In the very beginning of our planning stage, we set ourselves specific goals and aims to achieve at the end of the filming and everything else. One of these aims was to write, film and take part in a traditional horror that ticked all the boxes of the norms that can be found in horror films. We wanted to be as close and as accurate as we could to the horror genre. In the planning stage of our media product, we did not have a clear idea of what our film was meant to be in terms of a genre but we decided to go with horror. This was because horror is not just shocks and gore but can be split into many different sub genre's to. For an example, you can get psychological horrors, your plain gory ones etc. but the great thing is that thrillers come into the idea as well. We based our film choices on this basis so we decided to study films to give us ideas that were specifically horrors but also shared distinctive conventions of thrillers.
One film that we looked at was Memento. This is a psychological thriller that plays with your mind and toys with the ideas of confusion and desperation. Memento is not seen as a horror but there is no clear line as to how horrors and thrillers should overlap/counter from each other. Although this is the case, Memento does have scenes of violence in it which is always the key element to horrors and most thrillers. We wanted to portray and use this idea throughout our film opening because we wanted to stick with horror but also the fact that we did not want to concentrate or even use gore at all as our film is much more of a psychological horror than a gory thriller.
Another key element, form and convention to the majority of horrors is the idea of shock-tactics. This is where there has been a long period of time that has been dialogue and not much movement or action but suddenly the film shows alot of movement or violence to shock the audience. A great example of this is the scene in The Shining where Johnny is on his tricycle moving down a hall way where he sees two twins holding hands with each other to show vulnerability, the editing then changes and cross cuts between the two sisters as they were and to them lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood with a huge axe by their side. Although this is a very common convention in horrors, we challenged this as we disagreed with the use of it in our film. We wanted to portray a more psychological horror more than a gory horror filled with shock-tactics.
Our film (Aftermath) uses many examples of 'subjective' camera work, where the characters on screen know alot more about the situation than the audience giving a sense of confusion and desperation to find out the answers. Subjective camera work is another key convention of horrors and it is also used to create restricted narration which results in a mystery. This is partly through the fact that our film is an opening but also because we did not give the audience alot of information, there were more camera shots/angles/movement than there was dialogue. This keeps the audience intrigued and wanting to know what is going to happen to the people involved in the film. Subjective camera work can be done through editing, angles, movement and shots but the most important thing to remember is that for it work there needs to be close-ups and extreme closeups in order to confuse the audience as they can't really tell what is going on or who is involved in the scene.
This is an example of subjective camera work in our film as the camera is focused on the feet and you cannot see the character's faces so you are confused and do not know what is going on, this is a key element to horrors/thrillers.
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