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

The broad genre of our media product is horror, however it tackles the conventions of the subgenre supernatural horror/zombie. The typical conventions of a supernatural horror can consist of characters being ‘possessed’ and ‘haunted’, for example Emily in the ‘Exorcism of Emily Rose’ and Samara in ‘The Ring’. In both of these films the protagonist is a supposed to be a young girl, which is a typical convention in a horror films. This is because young girls are seen as vulnerable and easy targets they are always the role of the victim. The picture of the teenage girl is a stereotype of a victim and would be the one who is most likely targeted. This also multiplies the unnerving theme in not just supernatural films but also in our film too, as it goes against the expected role of a woman in the cinema portrayed as the ‘advisor’ and the ‘nurturer’ and unsettles the audience when they see that they are now the threat. Most supernatural films use this technique to unnerve the audience and create suspense, this is the reason we have also a woman protagonist as the demonised victim turn threat. This can alarm the audience as in some ways they can release more sympathy for the character because she is a girl and can exaggerate the ‘innocent’ persona she once had.

Even though the role of the woman has been challenged from the expected, supernatural films have adopted this method so it has now become the norm of the sub-genre. We have dedicated our film to this particular convention to complement the supernatural/zombie theme. However, most films of this genre still refer to a male or a demon as the dominator of the narrative, for example the ‘The Exorcism’ is dominated by a demon believed to come from the devil and in ‘Paranormal Activity’ the woman is haunted by a demon from her childhood. We took these aspects into consideration but decided we wanted to come up with something a lot more original for our production so we were able to create our own sense of disturbance and challenge the conventions. The way we did this was also use a woman as the dominator, the ‘demon’. She would be the person in the narrative that would had possessed the girl from the opening. This goes against the typical conventions and allowed us to explore different methods to portray the possessor as unsettling and daunting. We succeeded this through firstly the camerawork filming her at a low angle with some shots to represent her with the higher status but also we directed Aphra to come close to the camera. This almost manipulates the camera and makes the audience feel like they are being watched over as her eyes gradually become wider which emphasises the claustrophobic feel to the opening. We also used a red filter on the shots of Aphra to foreshadow to the audience that she is the ‘demon’ in the narrative. After we had used this red filter we realised that it looked like it had drowned the shot with the colour red, which we thought, could connote the demon woman’s thirst for danger and possessiveness. To further this image of the demon like woman, we created a look through black eyes using make up and back combing hair to represent her craziness, however this was not just used on Aphra’s character but also myself, Nikki-Leigh, as the victim to show her ‘new’ adopted possessiveness. We based the make up on ‘The Grudge’ and aimed to create a chilling effect.

The mise-en-scene of the film aimed to create an overall unsettling atmosphere for the character. We did this using two locations, the first for the demon like woman Longford Park where we used the bushes to exaggerate her unexpected eerie behavior, and the second, Withington Community Hospital. The hospital is also a common convention of a horror film, which can leave the audience feeling closed in and intimidated. We wanted this to symbolise the imprisonment of the victims body trapped by the demon like woman, the hospital corridor can seem to be closing in on her like quoted in the voice over, “the walls, their closing in on me”. We aimed to represent this image to unnerve the individual spectator and sparked our ideas from this picture.