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

By Liam Edwards

Our movie

Horror movies like Saw include lots of gruesome and violent with lots of blood and gore

We challenged this convention. We wanted to create horror using psychological means as a slow burn as seen in films like ‘The Others’. We avoided gore.

Horror movies include a female character being abducted and screaming as she is kidnapped or killed!

We avoided this convention for practical means as we have an all male cast! We also wanted to create a film that relied on psychological as opposed to visual fear.

Convention of horror genre

Movie TitleExisting horror movie titles How they compare to our movie

title- ‘The Devil’s Playground’.

Scream This title uses the word ‘scream’ and nothing else to suggest horror as it is usually the noise associated with fright which links to the horror convention. Our film uses fear and haunting to apply horror although in the title we use ‘Devil’ suggesting horror to the audience. We haven’t hinted at a teenage audience, we have instead hinted at a location that is associated with horror ‘playground’.

The Cabin In the Woods This title uses the name of a creepy setting ‘Cabin’ and ‘woods’ both being stereotypes for horror movies. The fear in our movie is based around a location and event not an object.

Mises en SceneLocation- horror movie conventions are: churches, woods, abandoned buildings and derelict asylums.Location- we used a conventional setting of a woods and secret den hideouts so we could have low light levels to really grasp our genre of horror and interest the audience.

Characters- conventions include using young children who are possessed or using groups of teenagers including screaming girls.Characters- we used this convention with the girl being possessed and haunting our main character although we went against stereotypes of girls screaming by our male character being the scared one.

Make up- conventionally horror movies use lots of blood and gore. Effects include deep cuts and severed limbs.

Make- up- we avoided using excessive make up effects as we wanted to focus on psychological fear through the use of sound and lighting not through gore and focus more on the haunting other than violence

GenreOur film was horror genre. The specific elements which suggest this are: setting, casting of teenagers in key roles, the use of chilling music, dark lighting, use of horror conventions