Essay For the horror films

Every films has codes and conventions in, every genre has as well. There are 2 types of codes used in films, these are:

Symbolic
Symbolic codes are what the audience sees in the film. An example of a symbolic code would be mise-en-scene which is French for "put in the scene". Mise-en-scene includes a range of things such as the costumes used, the makeup, the setting and the props used. An example would be a man is in the woods wearing a big coat and he is bleeding. The coat would be costume and the blood would be makeup and he is in the woods which are the setting and he has a hammer as a weapon which would be the prop. Also the facial expressions of the man would show the audience how he feels.

The other type is Technical.

Technical
Technical codes are how the camera has been used such as the angles, the shots and the movement to try and create the effect of making the audience scared. Other things included can be how the lighting has been used to try and make the audience scared because the victim has no idea where the killer could be. The editing and titles come under this as well because the title can be edited to look scary such as having the title in different fonts and different colour schemes so when people first view it they will be able to tell it is a horror. The editing can also be used to increase the pace of the film when danger could be building up. Also diegetic and non-diegetic sound which is sound on the set and sound that has been put over the actual scene to possibly make it scarier. Technical codes are much more important than symbolic codes.

Conventions play a large role in ten horror movies because they are used to attract the audience to see the movie in the first place.

Conventions 
Conventions are things that audiences expect to see. An example of a convention would be that the characters are lost in the middle of nowhere, this gives the audience a sense of vulnerability as they are nowhere near civilization, if it was set in a city they know that there are lots of people to get help from, but in a desert there is no one.

The 3 films I watched and analysed were:
Wrong turn
Dead Mary
Dead Wood

Wrong turn

Wrong turn was the easiest to identify the codes and conventions. The opening of it had a good amount of editing; this is shown by the pace in the scene which slowly builds up as it goes on. An example of this is when the male and female are talking as his goes away to look, but when the man gets thrown off the cliff, the cuts increase in pace with on cut lasting not even a second, this makes the movie feel more intense. The pace of this makes the audience feel a lot more threatened.

In the opening of Wrong turn starts off with a crane shot of the location which is in a forest. This is because it is a secluded location and it is to make the audience think that there is no help available because the camera shows just how big the forest is. To also show that it is secluded the male says that there is no one for 50 miles. The camera is then a bird’s eye view showing the 2 characters rock climbing and it shows just how high the cliff is so if they are at danger then they may struggle to get down quite quickly or get up as well if they are in a rush to hurry from the danger.

Wrong turn uses many conventions in its opening. One of these is that the strong male character dies leaving the female vulnerable. This happens in many horror films such as dead wood which I will be talking about later. Another convention I am going to talk about is that it is a secluded location. I mentioned this before but I will go into more detail now. The camera shows how secluded the location is by showing the area which it is set and that there is no help around. Instead it is just a huge dangerous wooded area and the woman is shouting for help and the male says” we are 50 miles from anybody” so this shows how secluded the location is. One final convention is where the victim is close to safety, as the woman finds out that the man is dead, she tries to escape by cutting the rope off so she can get to safety but she trips over some barbed wire and then is taken away by the unknown killer, it then cuts to the final shot of the car just so the audience can see how close she was to escaping from the killing ground.

The Wrong Turn uses a lot of codes. One of these codes would be the sound that gets used. When the Male is on the ground after getting thrown off the cliff by the killer and when the female falls down, there is a shot of the male’s face, just before this shot there is no music at all but when his face is revealed and covered in blood the music is instant. Another way sound gets used is when the camera is looking down on the female, there seems to be a thump out of scene, this could tell us that the male has been hit with a heavy object such as a rock or a tree. Mise-En-Scene has been used well because the female how the female has been dressed would seem quite inappropriate because she is showing a lot of flesh and is wearing a vest and high shorts. This is not very good for the female because she is rock climbing and she is not protected very well and if she fell, she could of easily cut herself because her clothing choice is not the best.

Dead Mary

In the opening of Dead Mary it seemed like it was going to be quite boring, but in the end it was by far the most technical of the 3 openings. There is a lot of tension because it is to get the audience ready as something is going to happen but there isn't. This is done by the use of music and the different camera angles so the audience are meant to feel that the person is getting watched and is meant to make the audience scared that something may happen. But the opening of Dead Mary has been done well because even though there is no action it is still very intriguing to watch. Also the use of editing has been used to put the audience in the characters shoes. As the pace of the cuts gets quicker you know that something is going to happen.

The camera has been used really well in Dead Mary because at the beginning there is a sign that isn't up properly and it is squeaking. The use of the camera on the sign and the road behind it shows that it is secluded and nobody is around to help them. Also the camera is out of focus as it shows the girls POV because she is looking in the mirror and the camera has been done to show the audience what the character sees and shows how deserted the road is. Also the use of the camera looking through the trees is meant to feel that the character is being watched and keeps cutting through the trees. Also the camera has been used the same way as the POV because the road is out of focus again and there is a person who is also out of focus as well, so it could look like any random person and it looks a scary for the audience because it could be anyone.

There are not a lot of conventions used in Dead Mary but uses some. One convention would be that it is set in a secluded location and many horror movies are set in locations like these because it is to make the character feel that there is no escape from the killer. In Dead Mary you can tell that this is a secluded location because their car is the only one there and it is a wooded area which can mean that the location is secluded and if they are in danger nobody can help them. One more convention would be that there is a sense of threat. Both characters are in danger because the female is on her own and she is very vulnerable, the man is in danger as well because he is going out on his own to find petrol and he could easily get jumped and killed by some people. The final convention is that the phone has no signal this is used when the female is trying to get hold of her boyfriend/Dad/Brother but she makes the audience think that the phone doesn't work by holding it up to the sky to try and get a signal and she also makes the audience that the phone doesn't work by throwing it in anger.

There are a lot of codes that are used in Dead Mary. One of these would be the diegetic sound that is used. These sounds were the birds tweeting which can indicate that it is set in a wooded area and that there is nobody else around. Another sound that was diegetic was the sign creaking. This can show that the location is very secluded as well because there is nobody around to possibly fix the sign and it is one of those noises that unease’s the audience. The Mise-En-Scene used is that the woman's outfit is inappropriate as she is showing a lot of flesh and she is very vulnerable and not ready. However the man is fully clothed and looks like he is ready if any danger was to happen to both of them. A prop that the audience sees is a flare gun, this could be foreshadowing any later danger that could occur and in the movie.

Dead Wood

In the opening of Dead Wood, there is a crane shot of the location and this shows the audience that this place is very secluded and big so there is a difficulty of escaping. A way of the editing being used is that the male victim is trying to get away from an unknown danger, but before that the use of sound is slow and steady but then as the man is trying to escape, the music starts to get quicker because the audience knows that something is chasing him and he is in danger. Also the editing has been used very well because the cuts gradually get quicker because it shows that danger is building up.

Dead Wood uses a range of different conventions. Some of these are the same as Wrong Turn. One convention would be that there is a death in the first 5 minutes. This is when the male is trying to escape from the unknown killer and he has a jump to make which seems quite a difficult one to make ( even though he just don sent climb down and climb back up is beyond me). But he doesn’t make the jump and blood pours out of his mouth where he is presumably killed. This convention is used so many times in horror films because it is meant to get the audience scared and frightened of what’s going to be on in the next few scenes. One more convention would be that the person is running through the trees where the person is very vulnerable because a branch could hit them, they could trip up or they could get lost quite easily and running through the trees is not a very safe way. One other convention would be that the woman is in danger and that she is victim because when the male dies, she is on her own and she has no power because she doesn’t have the male to rely on meaning she is a very vulnerable character in a very vulnerable situation and the audience are meant to feel scared because they will be wondering what is going to happen to that woman. Another convention would be that there is a false jump. This is where the camera is lowering down to ground level and there is a splash and this is where the man is escaping and the audience are meant to feel that more jumps are going to be expected in the movie. But in Wrong Turn the jump has been used by non-diegetic sound whereas Dead Wood uses Diegetic sound.  One final convention would be that the location is very secluded. It is in a huge forest where there is no sign of anybody being around so the audience is already feeling that the characters are going to be in danger because of how secluded the location is. So the people in danger would find it really difficult to get away

The opening of Dead Wood has a lot of codes. One code would be the use of Mise-En-Scene. This is what has been put in the scene. The male has a Hawaiian T-Shirt on. This shows that he hasn't experienced camping before because what he is wearing. Most campers wear thick clothing and coats but he is wearing a shirt which doesn't suit the camping environment. On the other hand the female is much better dressed than the other 2 females in the other films, she is actually wearing some clothing the covers her body. One other code used is the use of sound. This shows how secluded the location is by having birds tweet to tell the audience that the only noise would be the birds and nobody else and that it is a woodland. Also the music has been used by making it deep and mysterious then gets louder as the chase is going on so it is building up the tension. The camera is down low and tilted upwards to show how far and high the jump is so it is difficult to make but if he fell it would be very difficult to get back up without death.

Conclusion
In conclusion I think Wrong Turn uses the most and better codes and conventions. In the Wrong Turn the use of different sound has been used very effectively because the sound that has been used would really make the audience feel uncomfortable and very uneasy. Also the way the camera flies over the wooded area and you would expect them to be around a camp or something else but they are half way up of climbing up a wall which was pretty unexpected. Also Wrong Turn is the best in making sure that the female is really vulnerable and an easy target by using a range of conventions and codes to make the audience feel that the woman is in a lot of danger. Also the use of costumes, props etc. are all used very well and that there is an actual point to these being used. Also the different conventions and codes used in Wrong Turn are meant to make the audience feel that they are in for more.

Research Essay : Codes and Conventions in Existing Teen Horror Film Openings

Please find below the title of the essay you need to complete by 3pm on XXX. This essay will be valuable for your planning and evaluation.

• This essay should be done as a post to your blog. You can, if you wish, punctuate your essay with screen shots from the openings.
• The word count should be targeted at 750 words
• You should select appropriate examples from the openings to illustrate the points that you make. You do not have to write about everything that you see and hear.

Research : Codes and Conventions of Existing Teen Horror Film Openings (Dead Wood)

The opening to 'Dead Wood' for you to analyse.

Research : Codes and Conventions of Existing Teen Horror Film Openings (Dead Mary)

The opening of 'Dead Mary' for you to analyse.

Research : Codes and Conventions of Existing Teen Horror Film Openings (Wrong Turn)

The opening of 'Wrong Turn' which we have analysed in class.

Research: Conventions commonly found in horror films

the phone lines will more than likely be cut so the victims are not able to cal friends, familiar the police. In more modern horror films where mobile phones are used, the victims won't be able to get signal, the phone is broken or the phone has no battery.

Secluded location.
Horror movies always love putting people in a location that is no where near anything or anyone else, such as the Texas chainsaw massacre which is set in a desert.

The Short Cut

Instead of taking the nicely lit up road ahead which will take an hour you instead take the route that will take considerably shorter but is rumored to have killers lurking throughout and also it is very dark and very dangerous but still the character still decides on the short cut instead of the longer route.

Someone Is Killed In The First 5 Minutes

This isn't really a bad thing but it happens in nearly every single horror movie. When this is well done like in movies such as; Jaws, House, Halloween or Scream its used to set the mood of the rest of the film and can be very effect

Flash Backs/Forwards

This is usually at the start of the movie setting up the events that happened before the main story such as the first minutes of Halloween or The Descent. Or even a film where we see the latter effects of an incident that will happen after the main story in the film. This is used nicely in a lot of horror films because you do not know if its before or after and keeps you guessing.

The Fake Scare

A fake scare is one of the most over-used conventions in horror films. This is a scare that is not related to the original threat. For example; a friend jumping out, a door slamming and someone looking into a mirror. Very easy to do but very simple and effective to scare your audience.

Vehicle Won't Start

Vehicles wont start when they need it to the most, I bet the vehicle was working perfectly fine before this day and suddenly your car is rubbish and is trying to get you killed.

Warning Goes Unheeded

It is apparently human nature to go where one is told not to go and do what you advised not to do. This is achieved in many ways, for example; dreaming about something bad happening at a place you don't want to go but you go anyway, people tell you that there is a psychopath on the loose in the woods but you still decide to camp there.

Victim Inexplicably Falls Over

Victims seem to fall over the stupidest stuff at the stupidest time and instead of getting back up they seem to do some stupid crawl to get away from their killer which is pointless and basically asking to be killed.

Victim Cowers In Front Of a Window Or Door

A classic in horror movies is that the victim seems to always cower in front of a window or a door (something easily smash able). When the victim hides in front or a window or a door the killer seems to know where they are and smash through grabbing the victim, a jump scare. Or the victim looks out a window (car windows also) and they see nothing but when they turn away the killer pops up and smashes through.

Someone Runs Upstairs Instead Of Outside

This one links to the one before about investigating a strange noise, it is again a very stupid decision that characters in horror films always seem to make. Instead of a victim running out of the door to potential freedom and safety they instead decide to run up their stairs into a room and lock themselves in, with no escape.

Someone Investigates A Strange Noise

This is most annoying to watch features of any horror film in my opinion. Instead of a character doing what any other normal human would do (get out of there as quick as you can), they decide to look for what is causing the strange noise and this leads them straight to death.

Power Cut

During a horror film there is almost always a power cut that takes place and usually at the scariest moment of the film. The lights suddenly go out and suddenly the characters are at risk making it very scary.

Research: Thinking about fear

me and my group were told to think about what sort of things scare us and other people.

Research : A Timeline History of Horror Films

CLICK HERE this link goes to the "a timeline history of horror movies" website.
Below is the 1890's to 1920's. this is were horror started to become big.

 I had been given the 1960's to research and below is the list of all major films in the 1960's.

Horror Films In The 1960's

The 1960's were famous for one man in the horror film business and one man alone, Alfred Hitchcock. In the 1960's he made to of his most successful,  The Birds and Psycho.
















Psycho presented us with Norman Bates, the monster so close to normal it was only in the final section of the film that he revealed how monstrous a man could be. Based on the real- life story of Ed Gein, which has since proved fruitful for movies as diverse as Silence of The Lambs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho has become iconic in a way few other movies have ever become. In 2013, it even spawned a TV show, Bates Motel, which explores the relationship between a teenaged version of Norman (Freddie Highmore) and his mother, Norma (Vera Farmiga), many years before Marion Crane took her fateful turn off the highway.
Psycho is almost certainly Hitchcock's best-known film. Produced on a constrained budget of $800,000, it was shot in black-and-white on a spare set using crew members from his television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents.The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early death of the heroine, the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer became the defining hallmarks of a new horror movie genre and have been copied by many authors of subsequent film

Norman Bates, the psychotic killer in Psycho ------->













^^ the famous shower scene ^^




The Birds is a 1963 suspense/horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the 1952 story "The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier. It depicts Bodega Bay, California, which is, suddenly and for unexplained reasons, the subject of a series of widespread and violent bird attacks over the course of a few days.



Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 American independent zombie film directed by George A. Romero, starring Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea and Karl Hardman. It premiered on October 1, 1968, and was completed on a US$114,000 budget. The film became a financial success, grossing $12 million domestically and $18 million internationally. It has been a cult classic ever since. Night of the Living Dead was heavily criticized at its release owing to explicit content, but eventually garnered critical acclaim and has been selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as a film deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."The film has entered the public domain due to an error by the distributor.

Main task set brief

Here is your set brief:

The titles and opening of a new teen horror film, to last a maximum of two minutes.

All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source.

Preliminary Task Evaluation

The Task

Me and my group were asked to create a short film lasting around 60 seconds, within this we had to have a couple lines of dialogue between 2 characters. This dialogue would be a knock knock joke. Also we were told to include 4 different types of shots, 4 different types of camera angles and finally 4 different types of camera movement. We used more than 4 different shots, These Are the ones we used , establishing shot, point of view shot, long shot, close, shot/reverse shot, match on action and mid shot

Establishing shot = A shot used to show portray a location. These types of shots may be used with famous landmarks to indicate which city it is set in, such as: The statue of Liberty to identify New York or Big Ben to identify London 

Point of view shot = A shot that shows what the character is seeing and/or looking at 

Long shot = A typical shot that shows the entire object or human figure and is usually intended to place it in some relation to its surroundings.

Close shot = A shot made with the camera near the person or object but far enough away to include some of the background. 

Mid shot = A shot taken at medium distance, it is a shot of a person from the knees up 

Match on action = This consists of connecting 2 shots together in which a character finishes off an action in the second shot that was started in the first previous shot, for example a clip of a character walking through a door being filmed from behind then the clip cuts to him walking through from the other one.

Shot/reverse shot = This is used mostly in conversations, when two characters are speaking the camera will jump back and fourth in time with the speaker, its is used in conjunction with the 180 degree rule. 

180 degree rule = This rule states that a camera should be places somewhere inside 180 degrees on a particular side of the invisible line of a shot containing 2 people filmed in a sequence. If the camera crosses this line, confusion results for the film viewer, because it can make it look like the people are switching places as one watches the film.

Continuity Editing= This is a piece of editing where the scene is continuous and prevent disorientating viewers.

Pre-Production

We started planning our piece of film by using storyboards. These storyboards included subheadings so we knew what we were going to do such as the shot, the angle, movement and other things so we had a better idea of what we were doing. Because we used the storyboards my group found it a lot easier, because we knew what we were doing at what time and which shots to use.

Production

The way we started the film making was we left the classroom to get all of our clips that we were going to use. We got our shots in order of the location instead of the actual shot number. We found this easier because it meant that we wouldn't be wasting time trying to find a good location to get that certain shot. But when we were filming there were a lot of times we had to do a particular shot again because people were in the way and we did the shot more than once so that we had something worthy of using that didn't have all those errors in.

Post-Production

Before we did the editing, we had to make sure that we chose the right clips that we were going to be importing. When we did the editing it self we used a program called Imovie. The purple box at the end is an ending credits screen where I included all 3 of us that were involved with making the film. The green bar at the bottom is the music I chose and I did this because since there would be no dialogue and no noise it would be quite boring just to watch and to make it more entertaining I included the music which the viewers would find better. I also used some transitions because not all the shots fitted each other. 

Evaluation

One improvement we could of made was as soon as the joke took place the exchange in dialogue was very quick and there should of been a pause in between the lines because the character that was getting told the joke was meant to have no idea and it was really quick so he knew the joke and wasn't meant to, so when editing it was very difficult because the clips had to be cropped quite a lot so the joke could actually fit in, this made the joke only last about 4 seconds.

This is my finished product. I would say we did a good job considering we thought it would be easier because you have to make sure you get the right shots at the right times and make sure there isn't anything that will make the shot a very poor and make it look like bad filming.  But we could have improved a lot and in terms of my editing I feel i did alright seeming that it was my first time.