Reflective Analysis - Short Horror Film

Our objective is to produce a piece of horror/thriller film around a minute long. We were going to include conventions of both such as: hand-held shots, extreme close-ups/ close-ups and mid shots. We will film these: canted angles, low angles with some panning and tiling. All of the shots that we will film will be used in the hope that the audience will be shocked, nervous or on-edge. We will film this in black and white and we will use a simple setting so that the audience can relate to it and experience a similar feeling just like the characters felt in the piece of film.

After filming the 14 shots that we filmed we managed to include the horror conventions as listed above as that was our aim to try and make the audience feel uneasy. We also included shots where the characters walk away from the camera and shots where the camera pans and the character comes into view. This also adds to the effect on making the audience feel worried and slightly claustrophobic as the first few shots were filmed in a small room. This is a good convention as normally horror/thriller films are filmed in small spaces; it gives the sense that the character who is trying to run away will get trapped and caught. This makes the audience even more scared as they empathise that they can't get away as they are confined, which could leave them wanting more as they will be curious to know if the main character escapes or they get captured.

I think that teenagers and adults will benefit more from this film compared to younger children and it might scare them. As a result of this I think that the rating of this film should be a 12/12A rating. As a character dies it makes it a violent production which some viewers may not want to see. This is also a convention that you would find in a horror film as it links with death and normally someone dies in a horror/thriller feature. Another convention that we used was to film it in black and white which makes it darker and more mysterious. As most horror films will include low key lit places I thought this would be a good idea to include because it takes away at least some light causing the image to seem darker. This is also a good idea because light can be associated with hope or faith so taking this away can also take away the hope of the character who is being chased. Someone being followed or stalked is another common convention in thrillers as it is a very real thing but at the same time irregular. Irregular behaviour much as stalking another is well used in the genre of film and as we were able to include all of these conventions, I believe that this is a good piece of film which can be described as a horror/thriller film.