Evaluation 1

Jay Lambert

Horror Genre

According to the stereotypical conventions, horror films usually include:

- An isolated location and enclosed mise-en-scene (The Blair Witch Project set in a

forest)

- Body Horror (Saw is a prime example, focusing around special effect gore)

- Eerie music (The Exorcist eerie piano music 'Tubular bells')

- Low-key lighting

- Pathetic fallacy (rain, lighting, cloudy etc.)

- Close-ups

- Collision cutting

Location

Our trailer feature a lot of these elements that belong to the horror genre. We decided to

set our trailer in a forest since it prevents the characters from calling for help, and it's

also very easy to get lost in a forest. Forests are quite a typical location for a horror film

for these reasons, and are used extensively in 'Blair Witch Project' and 'Evil Dead'

Characters

Our trailer revolves around teenagers and we tried to give the varying personalities. A

horror film usually consists of a main antagonist (in our case we have a single killer:

'Simon Cohen'), a female victim, and a male hero. We gave both of our victims similar

personalities to these typical roles, such as 'Dylan' who is killed quite early because he's

quite naïve, and 'Danny' who tries his best to remedy the situation.

Antagonist

Female Victim

Male hero

Cinematography

We tried to include as many close-ups as we could, this is because being so close to

someone's face is unnerving which is why it is so common in the horror genre. We also

used expressionist angles on our killer and victims to represent there power. These

include low angle on the killer, and high angles on the victims when they're particularly

vulnerable. This can be seen below in the image from The Hitcher (1986) where the low

angle on Rutger Hauer establishes both this strength and sinister power over the film.

Sound

We have a single piece of minimalistic music that creates an eerie atmosphere

throughout our trailer. We chose this piece of parallel music because it's atmospheric

but also occasionally has an electric guitar which we can sync our titles to, or use it for

collision cutting. Saw's music 'Hello Zepp' by Charlie Clouser is an example of parallel

music because it fits what is being shown on screen.

Click HERE to listen

Editing

Editing is a particularly powerful tool to use for a trailer because it's a good way of

building excitement and suspense. Alfred Hitchock uses this technique very well in his

movie Psycho during the famous shower scene. It starts with a very long -about a 15

second- clip of Marion in the shower with no music, then it suddenly changes and gets

very loud and shows a quick montage of the killing. At the start of the trailer we have

quite long clips, but as the trailer progresses the cuts become more and more frequent

which creates excitement as well as a sense of panic.

Click HERE to watch

Pacing

At the start of our trailer all the clips are about 3 seconds long, and the music is quite

atmospheric and slow. As the trailer progresses the clips get shorter and the music gets

louder, this is done to create excitement as the trailer goes on.

5 Second clip, near the beginning

2 Second clip, near the end

Pacing

The Dawn of the Dead (2004) trailer is an example of good pacing. It starts off with

fairly long clips and all the transitions are dissolves which makes it feel quite slow. It

soon picks up pace and by the end of the trailer there aren't many clips longer than 1

second, plus the transitions to into cuts so they increase the pace through editing too.

Click HERE to watch

Collision Cutting

We tried to utilise collision cutting in our trailer because it's an easy technique to create

excitement. We started off our trailer quite slow and quiet – as is conventional – and the

only sound that is playing is the music. A lot of horror's use this technique, one example

it the 'Chernobyl Diaries' one moment it's very quiet and the characters are sneaky

around, the next they're all panicking and it gets substantially louder.

Click HERE to watch

Skip to 1:25 for an example of

Collision Cutting

Collision Cutting

When we get to a time where we want to increase the pace we use a clip of one of our

victims shouting. We increased the volume of this clip to create shock, but also signal

the beginning of the more action-packed part of the trailer.