SR: Our Target Audience

The genre for our movie is horror/slasher. I did a post, where I was outlining and explaining what the typical conventions of the slasher genre were. 

Before doing this post, I decided to do some research to find out who our target audience and primary audience would be. We wanted to create a movie that appealed to both males and females. The typical hybrid genre ROM-COM is one of the main genres that the subsidiaryWorking Title is creating. However, ROM-COM's such as Love Actually or Bridget Jones Diary appeal more to the female audience because of the romance genre. It does on the other hand also appeal to some male audience because there is considered to be comedy in it. 
When I then did this research, I decided to look for the common types of movies that the general public enjoy watching and found these statistics from the British Film Institute from 2012, which show that the number of males and females below 35, that watch the horror genre is around the same.

Due to this, we came to the conclusion that our main target audience, were males and females from the age rate of 15 to 24 and that our secondary audience would be from the age of 24 to 35. Since, it is also unlikely that a slasher genre gets an age rate under 15, if there are violent scenes and sexual assault, we thought that 15 and above would be the correct age. 

Bronwen and I intend to do questionnaires later on where we will ask the audience what they think of our basic idea and what they would like us to change etc. 

SR: Choosing the name for our "Final Girl"

One of the first slasher movies, is called Psycho from 1960. In this movie, Janet Leigh played the stereotype "final girl" as the character Marion Crane.
In the movie Scream from 1996, Drew Barrymore, who's character was called Casey played the stereotype of the "Scream Queen".

In most horror movies, the Scream Queen is portrayed as sexually active, blond, unintelligent and someone who is always going to make bad decisions.
Scary movie, managed to break this stereotype down in a very good way. The character Drew Decker, played by Carmen Electra is running away and can decide whether to run towards death or safety. A final girl, who is portrayed as smart and resourceful would run towards safety. However, a scream queen, like the one in this movie, runs towards death, because she is portrayed as dumb blonde.

A scream queen, usually ends up being killed, whereas the final girl always survives. However, in our movie, we are counter typing and our character is therefore the final girl, who ends up getting killed.
Because we are counter typing the main character, played by Bronwen, we decided to choose a name that is linked to the slasher/horror genre and links to the two movies, Psycho and Scream. We therefore took the first name from Scream, Casey, and the last name from the movie Psycho, Crane.
Our character's name is therefore Casey Crane.

SR: The semiotic analysis of our idea

 Audiences:

Below you can see a link to an article from box office, that shows which audience went to watch the premier of "The Purge" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". You will see that the audience was mainly young adults under 25. And there were around 50%-60% of women and 40-50% males.

http://www.thewrap.com/box-office-how-horror-films-conjuring-win-scaring-young-women-104901/

When reading this article you quickly ask yourself: Why are so many women going to watch a horror movie? You would mainly consider a horror movie to be addressed to a male audience. A very simple explanation for this is that the main protagonist in most horror movies is a woman.

Our film opening will also be with a female main protagonist. Moreover, we looked at bbfc and looked at the rating system. Our film opening would be most likely to be rated at 15. If clicking the link below, you will see that the age rate of 15+ is allowed to include any of the following:

• Strong violence
• Frequent strong language
• Portrays of sexual activity
• Strong verbal references to sex
• Nudity 
• Scenes of violence
• Discriminatory language or behaviour 
• Drug taking 

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/what-classification/15

Due to this age rate our primary audience would be young adults aged between 15 and 25.
Our secondary audience would be the people interested in the horror genre.


Genres:

When watching a movie there is always a main genre e.g. horror in the movie "Scary Movie".
However, there are also other genres that are or can be linked to it. One genre that could for example be linked to "Scary Movie" and also our film opening, is the slasher genre. In this genre, there is a main killer who is nearly always trying to rape or kill young women. One important signifier for the slasher genre, is that the killer will kill the victim with a knife. The knife is phallic, which means that it is a symbol for a sexual assault towards the victim. The term phallic, comes from Freud's psychosexual analysis of the 5 psychosexual stages. (phallic stage is the 3rd stage). It can therefore also be applied to media.

Representation:

For our stereotypes in our film opening, we have Olivia (played by Bronwen), who is portrayed as a very girly girl, who only cares about her friends, make-up and hair. Whereas our killer (played by Jonathan), is a stereotypical killer, where you don't see the face, he is wearing a mask and wants to kill Olivia with a knife.
We chose not to do any counter stereotypes, because horror is a very common genre and these two character's are stereotypes, which are considered to be the normative in society.

Creating the mask

Me and Jon created a mask which we would like to use for our production. We began by sketching out different ideas. We looked at a few different masks, taking inspiration from other horror movies and characters.
However, we also added our own ideas to make it individual.
For the mouth area, we wanted to create a skeleton or skull effect so we looked at some different images like this for example:

We thought that having the mask painted to look like skin with cuts and bruises would add a good and also individual look to the mask. We also wanted the mask to be quite scary.

The idea of having a mask/ masked killer in our film opening was inspired from the film Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)
This is the mask that the killer wears in the film:



We got the idea of having the mask look more like an actual face (so skin-coloured, with cuts and bruises) From the film he Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013) and the sequel to that, The Purge: Anarchy (James DeMonaco, 2014) Here is an example of the mask from these films:

For the mouth area of the mask, we took some inspiration from the character of The Joker.
We added cuts to the side of the mouth in order to represent this. We decided that blood and cuts were a good thing to add to our mask also because they are a very common feature in the horror genre. The dark shadows around the eyes on the mask were also inspired by The Joker.

This is a time lapse that we filmed when making the mask:

Film Opening Analysis 5: Poltergeist

Director: Gil Kenan

Writers: David Lindsay-Abaire (screenplay), Steven Spielberg

Budget: $35,000,000

Genre: Horror, Thriller

Rotten Tomatoes

"A family whose suburban home is haunted by evil forces must come together to rescue their youngest daughter after the apparitions take her captive." - IMDb

Titles

The film begins with the usual idents for 20th century Fox and for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. There is then a multicoloured, almost futuristic pattern, with the introduction to the movie in a white font, over it. There is some strange movements below it which suggest a mysterious and ghostly aspect to the film. 

When the title does appear, it is the grass behind some houses and this creates a mysterious affect. 

Also, after this, a zombie, animated, breaks through and then is seen being strangled by a hand. The camera then zooms out and we see that the zombie is actually in a video game being played by a young boy on an iPad. This is almost a premonition to events that occur later on in the film, relating to the supernatural.

Semiotics

There is a good use of a high angle/ariel shot over the tops of some houses, and then behind them is a field, where the title appears.

The non-diegetic sound used is a typical horror movie sound track during the title sequence. This is in keeping with the codes and conventions of a horror film.

Narrative Exposition

The theories can be applied to this opening is Propp's character theory, Barthe's theory of narrative enigma and Levi-Strauss' theory of binary opposition. In the characters that we are introduced to in a scene where a family are in a car, it could be said that the Princess archetype is established in the older daughter. There are a few questions that are left unanswered in this opening sequence, for example, where are the family going? , who is the zombie? etc.

The theory of binary opposition is the transition from the creepy, horrific zombie to the car with the family in. This is a common feature used in horror film openings.