Evaluation Part 1

Insaniterium

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of teal life media products?

The horror genre is a genre that is very easy to analyse through Thomas Schatz’s “genre theory” as it follows certain conventions and uses certain techniques and features that are easy to spot. From certain obvious characters (like slow moving monsters and the heroic male protagonist) to the types of camera angles used in the cinematography they are all very common to the horror genre. Both the new and old Dawn of The Dead films use unintelligent monsters and male heroes as some of main characters and Psycho(1960) uses a lot of skew camera angles to show that something strange and sinister is going on.

To make our trailer fit the horror template we needed to use as many of these generic features as we could to make it an actual horror trailer and entice horror fans. Horror films use lots of close ups to give detailed looks at the body horror or the expressions of characters. Shots like Marion Crane’s face screaming in the shower in Psycho both scare and draw in the audience emotionally. We also used close ups of our protagonists faces in Insanitarium to show the shock and horror they were feeling. We also incorporated close ups of the scenes of gore we used, this maximises the horror of the gore and maximises the discomfort the audience feels.

Many horror films, such as Saw, also use an enclosed/creepy location for their setting to strike horror and fear into the audience from the start. We reflected this by using an old abandoned, derelict hospital, enclosed with barbed wire. Another horror film generic feature is the ideology of sadism, the enjoyment of dealing pain. This in itself is a very frightening aspect of horror films and we represented this by having the antagonist a sadist. He enjoys murdering and disfiguring his victims and in general is a psychotic killer. Horror films are usually based on true events or are linked to current and recent events, for example War of the Worlds has many contextual links to the 9/11 attacks which happened a few years before and was still fresh in the mind of the audience. We used the historical context in our film, but to link to a key terrible effect 60 years ago. Our main antagonist based on the Nazi doctor/psychopath Josef Mengele who experimented on the Jewish children held captive of Auschwitz concentration camp. He was a psychotic killer and we thought would be a scary character to base our film on.

Horror trailers also use conventional methods to create suspense and shock the audience and attract the audience.  We watched horror trailers like The Ring and Orphan and learned the pacing of horror trailers conventionally starts off slow and builds suspense by speeding up but not too significantly and then towards the end they have a quick montage type sequence of chilling action, before the pace slows slightly before a jumpy frightening shot at the very end. We used this pacing in our trailer as it seems to work the best in shocking the audience, and the final jump the doctor makes towards the camera made some of our audience scream during the screening.  Some of the trailers we watched, like The Toxic Avenger, used a voiceover which, I think, adds a cheesy, comic feel to the trailer, so we decided to use text to explain the narrative instead.

We didn't imitate the work of any auteurs, we tried to add our own feel to our trailer. We had several unique aspects that made our trailer distinctive. The gore we used seemed effective and with the stitched wound and the scars on the Doctor's face, while inspired by the Joker’s wounds in The Dark Knight, were unique to the horror genre. It could be argued our style is similar to the gore created by Tom Savini and George Romero, but our film focuses on a real-life monster instead of fantasy ones.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/77955575@N03/7023814375/ Please follow this link to see a selection of shots from our trailer compared to existing horror trailer products.