EVAULATION: QUESTION 1 In what ways does your opening

sequence use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real

opening sequences?

• Characterisation not only helps tell the narrative of the opening sequence but it helps convey the genre to the audience. Most commonly, films will establish their main characters within their opening sequence which I believe I and my group did very well. We have decided to use a male as the antagonist as in most horrors a male is most commonly used, based on the idea that they are usually seen as the stronger sex. We have used two girls (one who is killed and the other a future victim) as the protagonists as they are typically those who are targeted due to the idea that they are the weaker sex. We stuck to these conventions within our opening in order to have an effective picture of what our genre is as many other horrors do this. We firstly see the girl who gets killed. She is dressed in all black Is wearing red lipstick. The use of the dark clothing as apposed to bright clothing presents the mysteriousness of the moment, It creates an eerie vibe and foreshadows possible events that are yet to come in the narrative. The red lip sick also connotes ideas of danger, is conveys ideas of blood and death, which again adds to the narrative. We also dressed all the other characters seen in the opening sequence in the same dark colours for the same reason. This is also seen in many other horror movies such as:

Friday the 13th Scream Dead Silence

Characterisation

In my opening sequence I and my group used a dark quiet area that has little light in order to create the eerie, scary atmosphere that we wanted to portray to the audience. We wanted to do this as in most horror genre the area is usually quiet/abandoned and has low key lighting. An example can be seen in ‘The conjuring’. The lighting and lack of characters within the shot is very similar to our opening sequence.

Setting

Large amounts of horror movies use an establishing shot at the start of the film to allow the audience to get a sense of location. being able to see certain aspects of the character and the surroundings is what keeps the audience on edge. The use of a quiet, dark area within our opening sequence adds to the idea that something bad is going to happen as we get notions that this is a dangerous area. This can be seen in the movie ‘The woman in black’. They have used an establishing shot in order to show the location of the house – it shows both the surroundings and the house are worn out and not looked after which adds a sense of horror as this type of house is usually associated with danger within movies. Within our opening sequence we used an establishing shot to show the quiet, dark area round the lake which creates a sense of horror.

Many Horror genre films have their own unique way of presenting their genre to the audience. We as a group decided we would create our own unique way of portraying the narrative and genre to the audience in a way that would be enticing. We took inspiration from the film ‘se7en’ in which uses a montage of quick, snappy shots which creates a sense of suspense and fear, leaving the audience on the edge of their seats. As we were creating a horror-thriller we thought this would be appropriate in order to allow the audience to fall in the same mood of the film and so we used a similar technique.

Genre

The audience can also see the genre through iconography. To present our genre to the audience we used props such as a hammer (weapon) and blood which are clear symbolic factors which portray that the genre is a horror. The movie ‘se7en’ has also used this with the likes of a razor blade (presumably used as a weapon) which is also seen within the iconography of horror.

• Typical horror movies often base around the idea of one character killing another character(s). Within research we found that there are a multiple selection of a typical narratives for horror genre movies which gave us choice in what order we could put our events in for our opening sequence. Within our opening sequence we are given a large part of drama as the start of the opening sequence where we see the young girl get killed by the antagonist which is an impacting, and important aspect of the film. This help set up the narrative for the whole film and we believe it to be enticing for the audience. This was inspired by the use of this type of opening in ‘The woman in black’, where we see three little girls committing suicide during the first few moments of the opening. We believed this to be the most exciting, enticing opening in which we could leave out audience on the edge of their seat.

• As mentioned before, the use of our costumes also helps convey the narrative. We have dressed the characters in black clothing to connote a sense of mystery. This entices the Audience as it seems that there is more to the narrative to what meets eye in the opening sequence – leaving the audience with the need to watch on further.

Narrative