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

real media products?

Unlike some magazine covers which portray the characters from the film, we used an image of our crew/cast holding equipment, which symbolises that is was a guerilla film.

We used key conventions of magazine covers to create a professional finish on our front cover.

The similarities between our Empire front cover and this Harry Potter cover include the limited colours used. As ours is a Halloween style issue, we used red, black and white across our cover. The Harry Potter issue from Empire uses gold and black as a main colour for its coverlines, plugs and puffs.

The covers also differentiate in that our main coverline uses conventions of the horror genre (the ripped edges and scratched typeface) to enhance the fact that it is a Halloween issue.

We found that this poster for the film ‘Shutter’ is also very similar to ours.

Our film poster follows the main conventions of many other posters from the horror genre. They show a distorted or slightly unclear image of the killer, which is the effect we tried to create too.

‘Halloween’ was one of the first films to portray a poster with a shot of the killer. Many other films of the horror genre proceeded with this effective idea.

We took inspiration from other films from the horror subgenre of stalker/slasher, where a killer is hunting a female protagonist.

The screenshot below is from ‘Scream 4’ and shows the masked killer in the background. Another similar aspect of our film is the idea of having an anonymous killer, the Scream films use a mask, whereas we chose not to fully show the killer’s face.

We also took ideas from ‘The Blair Witch Project’, by using night shots.

To enhance the spooky atmosphere, we used a night vision effect on a video camera, which heightened the atmosphere and realism of the trailer.

We also shot scenes on a hand-held camera, which again gave a more amateur and realistic feel.

Our trailer also used the ‘silhouette’ idea, where the killer is seen from a low angle shot, making them seem more intimidating. The shot on the right is taken from ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ which is another iconic film from the slasher genre. The film also uses an iconic killer, again using a sense of anonymity to present the villain.

We feel that our trailer and other outcomes have effectively and clearly highlighted many of the key conventions of the

horror genre and ‘slasher’ sub genre.