Genre Conventions

My Chosen Genre

My chosen genre for my trailer is horror, I will apply horror conventions to my trailer to ensure that the audience understands the genre of the film being advertised by the trailer. I will also apply conventions to ensure the audience who are attracted to horror films will be attracted to mine trough the conventions portrayed in the trailer.

Setting conventions

The conventions of the setting in horror movies is generally clear to connote a disturbed, dangerous and dark feeling to the audience, therefore, in my trailer I will ensure that the setting is created with darker lighting and darker prop colours to ensure the feelings of fear and suspense is connoted as the audience watch the trailer. The feeling of fear, excitement and suspense is expected from a horror film because the audience want to be scared while watching and after the film, therefore to make the audience have these feelings I must connote them through my trailer through the mode of the setting of the film to show the audience that the film does follow there wishes of a film of being scary, showing the audience the conventions they wish to see enables them to give a good reason to come and watch the movie to be gratified by watching the film with the conventions the wish to see.

Narrative Conventions

The narrative of any film gets the audience hooked simply from the common conventions of the narrative according to the genre. For the conventions of a horror genre to be followed it is usually the case that the film starts with a innocent character/characters which are usually moving away from their common place of residence, whether that be temporally or permanent. The film often then continues to the character/characters seeing, hearing or feeling unnatural things which they then sometimes go on to investigate. This then usually leads to people dying or becoming possessed. These conventions are basic is horror films and attract the audience through the feeling of the characters going somewhere were they are not comfortable and are not familiar with, this feeling is likely to be of being felt by the audience therefore the audience can relate to the characters and form a relationship due the this common feeling, this relationship will stay with the audience and they will feel more sensitive if anything bad happens to the character who they have formed a relationship with. In the beginnings of my trailer I will show the characters simply carrying out there normal life's by helping a relative who has passed away, the characters go along to their house(which is a new environment they are not familiar with) where strange abnormal events start to occur, the fact that the characters are not in their usually house is another convention followed and enables me to be able to apply other horror conventions to the trailer such as unexplained noises to the new and place were the characters are.