictures‟ and also „Dark Castle
Entertainment.‟ We picked Dark Castle
Entertainment as we felt it was much better
suited and even has a theme of horror to the
production title sequence, which was well
matched to our trailer.

7. We also found that the trailers had preview cards, the title of the
film itself and a „coming soon.‟ These are features we see in nearly
all trailers, not just for horror movies and without these our trailer
would not look real.

8. Todorov Theory
Todorov‟s theory was produced in 1969. He believed that all films followed
the same narrative pattern going through stages of the equilibrium,
disequilibrium, acknowledgment, solving and making a full circle back to
equilibrium again.
I believe that our horror film idea does conform to this theory, and some of
these stages are shown in our trailer itself. The stage of equilibrium is the
beginning of our film and also the beginning of the trailer. This is where
everything is as it seems, and the couple, the two main characters in our
film are happy and in love. The disequilibrium is the disruption of that
happiness by an event, in this case a horror event, which in our trailer is
when Steve believes someone who is going to harm him and his wife is
following him. The acknowledgement stage is when Steve starts to become
paranoid and disturbed by his stalker.
The solving stage is when Steve believes he
is seeing his stalker attacking his wife and Steve
kills the stalker, which is Steve‟s way of trying to
solve the situation. However, the equilibrium
stage is when the audience sees that Steve
was only imagining this stalker and he was the
one attacking his wife who he had now killed.

9. Although I believe the film idea conformed to Todorov‟s theory, our trailer
challenged this idea. The trailer takes his theory of structure and makes
something that is not structured, that is confusing and disjointed, to make
sure that not too much of the plot is given away to the audience before they
have already seen the film.
The Idea:
To get to our idea for our horror film, we used all the resources we could. We
created mind maps of types of horrors we could do including zombie films,
mental illness, possession, religion and more. We then looked at these themes
in more detail, discussing ideas for each theme to see which ones would be
easy, effective and achievable for us. We first thought of doing a slasher film,
or a possession film. But we then came across the idea of using mental
health as a theme. We knew this wouldn‟t be easy to convey in a trailer but it
was different and an interesting theme to use for our horror trailer.
When we decided on the theme of mental illness, we started thinking of
ideas for an actual film and how we can make it into a trailer. We looked at
existing trailers on YouTube, we Googled ideas, we asked family and friends
for ideas and after sitting and discussing with my partner we came up with
the idea of Steve's character with schizophrenia.

10. In order to challenge media conventions, we looked at the most common ways in
which mental illness is already portrayed. When researching films like Maniac
(2012) (about one man who obsesses, stalks and kills women) and Halloween
(2007), we noticed that most characters with a mental illness become serial killers
who go around killing a large number of people usually with no remorse.
In order to challenge this idea, we wanted our character, Steve, to come across
as “normal” someone who is recently engaged, has a job and goes about his life.
We wanted our audience to believe that the threat is the stalker and feel
sympathy for both Steve and Katie, especially Steve who keeps seeing strange
things which his fiancé won‟t believe. At the end, if our film was real, when the
audience realise that the real threat is Steve, it is shocking and almost
unbelievable.
This challenges the idea of having a serial killer with a mental illness killing lots of
people, as our film idea looks deeper into the the mind of a person with
schizophrenia and the things they can create out of their imagination.

11. When conducting research from friends and families, we asked
them how they would react to an ending like this. Some people
say that they would still feel sympathy for Steve's character as
he cannot control his actions and although he kills his fiancé,
the film shows how much he cares about her and would do
anything for her.
We wanted this kind of reaction, as this is how we felt we could
challenge existing media products based on mental illness. Our
character Steve, is not a serial killer with a mental illness who
has escaped from a mental asylum. Instead, he is a normal
person, which could be anyone we know such as a friend,
family member or neighbor who has a illness that can lead to
paranoia and death of either themselves or others in this case,
Katie.
Our trailer however, could not show this directly as this is the
main twist of the film and if we were to show this, it would give
away the whole film and no one would go and watch a film
they already know the whole plot line for. This is why we made
a trailer that shows some aspects of this idea such as Steve
grapping pills in the bathroom while looking disorientated and
shaky. This suggests that Steve has some sort of illness in order to
have the need to take pills. We also show scenes where Katie is
being dragged in the house and her bloody hand in the
bathroom being dragged down a wall. However, we never see
Steve in physical pain or bleeding which makes some
suggestions that it could be him that is hurting Katie.

12. We also used real media products with our use of music. When researching
existing trailers, we watched them on mute and found that when watching
these trailers with no sound, they were not as scary to watch as when the
sound was on. This showed us how important music and sound effects are.
For us, this took the most time as we wanted our music and sound effects to
fit our trailer perfectly and make the trailer feel eerie, mysterious and above
all- scary as this was very important in making our trailer look real.
Overall, our trailer was able to use, develop and challenge the forms and
conventions of real media products. We used ideas and influences from
exiting trailers, music and information but we developed these ideas into our
own and changed them so that we could challenge the stereotypes and
ideas of existing media products.
By Selina Argyrou