Question 1

In what ways does your media product

use, develop, or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
Our film complies with many typical horror
conventions throughout, the most obvious being that
the victim is a young, blonde female and the killers
are all male. A lot of films do this because women are
traditionally seen as the weaker sex and more
vulnerable, in need of protecting, and so the audience
will feel more fear is a girl is being stalked than if a
boy was. Also, the girl is alone in her house when the
stalker is stood behind her door, another typical
convention which is also seen in Scream (1996) .
Because they are alone, the audience instantly is
aware that the protagonist is unlikely to survive and
fears for their safety right from the start.
Our title sequence is similar to that of The
Strangers (2008) because of the panicky, female
voiceover whilst he credits are coming up. Our actress
worked loosely from a basic script and then
improvised to keep it sounding spontaneous, which
was actually very effective in our film, and added a
sense of credibility to it in my eyes. However, it differs
from a lot of horror titles because it scrolled over a
series of photographs, which the names of the
directors, editors and cast members scribbled in
marker pen underneath like captions. A lot of films
use just a black screen with the names fading in, with
backing music creating the atmosphere.
Our film challenges certain conventions typical of
that of a horror film, one of them being that our
film is shot in the afternoon/early evening. A lot of
horror films are shot at the dead of night, because
traditionally this is when bad things happen,
because the night makes it easy for people to hide
and obscures peoples vision. We wanted to give
the impression that things can happen to anyone
and at any time of day, to instil a lasting fear in the
audience, because the thrill will encourage them
to watch the film again and again.