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

Real trailers

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There are several conventions of horrors and trailers I will address here. These are:

• The role of police/military (top right)
• Intertitles (top middle)
• The threat at home (middle right)

The role of police/military

Forces with some authority, such as these groups, are often used in horror to provide a higher sense of threat. This presence of 'peacekeepers' can either be directly addressed or subtly hinted to. They almost ALWAYS provide very little or no help at all to the individuals in danger, and are sometimes first seen after having failed to solve a case. This blundering of those who are supposed to serve and protect those in danger causes unease in the audience, as they are placed in the shoes of someone who has less power than that. It creates a sense of isolation and desertion, and they learn that they cannot count on someone else to help them. They are typically seen/addressed at the start of films/trailers for this reason.

Intertitles

Intertitles are very common in film trailers, and are probably most abundant in horror trailers of all genres. This is because extra information is sometimes needed to set the context of the film, and so draw in the audience. For example, the film Blair Witch Project opens the trailer with intertitles, setting up the story and telling the audience that it is real footage. This sets up the scene with an interesting plot and sets the context so the audience knows what to expect. We were inspired by this film so we naturally used a similar method of opening the trailer. The audience is drawn in to the aspect that it is real; whether or not the audience actually believes that it is real footage is another matter. Horrors are usually ways in which we can experience terror without actually being at risk, but if we think that these series of events actually occured, the barrier is broken - which leads me to my next point.

The threat at home

Zombie films are scary partly because it shows our friends and family turning into relentless killing machines. When the audience subconsciously feels that a threat could come from their own home, a greater feeling of terror is felt. Relationships are often set up in zombie films to exploit this fact, and shows that love doesn't stop death unlike many conventional action/romance films. In our trailer we have showed one of the friends (or two if the audience notices) have become this killing machine, so sets up this close proximity to danger with the feeling of being stranded and lost in a forest.