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

The purpose to creating a trailer is to give an incite to a film to incise your target audience, which in horror is mainly young males, to come and see the film. Which evidently will resort in more profit for the company. Trailers persuade target audiences to view films by making it clear what the genre is and giving some information into the plot in which you would expect their to be a type of problem which needs solving, but is left unanswered in the trailer.

Here are screen shots of some conventional horror trailers, which are similar to ones our group choose to use in our horror trailer. I will be relating to the two screen grabs, to see how real frames from existing horror trailers compare in their similarities and differences in terms of key horror trailer conventions.

In our horror trailer we decided that we would want to use mirrors in out trailer as they are a typical convention in horror. There are a lot of negative connotations that are attached to mirrors and a lot of superstitions. This idea that mirrors can bring bad luck makes them a good prop to use in horror trailers as the iconography attached to them makes it very spooky. Such superstitions are breaking mirrors brings seven years bad luck, babies should not look in mirrors for the first year of their life, so on and so forth. You can find out more about these superstitions here http://www.csicop.org/superstition/library/mirrors/
The screen grab I have used to compare my mirror scene to is Mirrors a 2008 horror film directed by Alexandre Aja. Our horror trailer uses the mirror to introduce the antagonist to the audience by showing him indirectly. While the film Mirrors uses the mirror to represent how when you look into a mirror you can see your own sole. This is another superstition attached to mirrors which you can find out about in the link above. You can see from the screen grab how both of these represent the conventions of horror, as you get the shot of two characters, where one is the victim and one is seen to be the devil or antagonist.

We also wanted to include the use of fire and smoke with in our trailer, as fire and smoke makes you feel a sense of danger and uncertainty. Also as fire is red/orange and danger is normally represented by the colour red, it makes you feel that some thing related to horror could be present, leaving the audience feeling on edge. Also, as with mirrors comes superstitions associated with fire and smoke such as to dream fire means hasty news and to dream smoke means trouble. This is why we decided to use these in our horror trailer. We used fire in our trailer to create a montage of clips, which are speedy and quick cuts. Less cuts which are slower are more common in films such as romance where as speedy quick cuts, where you use more footage creates a more eerie atmosphere which is much more suitable for the horror genre. We decided to end our horror montage with the fire clip as it took away the pace of the montage and just made you focus on the candle, which can play on the binary oppositions as candles can be considered to be romantic in the right scene, where as they can be seen as dark and evil when used in horror.

We wanted to make the inter titles of our film represent one of the main pieces of footage in our trailer which we considered to be our montage and with in that especially the flicker of the lit candle. The smoke is to make sure that it is reiterated in how this is to give you an impression into the film and how the genre of the film is horror. The clip that I have selected which is similar to mine in the way it uses fire scenes to show the conventions of horror is Sorority Row a 2009 slasher film directed by Steward Hendler. This film uses horror it bring back a horror story of the past, like the return of the repressed. How the prank that got took too far resulted in an accidental murder which gave them the choice of either to admit to or shy away from and hide the secret, this resulted in the return of some thing from the past eg the return of the repressed which makes for the slasher film to be so successful. They use the fire to show capture and how you cant escape, which with in the conventions of horror represents how you cant escape the past and how the fire has trapped you and your are going to be haunted and tortured for what they have done.