Choosing a Genre

From watching horror film over last few week to get myself more familiar with the genre, we now have to choose a horror sub genre for our trailer. The main sub genre is slather, Gothic, supernatural and psychological. I have evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of sub genres to help make the made the right decision in which genre to use.

Gothic Horror

Gothic horror combines elements of both horror and romance. Women are represented as weak and vulnerable, they are seen as damsels in distress. While men are represented as brave and strong and will enter the dark world to save the day.  The villain are normally not from reality, such as monsters, werewolves and vampires The settings and location include A castle, Ruined buildings, graveyards, woodland. Extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, and extreme weather. An advantage of Gothic horror is like the idea of combing horror with romance, making a scary love story. However I would be able to find the good believable locations to shoot in such a for a Gothic horror due to limited resources a castles. The villains are usually are normally not from reality meaning to create my villain I would have to use a lot of make up which I would find difficult to make it look professional.

Slasher Horror

Slasher’s typically involving a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner. The weaponry used to kill the victims are usually cutting tool such as a knife, chainsaws or axe. Many slasher films are set in isolated locations such as on islands, deep in forests, small towns, abandoned buildings. The Victims tend to be young, attractive, secondary school, college or university. The victim to die is usually a young, attractive, promiscuous blonde women  who is weak and therefore dies by the killer. The Killer in the slasher film is usually male. His identity is always, unknown or concealed either by a mask or by dark lighting. He is usually very strong making him nearly impossible to die. His background is often troubled, such as childhood trauma that explains his choice of victim, weapon and location.  The Final Girl who is smart bout not as attractive as her victims only have a single survivor and defeats or gets away from the killer. Many slasher films have sequels. An advantage of a slasher usually have simple storyline which I think would be easy to create a storyline. However due to limited resources I think it would be very difficult to create graphic killing a sequence of victims without it looking amateur.

Psychological  Horror  

Psychological relies on character's fears, guilt, beliefs, characters' fears, guilt, beliefs, creepy sound effects, relevant music, to build tension and scare the audience. Unlike Slasher’s the psychological have use minimal blood and has very few deaths. The storyline are complex, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats wondering who the killer is, their horrific identity is often not revealed until end of the film. The locations are set in normal surroundings such as a suburban house. The Killer,  The 'psycho' will usually look like a 'normal' human being, who fits in to society. But as the plot develop and audience starts to see the killers disturbed behaviour. An advantage of Psychological horror is uses less blood to scare the audience and is set in normal surrounding which I could produce for my trailer. However a disadvantage would be challenging to develop a complex storyline that would keep the audience guessing.

Supernatural Horror  

Supernatural horror narrative focuses on folklore and religious traditions, focusing on death, the afterlife, evil, the devil, ghosts and spirits. Locations used within supernatural horrors tend to churches in relation to religious themes in supernatural horror, suburban houses and abandon/haunted houses. The narrative usually includes the ghost or spirit or ghost trying to give the protagonist main character a message. I feel supernatural are the scariest sub genre I have look as we hears stories of people speaking to spirits and seeing ghost and it difficult to know if are real or not.

In conclusion we have choose to sub genre of Supernatural Horror for our trailer. The fear of the unknown makes a good horror film can make audience feel like they are experiencing our worst nightmare. I feel by choosing supernatural we will be able create an original narrative as well as being  inspired by films such as The Others and The Unborn.