Research: What makes a good Teen Horror?

To put it in simple terms, A teen horror is a horror based at teenagers (you never would have guessed) It usually contains elements such as a "Dim-witted" niave teen girl who is usually chased and falls over dramatically - In cliché. Teen horrors usually begin with Day-to-day life, with many foreshadowing lines just so you remember it's still a horror, Often things regarding a sleepover where girls might be talking about a horrible murder that happened in the woods and then they decide "Lets venture into the woods"- Bad mistake because we all know there's a killer out there. This genre of films rarely has a main story-line to it other than maybe an old tale about a murderer that no-one believes and then suddenly this psycho murder is loose from no-where and starts killing everyone...

Here is a trailer for "Scary movie" which takes all the teen horror clichés and moulds them into a classic comedy take on "Scream"

The first notable teen horror is probable Halloween (1978) Followed by Halloween II (1981), A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) and Friday The 13th (1980), Creating a whole new revolution of teen horrors and psycho killers

 

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was another iconic film for the decade, and even today "Freddy Krueger" is regarded as one of the best horror characters out there, he even has his own eerie song... In my opinion the special effects and make-up used in this film to make the character are some of the best out of the teen horror range

 

Research: Horror films continued

One of my favourite horror films Is Saw (Despite them dragging on) I feel the film has a creative yet twisted plot, topped off with a bucket load of gore. As i found out in previous research, many people will refuse to pay any attention to real blood and horror but if it's in a film, we love it! Below is a trailer for Saw 1

 

Saw 1

Another key theme of horror films is paranormal, and fear of the unknown, which I guess is why most horror films you see tend to contain a lot of dark scenes and eerie noises to build tension throughout the film, in order to try and keep the audience attached for as long as possible. One of the most recent popular paranormal films is "Paranormal Activity", personally I don't like these films because I feel there isn't enough action and you don't get to see much of what's going on. Paranormal activity is filmed in a similar style to "The Blair witch project", one of the most iconic paranormal films out there

As you can see by the reactions, people will respond with laughter to being scared

Zombie films are still as current as ever, evolving from the 1950's creation of mutants and monsters. I feel these are a popular sub-genre because of the realism some zombie films convey, and lets face it, in reality no one wants to be eaten alive. Recently I watched one of my favourite zombie films - the reason I like it so much is again because of the gore, the realistic special effects and the thrilling storyline

 28 weeks later

In order to find out what other people think about horror films I have conducted a Survey for them to take with a variety of questions about Horror films- this should help me in planning for my main task

Research: Horror Films

Recently I have been doing some research on horror films in preparation for my main task, You can see this by clicking here

Main Task: Introduction

Our main task will be the titles and opening of a "teen horror" film to be 2 minutes long. All the audio and video material we use must be original or from a copy-right free source, before we get onto this though, there is research to do!

An example of a teen horror

Evaluation of Preliminary task

Completed Edit

Above is my version of our preliminary task, edited to be extremely over-dramatic!

Re-editing

Today in the lesson Me, Tom and Nicole briefly discussed a few more ideas for our editing and I added in some sound effects and swapped seem effects around and I think my version is complete, now we just need to discuss which one to use for our preliminary task and then evaluate it using power-point in our own time!

Editing with I-movie!

Editing task

In my version of the film I aimed for a more comical approach, to begin with I added music to make it similar to a 'Sit-com' with a cheerful sounding ending but i decided to change this to a more dramatic piece instead because i thought that it fitted in with the genre we picked. I changed the colour of each scene to have a bleached looked so it would look more like a generic horror styled film, I feel this was a good choice and i feel the final product will be quite effective

FIlming

Today we did our filming, we managed to get all of the shots we needed and we decided, in order to suit our "zombie apocolypse' theme, the P.E room that we used needed to look like it had been wrecked and so we just moved a few chairs around to make it look authentic, we had to make a few changes due to complications but we managed to sort them out in the end, we will each be editing different versions to see what we come up with! During our filming we had a few bloopers but we chose to keep them for our own humor! We all had our opinions and input during the filming and we ensured that we focused on using all the camera movements/angles such as 2 shot, Close up and shot-reverse-shot. there were a few issues with lighting but we managed to get past these by adjusting the angles of some shots

Todays task

Beginning the filming

Today some of the class will start to film their preliminary task, the rest of the group who aren't prepared will be re-thinking their storyboards - we are one of the groups who has some rethinking to do on our storyboard, we have decided to change the ending and add more dialogue to the piece so it fits our task better, Nicole re-wrote some of the storyboard and now we are ready to film!

Modeling our I-pad