Second Ideas

Today we discussed what type of horror trailer we would be producing. Horror was one of the first genres of film to be produced the first horror being Le Manoir du diable translated into the house of the the devil.

We chose to follow to normal conventions of a film trailer in order to promote it successfully. Charles Derry argues that there are three sub-genres witinh horror these are

1. Horror-of-the-personality: Threats in this story are normally stemming from human beings

2. Horror-of-Armageddon: A me

nace which usually comes from nature going mad threatens human’s existence

3. Horror-of-the-Demonic: Horror stems from the idea that evil otherworldly entities exist

We created a mind map of the main ideas we had as a group they are numbered showing which sub genre they are related to.

After creating the mind map we decided on three different stories that we could into more detail about and create a plot story. The three stories we decided on is.

1. A man has recently been released from a hospital with head injuries. When returning to his given address he walks through the front door and his house starts to reveal itself as a labyrinth of bizarre and dark events. When he walks through a door the setting completely changes. He always watches people being hunted by a crazed masked killer from a removed perspective like a fly on the wall. Eventually he realises that the killer was himself before he suffered from amnesia.

2. A boy and a father move into a new house in the country and begin to hallucinate occasionally seeing each other as demonic figures. Strange occurrences take place in the house; bizarre reflections in mirrors, sinister shadows creeping across the walls etc. Both the father and son find themselves being haunted by each other. The father tries to discover if his house is haunted and why, but he eventually starts to suspect his son of being possessed by an evil entity.

3. A farmer begins to suspect that the scarecrows on his farm are moving independently of their own whilst he is asleep. All his possessions start to go missing and turn up in strange places. His anxiety is heightened when the animals on his farm get slaughtered over night. Locals then tell him that they’ve seen men walking around outside his house at night suspiciously. His objective is to uncover the mystery.

We decided upon the second story this was because.

• We decided not to use the first idea because although we all thought that the first idea was the best it does not evoke the horror and fear that we were looking to evoke within our audience.
• We chose not to use the third idea because it would be hard to organise the trailer as we do not have access to a farm whereas we can easily get access to a house.