Horror Synopsis

Our horror synopsis starts with a young girl living in a new house, we shoot everyday normality of her and her family. Then events start happening which are unexplained, the girl has started sleep walking, and as she does, she does weird things such as getting knives from the kitchen, writing in blood on the walls, turning lights on in the middle of the night. The events that she does get worse and worse so the parents decide to put up CCTV cameras around the house once they realize its their daughter that is doing all these terrible and weird things. They capture footage of her acting possessed as she is sleep walking, there is one scene where the girl is rocking in the dark with her hair over her face and when she looks up she starts screaming with editing that will distort her face.
The parents then find under the floorboards in the little girls room a diary that was written years ago by a family who used to live in that house. They discover that their little girl is repeating the events in the diary, the girl who used to live there was also sleepwalking and doing strange things to her family. The parents search the girls name on the internet and find that the family were all tragically murdered by their daughter... they then start to panic, relying on the diary to find out what happens next, but with pages missing they struggle to know whats going to happen next.


We will include normal filming but after events start occurring, we will edit the camera footage in certain parts to make it CCTV footage. We will also use a sound bridge at the start from when the production companies are on screen the dialogue is creating suspense of what is happening. With an open line like 'Who turned the light on last night' or something similar. I think that creating shots of the girl acting innocent like swinging on a swing in her garden will create some sort of innocence to her role that makes the audience see how something they dont ever think they could fear actually becomes monsterous.

Horror Mood Board

In my mood board i included the things i find most scary these included Eyes,Little girls,Wounds and Masks none of these things would be overly difficult to include in our horror tailer.

Trailers

Features of the trailer of "The Thing" that i like.

"The Thing" is an effective trailer and uses many different editing techniques to make the person watching it feel like they are actually there. The thing i like most out of the trailer is what happens at exactly 1.00 the man is edging slowly towards something but we cant see what the sound is quiet so it builds up tension there is then a fade to black and a loud bang when the video comes back from the black he is being dragged backwards underneath something. We had a similar idea with dragging someone backwards out of bed but now we can use the idea of a fade to black first to build tension.

Features of the trailer of "Haunted Changi" that i like. 

"HAUNTED CHANGI" uses video that looks like real video footage to make the watcher think that the special effects arent added on, the way they make it look like a real CCTV camera is by adding a filter effect in an editing program such as "bad TV" or "Plasma glow". The way the inter titles look like they have been sprayed onto the floor in the shot is also effective but then it wipes away so we know its been super emposed over the top.


Features of the trailer of "Hide and seek" that i like.

The trailer to 'Hide and Seek', I find typically scary as there has been a whole narrative set up to suit what is going to happen in the future, horrors often use children to manipulate the innocent factor to something that is scary. The way they move to somewhere new shows that a change could easily happen, the girls mother having just died allows us to know that the girl would be troubled, and giving her father some responsibility. The imaginary friend we never see, 'charlie' controls the girl, and uses her to threaten the woman who meets her father, the whole way she blames 'charlie' and draws the policeman dying, gives us a sense that the imaginary friend is very real, maybe a spirit that has influenced this innocent girl to create punishment for her father and his choices. I think this could be interpreted into our trailer we will make as the whole children involvement and not seeing the villain adds some fear for the audience.

Narrative Theorists

We applied the theories and ideas of four narrative theorists to The Shining.

Firstly i am going to discuss Vladimir Propp, Propp was a Russian critic who explored the underlying structure of folk tales and proposed a set of universal character and narrative functions which he thought were the basis for all stories. Propp’s outline of the functions in a member of the family leaving home relates to the film, the preparation, complication, transference and struggle are followed by The Shinning. However, the return and recognition is not a part of the story outline of the film. The film ends with the villain (Jack) eventually dying, and the heroes escaping.uneasy fit with the Shining as even thought there was a clear villain and hero, there were potentially more than one and some character’s roles were unclear. For instance Wendy could have been seen as a hero and she had the guts to stand up to jack and lock him up in the food store room. Also Halaran could be seen as the hero as he communicated with Danny the little boy and came all that way to the hotel because he could sense there was something wrong happening. Even though he got murdered before he could help anyone, he supplied the Snowplough which in the end helped Danny and Wendy escape, leaving Jack (the villain) dead. Jack’s role changes from the beginning of the film to the end. He is seen as harmless to begin with, but it is unclear whether a supernatural entity has turned him loopy or the isolation of the conditions in a big hotel, away from any other civilisation. Either way he is seen as the villain because of his actions towards Wendy and Danny in attempting to kill them with an axe. We see earlier traits of his strange behaviour, when he speaks rudely to Wendy and swears at her. He also loses his sense of time; as we witnessed when Wendy brought food up to him he asked what the time was and it was 11:30am, which for a man who claims he has lots of things to do is not a sensible time to wake up. Later on we realise that he wasn’t actually writing he was writing a repeated phrase on hundreds of pieces of paper “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.horror film are somewhat followed by The Shining. The preparation that starts with a

Claude Levi-Strauss looked at the narrative of horror films in binary oppositions. They are sets of opposite values which reveal the structure of the media text. An example of this would be Good, and Evil.
He was not focused on the events which took place in the plot, but instead more for the deeper meaning of the themes. He looked at how the narrative might be a property of the human mind. He extracted common myths and crossed them with cultural boundaries. These binary oppositions where seen to structure our understanding of the world. The hotel in the film is seen as a bad place, from the beginning of the film, as the film went on it increasingly got a worse image. Jack, Wendy and Danny were seen as the innocent people coming to take care of the hotel. This illustrates the example of good and evil. Also when Jack becomes a villain, it is him against the good Wendy and Danny and he turns into the evil presence. There is a large sense of past and present in the film, some of which is unexplained. The cook Halaran tells Danny that the past usually comes back to haunt the hotel, as a warning. Jack is haunted by the past which could have been one of the reasons why he became a villain. He may or may have not just imaged the ball where he met O’Grady, it is not explained. It is still questioned whether he was possessed, or he became a villain through paranoia and isolation. This brings us to the normal and paranormal part of the film. There were lots of paranormal activity occurring. Such as it is unexplained how Jack escaped from the food storage room, after being locked in there by Wendy. It can be argued that every time he images things there is a mirror in the room, therefore he could be imagining it, but we as the audience do not know for sure whether he is really seeing this, as a result of the haunted hotel, or he is just imagining it, going mad. The idea of humans and aliens could relate to what Danny is seeing when he sees the two girls around the hotel, he isn’t going mad like Jack but he is seeing these paranormal images too, therefore it could explain what Jack is witnessing. The humans are Wendy, Danny and Jack, but could it be argued that Jack turns into an alien? The old woman in the bath, the twin little girls, and the ball were all a sign of alienism because theoretically they were not meant to be there.

Bordwell and Thompson’s theory was that the narrative is a “chain of cause and effect occurring in time and space.” The delineation of time and space: the screen duration, plot duration, and story duration. The film The Shining itself is 115 minutes long. In this amount of time the plot duration was around 6 months long, and the story as a whole was set through 60+ years. For them, a narrative typically begins with one situation, a series of changes occur depending on pattern of cause and effect, eventually a situation arises that brings the end of the narrative. The narrative shapes the material in the time and space, it defines where everything takes place, when, and how fast they take place. It uses technical techniques to manipulate the audience’s awareness of time and place by using: flashbacks, replays of action, slow motion, speeding up, jumping between places and times.

Narrative Theory

In class we explored the ideas of 4 narrative theorists. These were Propp, Todorov, Levi-Strauss and Bordwell and Thompsson.

The first I am going to talk about is Propp

Don't Be afraid of the Dark Trailer analyses

The trailer uses a just a black screen for a good 40 seconds with a voice over whispering "Your siting there in the dark but dont worry there is nothing to be afraid of" this makes you feel like there is something around you. The sound makes use of the 5.1 surround sound by adding whispers from different speaker to make you feel asif there is somethign all around you. The first thign we see from this long 40 seconds of Black is this shot below the text has been overlayed onto the video this gives the feel of entrapment. 

Next we have a gothic style house faded in from black, Gothic style houses are a typical convention of horror films as they are usually set in spooky old mansions, castles, or fog-shrouded, dark and shadowy locales. And the main characters are usually mysterious people normally owning the house or having something to do with the house.

I would say this is a conventional horror trailer as it includes : Dark flashes, Mansion, Big open rooms with nowhere to hide this trailer is very similar to "A night alone" with there being lots of long shots of mysterious things we cant work out until the camera moves in closer. The majority of this trailer is very dark the only time we see any light is when the light flashes from the lightning.