EVALUATION QUESTION 1 - Conventions & Representations

Part 1 "How does your product use or challenge conventions?"

We decided to do our film opening in the horror sub genre. The genre conventions of horror are very clear and it's normally very easy to identify when a film is horror. However, in terms of character, we decided to challenge this and have included a counter-type in our film opening.

Common conventions of horror genres:

After having done a lot of research into the common conventions in several horror genre films such as Halloween, Scary Movie, The Cabin in the Woods, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Insidious I found that there were a lot of common conventions in the horror/ slasher genre movies. These conventions are not only what characters do, but can also be anything from the mise-en-scene of the film, such as an empty house in the middle of nowhere to the costume such as a mask of the stereotypical psychotic masked killer in slasher movies.

Placing the characters in areas where no one is around to rescue or help them and they are all on their own is one of the most common conventions of horror movies. Often the places used by the director and the mise-en-scene that they create are abandoned places such as the woods, an abandoned house amusement park or a house out in the middle of nowhere. 

The Cabin in the Woods is a great example for this convention, when you see five central protagonists, which find themselves in a house in the middle of nowhere. When watching the trailer, it is already denoted that they will be cut away completely from society when one of the girl says: "Doesn't even show up on the GPS". 

Since it is a horror genre movie and she says that in the beginning of the trailer, it is already connoted that something bad is about to happen.



Like they say the whole point is to "get of the grid". Meaning that they haven't really considered the fact that something bad could happen, stereotyping them as the typical dumb teenagers who only care about partying. Stereotyping teenagers in horror movie is very common. Often the typical stereotypes are either scream queens or final girls. Scream Queens being the one's that always die and are killed by the killer and final girls being the clever one's who always survive. This stereotypical convention and how we challenged it in our own final rough cut will be discussed a bit further down the post.

In Texas Chainsaw Massacre from 2003, the central protagonists end up in a small village, where Leather Face hunts them down with his chainsaw. In the first few minutes only of the movie, they meet a young girl who kills herself by putting a gun to her head in their van. She does this, because they drive past a building that she obviously doesn't want to go back to by saying "You are going the wrong way". It is denoted that it is a bad place and despite that, the 5 teenagers still stay there.
Also, they are quickly slaughtered by Leather Face one by one an are still staying there instead of trying to get away. The usual stereotypical teenager would probably run for his own life. However, in this movie they still try to figure out what is going on and therefore only one of them ends up surviving. Furthermore, the leather face also fits in with the typical convention of the slasher genre, where there is very often a psychopathic killer who is masked and kills young adults. In our coursework we were inspired by such a character and mask. Therefore we decided to create our own mask to represent the slasher genre. Also, it was an inspiration for our working title: "Not my Face".

Another typical convention of a horror movie is that the characters go look for a strange noise, when they hear it. When watching a horror movie, don't you always think "don't go in there" or "don't open that door" and then the characters end up doing it anyway and either end up dead, get chased or get hurt.
A great example for this type of convention is from the movie Insidious, when the mother hears that there are weird noises in her sons room over the babyphone. She ends up getting really frightened.

Again, a stereotypical teenager would probably run away if they were in an abandoned house and heard a strange noise. However, the horror genre, specifically focuses on what a usual teenager wouldn't do. If I, as a teenager would run away, the character within the horror movie would stay and get killed. In our final cut, our central protagonist, Casey, hears a strange noise behind her and immediately turns around. Instead of running away, because she is scared since it is dark and there are strange noises, she stays and ends up getting killed by our killer.

Narrative

When discussing narrative, I can state that there are quite a lot of theories that can be applied to our movie.
First of all Roland Barthes concept of the narrative enigma can be included, since there are enigma codes in our film opening. For example when Casey Crane ties her hair back and then it flash
forwards to when her hands are tied behind the chair or the red nail polish flashing forward to blood being spilt. These are examples of our film opening where clues are dropped but there is no clear answer given to what is going to happen to her.
Furthermore, Propp's theory on character archetypes also applies to our film opening in the way that the killer is Propp's definition of the villain. For our film opening this is the only archetype that would fit, since the final girl is not being saved and there is no other character in the film opening besides those two.
Moreover, we could also apply Todorov's theory on the narrative formula to our film opening. However it does not go through all 5 stages. At the beginning when she is in her bathroom, there is a clear state of equilibrium where all is well and there has not been any harm done yet. After the church scene, there is then a clear disruption of the equilibrium, because the killer shows up behind her and the film opening ends with a scream.

Lastly I also wanted to apply the "uses and gratifications theory" from 1972, which looks at 4 different categories in a film:

1. Diversion/Escapism
2. Personal Relationship
3. Personal Identity
4. Surveillance

Diversion/Escapism: 

An audience might be able to escape into this movie since it is very dramatic. When showing it to an audience that had no idea of what the storyline was, the film opening made them jump at some points. Therefore, we can say that they might be able to escape into the horror world. 

Personal identity:

The female or even male audience might be able to identify with the final girl, because she is singing in her bathroom and a lot of people can identify with this. Furthermore, the identification is normal in the way that she is wearing a plain white T-Shirt and doesn't look glamorous. This means that it is probably easier for a wider audience to identify with her. For example, the scream queen is often killed off, because she is someone the wider audience can't identify with. For example if the final girl were a cheerleader such as in the movie "Bring It On" from 2000, it would be harder for the audience to identify with her since she is more a one of a kind, rather than a girl like Casey who is a normal looking a girl with not to much make-up or glamour. 

Characters (The Scream Queen)/ Countertyping Final Girl

The most common convention of a horror genre movie is the stereotypical scream queen as mentioned above. In the movie Scream, the main character is represented as the typical scream queen when she chooses a banana rather than a weapon. This clip shows a perfect understanding of how a scream queen is portrayed and stereotyped.

First of all, she has the exact physical traits of the stereotypical scream queen. She has blonde hair and blue eyes, she is good looking and in shape.
Furthermore she is represented as the typical dumb blonde, when she as mentioned above chooses a banana rather than a weapon but also decides to run towards death rather than safety.



In our film opening, we decided to challenge this convention by counter typing. We did this by choosing a final girl, Casye Crane, who has the stereotypical brown hair, and the other physical traits of the final girl and ended up killing her rather than the scream queen.
In the podcast below, I am explaining why we did counter type and in what way we went against the normative.




Part 2: "How does your product represent social groups or issues"

Social groups and issues:

There are a lot of different social groups, that exist in all sorts of different genre movies. Some of these include:

• Age
• Stereotyping
• Gender
• Sexuality
• Ethnicity
• Pink Pound (gay audience) 
• Disability

The representations and use of stereotypes in a movie are factors that decide, which audience the movie is targeted at. Whether it is a niche audience, such as an audience that might only speak Chinese, which was the case for the movie "She a Chinese" or a mainstream mass audience. A mass audience is when the movie is for example aimed to a larger audience with a wide release. An example of this would be the ROM-COM movies produced by the subsidiary, Working Title, who has produced several films such as Bridget Jones Diary and Love Actually, which had a wide release. It is important that the producer choose carefully, when deciding on which social groups should be in the film. Throughout this post I will explain and discuss the different social groups, their issues and how our product represents social groups.

Age

Our target audience are 15-35 year olds, because it is a horror genre movie. Our product represents this as our central female protagonist in it is a 17 year old girl, who is portrayed as smart. People from this age group will be able to relate to this final girl stereotype. However, they might not be able to relate to is the fact that she is religional, because several young teenagers in the society we live in don't go to church anymore. The reason why we put in a church scene, was to denote that she is still a virgin and that she enjoys praying.
The fact that we counter-typed our final girl, to being killed anyway, even though a final girl usually would survive, makes it more interesting for our audience to watch the movie, because they might expect her not to be killed. Also she has some traits from the scream queen, which is that she cares about her looks, when doing her hair and painting her nails.

The fact that she is wearing nail polish, also helps to represent this age group, as people within our target audience are not only males but also females. The females are able to relate to how it is to get up in the morning and standing in front of the mirror to look at your hair.
Furthermore, we used the diegetic sound of her humming to create realism. When asking young people that age what they do when they go to a shower or when they are in the bathroom, a lot of them answered that they sing or hum. Therefore, I thought, when creating the sound, that this would be suitable in order for our female and male audience to be able to relate to her.

Stereotyping 

For this part I decided to do a podcast in which I am explaining which normative stereotype we challenged and why we did it. You will be able to see the script below the podcast. 

"This is my podcast in which I will be explaining how we counter typed the normative stereotype of the female protagonist in our media product. 

There are more types of social groups and issues raised in movies than people would usually think about. Some of the typical social groups include age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and most of all stereotyping. There are normative stereotypes, such as the usual scream queen, who is portrayed as a dumb blonde and then there are counter hegemonic stereotypes, where you challenge the normative stereotypes. 

This is what we specifically did in our film opening we challenged the normative stereotype of the final girl and scream queen. 

Again, the stereotypical norm of the scream queen is an unintelligent blonde, such as in the movie scream, who is sexually active and ends up getting killed in any horror movie.

Whereas the normative of the final girl is a character with brown hair, who is denoted as intelligent and clever and who is virtuous. Usually a final girl is always the one that gets away and doesn’t end up getting killed. However, we decided to get a girl with brown hair, all of these qualities, but who would still end up getting killed by our psychotic masked killer anyway. We did this on purpose to counter type the stereotypical normative of the final girl and got good feedback for doing so."

More about stereotyping

To understand stereotyping better there are these typical examples of how there is always someone with a strong accent, such as a Welsh accent or scottish accent that a lot of people can't understand. For example in the ROM-COM "Wild Child" there is the matron who is scottish and everybody makes fun of her and tries to trick her. Whereas in "Notting Hill", there is the Welsh man Spike, which is portrayed as dumb and silly. 

A monkey dust video called "Richard Curtisland", represents the common stereotypes usually represented in Richard Curtis' movies such as Love Actually. As you will notice there are only Caucasian character's in there and no black characters or characters from other cultures. Furthermore, there are no social groups with a gay character or a disability. From some point of views, this can be seen as racist. However, Richard Curtisland does apply to all of his movies. 



In our film opening we did not include any of these social groups either. However, if we were to have filmed an entire movie, we would have made sure to include characters of different ethnic cultures and backgrounds. A main reason for this, is because we specifically live in a country (Luxembourg) and society, where there are a lot of different cultures and religions, which is considered as a normative. 

What we did on the other hand was to include both a British (Casey) and an American character. Our killer, is American, and had it been a full length film, the audience would probably have heard his voice, whereas in our film opening they don't. Our film would therefore appeal to both an American and a British target audience. Moreover, we have no negative stereotypes, such as making fun of homosexuality or ethnicity, because it was important for us that our film opening would not be offensive to anyone in any way.  

As mentioned in many posts before a scream queen would be an unintelligent blonde, who is wearing  revealing clothes, such as Drew in this Scream Movie who has all of these qualities.

A great example of a final girl on the other hand, would be someone like one of the main character's from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who is portrayed as more clever, because she is the only one who get's away from Leather Face and survives at the end, denoting that she is a final girl. She is also not making out with her boyfriend as much as the couple in the back. It connotes that she might still be a virgin which is also a common trait of final girl. Our central protagonist, Casey, could be considered as the non-stereotypical final girl, because she is the one to be kidnapped at the end of our film. 

Our mise-en-scene, of her room also helped to stereotype her character, because there are several books. Allthough you might not see them entirely, we put a lot of schoolbooks such as economics in there and also a book about Steve Jobbs. We wanted these to denote her character about being a final girl who is clever. 

Gender

The social group that our media product represents is both a male and female audience. 

When we did a research on target audience we found these statistics from the British Film Institute from 2012, which showed us that the number of males and females below 35, that watch the horror genre is around the same. That was the main reason why our target audience ended up being from 15-35. To read more about our target audience, you can go to that post. 

I believe that one of the main reasons why a lot of young adults enjoy watching horror/slasher movies, is because it is not just romance, which is stereotypically just for females, and it is not comedy or action either, which is stereotypically more for males, it is something in between the two genders, that wakes an interest in both and is not just one-sided. 

Ethnicity

As mentioned above, we only included Caucasian cast in our film opening. As we were a group of three, it was difficult to schedule the times so that we could all be there to film at the same time. In the beginning, at our group pitch 1 we had 2 female actors who were supposed to play the roles of the central protagonist and the character of the psychologist. However, it did not work out with scheduling it so that all 5 of us would have time to film. Therefore we decided to make it easier for our group by having 2 of us, Jonathan and Bronwen, playing the lead roles and one directing most of it, which was then me. 

Moreover, as mentioned before, if we were to have filmed an entire movie, we would have made sure to include characters of different ethnic cultures and backgrounds. A main reason for this, is because we specifically live in a country (Luxembourg) and society, where there are a lot of different cultures and religions, which is considered as a normative. 

However, there are some horror movies such as "The Conjuring", "Poltergeist" or "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", that do not contain any non-caucasian characters can have a success.

Sexuality

In some way or media product represents a certain aspect of sexualits, because the killer's weapon is a knife. We have filmed some scenes where he was holding the knife. However, the footage was either not good or we did not use the scenes because it was hard for Jonathan and Bronwen to act it out and did not come accross as real.

However, the knife is considered to be a phallic object, which is a terminology that comes from Freud's theory on psychosexual stages. It is considered to be a phallic object because it represents sexual assault. As you can see on this picture, we did try to include it. When it was filmed it did not achieve verisimilitude. 

Therefore we can conclude that some sexuality played part in our film opening. 

Coursework: Slasher sub-genre an overview

In our coursework as an example, we know that the main genre is horror. There are 4 main types of horror genres known as Psychological, Killer, Monster and Paranormal. Our coursework would be an example of the Killer one. These 4 main types can then be even more in depth and have what is called sub-genres.

A sub-genre or sub-genres are categories that are subdivisions to a larger genre. As an example, when looking at the table above, slasher genre is a sub-genre of the killer horror genre. So our coursework is also a slasher genre. In the small boxes, you can also see examples of movies that are in the slasher genre. In that box, there are examples of the two movies "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween". Our coursework is inspired from Halloween by John Carpenter from 1978 and therefore we can say that it fits perfectly with this table.

Below is a page of a slideshare presentation that I found:

http://www.slideshare.net/callumsands/codes-and-conventions-of-slasher-films-9471590/2

As you can see a slasher film is as mentioned a sub-genre of the horror film genre. Our coursework is more slasher than horror since it contains several of the slasher elements. For example our killer is represented as a psychotic masked killer who keeps young girls trapped in his basement. Also, we were filming some shots where he should kill the final girl with a knife, which is used in slasher movies to  represent the sexual assault. It is also represented as a phallic object, which is taken from Freud's theory on the psychosexual stages. You can read more on the semiotic analysis of our idea in the post that i did called semiotic analysis. 

JP: Film opening 8 - Halloween (1978)

Director: John Carpenter 

Genre: Horror, Thriller

Producers: Compass International Pictures, Falcon International Productions

Budget: $325k

Boxoffice: $47m

Halloween is a archetype of the horror genre which has inspired many popular films for decades. John Carpenter is credited as the director and creator, meaning he is the Auteur of the film.  John Carpenter's name appears in the title of the film which is significant because from the 1970's - 80's he was mostly known for creating Science fiction and thriller films.

I am analyzing this film because its opening sequence has heavily inspired our short film opening. 

Outlined below are some of the semiotics of Halloween which influenced our film idea. 

While the opening credits roll in, the camera slowly zooms into a jack o' lantern. This connotesthat the movie is taking place in October when halloween is celebrated in North America. The Jack o' lantern is a famous symbol associated with Halloween and families across America carve them out as seasonal decorations. Seeing as the film was released close on October 25th 1978 and only in America, the audience would infer that  this is a horror movie.

during the credits there is non-diegetic, 
fast paced, ominous music which connotes mystery and suspense. The opening credits are written in orange Serif font on a black background, this makes use of the traditional colors associated with Halloween. The title sequence of the film already depicts an imagery and evokes a feeling of suspense, terror, and fear.

The first scene of the film is a continuous shot that start from a establishing shot of a house and follows the point of view of an observer into a side window where the first two characters are introduced. The opening shot is important because it signifies the perspective of an observer. Halloween is the story about a masked boogey man, thus the introduction of this shot signifies that the story is told from his perspective. This further anchors the horror and creepy elements of the film. The image on the right, as well camera-shake, demonstrates how the perspective of the boogey man, Micheal Myers, is achieved. 

BV: Our Target Audience 2

I did an updated and more developed post on the target audience for our slasher film, following on from Sophie's post on target audience. 

For our film, we knew that we had to stick to a very specific and typical target audience. This is because the slasher genre has often been called an example of 'genre purism' essentially, this means that the conventions of the genre have been in place so long, and are so specific, that attempting to deviate too far from tradition or changing these conventions can result in a films financial failure. This leads onto how our film opening engaged with our audience/audiences, which I will be covering later on.




Typically, the target audience 
for horror/slasher films is 15-25 years old. Although quite a few of these films have an age rating of 18, 15 year olds still have access to films online or on DVD, making it difficult to enforce these age ratings. 


Here is the BBFC page for Saw, which shows the rating and explains why it was given.

So, deciding the age of our target was very straightforward, as we have the same target audience of the majority of slasher films that exist. 



I found some statistics based around the ages and genders of horror movies. 
As can be seen, the majority of horror film viewers are between the ages of 18 and 24. 

To finish, the target audience of our film would be 15-24, and the secondary audience being 26-35.

Primary and secondary target audience

The primary audience is the audience that the film is primarily target at, so the main people who will watch the film, for example. When creating a film, the target audience is something extremely important to consider as failing to appeal to the target audience could result in the failure of the film. 

The secondary audience are people who wouldn't go and watch a film by choice, but would perhaps be influenced by the primary audience. To explain, a young teenager who really wants to see a film (and would be the primary audience) could bring someone with them, a parent or a friend for example to watch it with them, making them the secondary audience. 

So for our film, due to the fact that the second largest percentage of viewers of horror is 25-34, we decided that this would be our secondary audience.

Audience Gender

As seen in the pie chart, more men than women watch horror films. 

This is because they can interact or relate better to the characters on screen, and the main killer is normally a man.

Women are less attracted to horror, for reasons such as the negative portrayal of women in such films. 

Character types such as the final girl are stereotypical and very negative. 

However, including romance or aspects of romance in horror/slasher films also attracts women to the film, and making horror films good 'date films'; the romance aspects appeal to the women and the gory/horror aspects to the men. 

Therefore, our primary target audience is men as they view horror more than women.

On the other hand, we actually wanted our film to appeal more to women than the average slasher movie, by representing our main character differently and ensuring that it would pass the Bechdel test. (I expanded further on this on another blog post.)

Our Target Audience

The genre for our movie is horror/slasher. I did a post, where I was outlining and explaining what the typical conventions of the slasher genre were. 

Before doing this post, I decided to do some research to find out who our target audience and primary audience would be. We wanted to create a movie that appealed to both males and females. The typical hybrid genre ROM-COM is one of the main genres that the subsidiary Working Title is creating. However, ROM-COM's such as Love Actually or Bridget Jones Diary appeal more to the female audience because of the romance genre. It does on the other hand also appeal to some male audience because there is considered to be comedy in it. 
When I then did this research, I decided to look for the common types of movies that the general public enjoy watching and found these statistics from the British Film Institute from 2012, which show that the number of males and females below 35, that watch the horror genre is around the same.

Due to this, we came to the conclusion that our main target audience, were males and females from the age rate of 15 to 24 and that our secondary audience would be from the age of 24 to 35. Since, it is also unlikely that a slasher genre gets an age rate under 15, if there are violent scenes and sexual assault, we thought that 15 and above would be the correct age. 

Bronwen and I intend to do questionnaires later on where we will ask the audience what they think of our basic idea and what they would like us to change etc. 

Rough Cut 4 - Without Music

This is the 4th rough cut without any non-diegetic music. In this rough cut, you will be able to see how I have changed the length of some of the shots and the use of some special effects to create a bit more tension to our film opening. Ofcourse it is a horror genre movie and so it is usually hard to create tension, without the use of non-diegetic music.
However, the audience that we got audience feedback from, a year 13 class from our school, told us that they thought it had quite a lot of tension, despite the fact that there was no music yet.
This was already a very good sign that we had a good setting and shot variety.



Although, we did not get a lot of negative criticisms from our primary audience on what we could change, I decided to convert and modify some things before adding music to it.

Firstly, I added a special effect called "Bad TV" in Final Cut Pro. This made it look more creepy within the basement scene by signifying that it was all recorded on tape.

There were also shots during that video recording, of Casey Crane tied up to a chair, connoting that the killer probably films all of his victims and films how he kills them. 

I thought that this entire special effect would work well with the genre. Later on in my evaluation question, you will be able to read on how I was inspired for this special effect from the film "Poltergeist", which I analysed back in the beginning of the year to look into the conventions of the stereotypical horror genre.



Furthermore, Bronwen re-edited the bathroom scene, such as for example the shot of her (Casey) closing the door again after taking the nail polish. This was done, since our audience feedback from our own class had told us that there was a lack of continuity. Bronwen also decided to use other shots, with a better shot quality. In it's entirety, Bronwen managed to transform the bathroom scene into a scene with more continuity and flow. There is a post on Bronwen's blog, where she describes what she changed and why she changed it.

We did not change the church scene, after Jonathan had edited it the first time. We thought the shots were good and we were especially given praise for our close-ups of the matches.

During the final scene, which I edited, I was given a lot of feedback on how the shots should be shorter, but the scene should be longer to build up even more tension. I managed this, by creating a better shot variety, such as using shots that were taken behind the church of Bronwen walking. Moreover, I made the shots shorter of when the woman is walking up behind her so that the false scare would come more accross to the audience.

What I also did to create more tension, was to cross cut between the shaky footage point-of-view shot to the shot of the killer. Shot, reverse shot. At each reverse shot, I zoomed in a little bit on the footage and was able to get a close-up of the killer everytime using Final Cut Pro. This was useful since it denoted that he was moving closer and closer to his target. I was inspired to do this, after having seen and analysed the film "Friday the 13th", where there was shaky footage of the killer's point-of-view when he walked up the stairs. I thought it created a lot of tension. You will be able to see how I created all of this later on in a post that I am going to do on the final cut pro X tools and effects I used.

The next post, called Rough Cut 5 will explain exactly how I worked with sound and why I have chosen to put on the non-diegetic soundtrack that I did. 

Film Opening 7: Friday the 13th (1980)

Director: Sean S. Cunningham

Release Date: 9th of May 1980 (USA)

Actors: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Jeannine Taylor, Robbi Morgan 

Production Companies: Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Georgetown Productions Inc., Sean S. Cunningham Films  

Genre: Horror, Thriller

Budget: $550,000 (estimated)

Box Office Domestic:  $39,754,601



Right at the beginning of the film, we see a shot of a lake and a house and hear an audio bridge of people singing. At the same time, the title "Camp Crystal Lake 1958" appears on screen, which denotes the setting.

The audience is taken inside the house, where we see several people around a campfire singing and one playing the guitar. This establishes a state of equilibrium, where all is well and the narrative enigma. However, there is quickly a disruption of the equilibrium, which we notice with the sudden change of non-diegetic music and the shaky footage denoting somebody's point-of-view when walking into the lake house.

After the shaky footage, there is a crosscut back to the room, where the people are sitting around the bonfire. This connotes that something bad is about to happen, since it creates tension by crosscutting from the one creepy shot to the other one where there is a state of equilibrium. 

During the scene of the bonfire, we are introduced to a couple with the use of the rule of thirds. The first shot is of the girl with the guitar who looks over at someone with a smile.

There is then a boy who is a bit more in the left of the screen and after a while they are then both in the middle of the screen. This denotes that they are a couple and is confirmed when they kiss and hold hands.

The Rule of Thirds, is specifically often used in rom-coms, produced by Working Title, such as Love Actually.


The two go to the attic in a barn and start kissing eachother. The audience sees how the killer is then moving closer and closer to the two young people, by following his point-of-view from up the stairs with the use of shaky footage.



The boy is killed first and afterwards we see how the girl is trying to escape without any luck. At first, she doesn't even look scared when someone is coming up the stairs and she only starts saying something after her boyfriend is killed.
Furthermore, she also has blonde hair and the heavy kissing denotes that she is also sexually active. This is therefore a clear example of the stereotype of the scream queen, which is often used in horror movies. A scream queen, is also portrayed as dumb and therefore the one who gets killed first. In this scene, the girl did attept to escape, however she didn't really run but more moved a bit backward rather than running like a clever final girl would have done.
In my first evaluation question, I will be discussing how we challenged this stereotypical convention of the scream queen.

Film Opening 6: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

Director: Marcus Nispel

Release Date: 17th of October 2003 (USA)

Actors: Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Andrew Bryniarski, Erica Leehrsen, Mike Vogel, Erik Balfour

Production Companies:  New Line Cinema, Focus Features, Platinum Dunes, Next Entertainment, Chainsaw Productions LLC

Genre: Horror

Budget: $9,200,000 (estimated)

Box Office Worldwide: $107,071,655


The movie begins with a very ominous and dark non-diegetic soundtrack, during the time that the idents are portrayed on screen. This non-diegetic music denotes the fact that the movie is a horror genre.

Followed by the idents, the movie starts out with a voice-over of a male voice who explains what the movie is going to be about. During the time, there is shown several clips in black and white of crime scenes. During several times that the male voice-over speaks about the different pieces of evidence the police had found, there is an audio bridge between what the audience sees on screen and what the male voice-over is saying.

“The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of 5 youths. It is all the more tragic in that they were young, but had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected, nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them, an idyllic summer afternoon became a nightmare. For over 30   years, the files collected dust in the cold-cases division of the Travis county police department. Over 1300 pieces of evidence were collected from the crime scene at the Hewitt residence. Yet none of the evidence was more compelling than the classified police footage of the crime-scene walk-through." 

When the male voice-over talks about the footage of the "crime-scene walk through", we see a pile of camera rolls and afterwards hear and see the entire walk through that was done by the police. 

The entire walk-through of the police officer connotes that none of the 5 young adults are going to survive and therefore again denoting the genre. After having seen this 3 minute introduction, we are taken back in time, where the 5 teenagers were still alive and we are following them throughout the movie. 

The audience is introduced to them by seeing a van with 5 teenagers in it. This denotes that these are our 5 main central portagonists. The one girl sitting in the front of the van is wearing a cow-boy hat, while singing to Sweet Home Alabama, which is a diegetic music that comes out of the radio. Furthemore, there are cornfields in the background.

The entire mise-en-scene of the cornfields, her costume with the cowboy hat and lastly also the diegetic sound of the song "Sweet Home Alabama" by Lynyrd Skynyrd, connotes that the movie is set in Old Texas, Alabama. 

2nd Rough Cut of the Final Scene

This is the 2nd rough cut of the final scene, where the killer kidnaps the final girl. This is the bit that I edited, where I am still going to put sound on and either detach the audio that is on there now to just work with sound effects and non-diegetic music for there to be created a lot of tension.

In the exam there will be 4 main technical aspects that we need to comment on. These are:

• Mise en scene
• Cinematography
• Sound
• Editing

In terms of mise-en-scene, the costume of the central protagonist such as her jacket and her tight jeans denote that her age is around 16-17. You can tell that the central protagonist is not the typical character of the usual scream queen. Had it been a scream queen, she would have had blonde hair, ripped jeans or even a skirt and maybe have a handbag or clutch with her. The choice of the central protagonist wearing a concervative high collar T-Shirt, also emphasise the fact that there was a counter-typing by using the final girl and killing her instead of the scream queen.

Also, the costume of the killer waering all black and having his hoodie up around the mask denotes the genre. The mask is very good, because it really emphasises on the horror genre. Throughout the entire film, the audience isn't able to see the mask until the last bit where the killer finally appears on screen. This creates tension, and I intend to work a lot more with non-diegetic music to be able to build up the tension. Furthermore, when looking at the 1st rough cut, which was edited by Jonathan, you can see how our final girl is getting a false scare, by a woman who only wants to return her bible.

In this clip, which I am going to edit as well, I will begin with the non-diegetic music in order for there to be continuity throughout in terms of sound.
Moreover, there is a different ambient sound in every single shot. because we hear Bronwen's shoes going over the street and then you hear a car as well in the background. Due to this, I will loop the sound from the first shot, so that there will be continuity in it and that the sound doesn't change in the different shots. 

The mise-en-scene is very good outside, and the darkness and the natural appearance of the blue tint helps to connote the genre. This location was chosen on purpose because of the very bright lighting that added this specific blue tint as a natural effect. Because it turned out this well, I will be editing the first rough cut, by adding a blue filter when our central protagonist comes out of the church as well.
Another way we could have portrayed our central protagonist as more vulnerable would be to have framed Bronwen on the left or right side in the frame.
There is also some foreshadowing because she is walking towards a less lit space, where it is very dark, which foreshadows that something is going to happen.
Two other angles, that could have been incorporated, would have been a low angle and a dutch angle to make Bronwen appear as more vulnerable.

This shot was done on purpose to foreshadow, how she is going to get kidnapped. In thsi shot, she is a dark silhouette, which connotes that she is practically already gone.