Narrative enigmas In trailers Research

Bridget Cardenas Pazmiño

What are narrative conventions? (Story Conventions)

• The narrative goes in chronological order, until in around the middle of the trailer, where tension starts to develop, and then the climatic point of something bad starts to happens.

• The narrative then starts to become unchronological and fast pace and ends at a climatic point (this is where the huge enigma is).

The purgeThis is the typical nuclear family that has the perfect life and is content with her friends, however around the middle of the movie the family is being attacked because they saved a homeless man, in the end of the trailer you can see that they are vulnerable by not focusing on what's behind them.

• They go somewhere and check that everything is okay however, they hear something and go to investigate. Either the horror continues or just begins.

• The main characters gets injured, killed, or missing.

• Have either a horrible finale, a happy one or a link towards the sequel.

What is the Narrative Structure?• At the beginning of the film you can easily see is a girl living her normal life. However, she

suffers from an accident but can’t remember her past therefore she must find out who she actually is. This is what is told by just looking at the trailer.

• Finally what happens is that the trailer leaves you with an enigma of ‘What happens next?’, ‘Does she discover who she actually is?’, ‘Does she die or gets killed?’

• The trailer allows the audience to get an idea of what the movie is about and hints what will happen in the movie therefore, leaving the audience intrigued.

Trailer: I know who killed me

What unrestricted narrative is there?

Within a social science fiction horror movie the narrative has no limit to the information that they want to give to the audience in this case they want to hint to them what is happening and what’s going on.

In the purge you can clearly see what the movie wants to show and it the reason of ‘The Purge’ in the city. Also it hints what is going to happen “the night” of the Purge.

What restricted narrative is there?

However, Social science fiction horror also in some cases doesn’t really want o give a lot of information away.

This is to create enigmas for the audience to be able to think what’s going on. Some enigmas in some cases are never solved, until you see the movie were you can fit the pieces together and get the conclusion of what the movie is about.

In Dark Skies, the main character is doubtful of what happening in their house, as the trailer proceeds, we learn along with the main character what’s happening in the trailer. However, we can know the full story clearly if we watch the full movie.

What are the enigmas the audience is left with?

Who is following them and why? Will they make it out alive?

What is their history? And why are they tormented with it?

Trailer: The Gift

How do they create these enigmas?

Enigmas are created by the editing. The editing has to make the scenes fast pace and short, this will make the audience doubtful of why the fast pace and also by doing this the audience will not be able to think as quick therefore creating the enigmas.

Another way to create enigmas in trailers would be by using flashbacks, this will make the audience think of Why are there flashbacks?, What did they do? and, so on. (Example of this would be: I know who killed me).

How does this connect the expectations/ conventions of genre?

Social science fiction horror are expected to surprise the audience, by doing fast pace and making people or creatures to pop out of nowhere.

The MES-EN-SCENE usually in these type of films would be weapons, fighting, and dark colours, this would be the setting, this would make the movie more scarier and eerie.

And the movie is usually set in a house.

There is also a large amount of fighting either against people, or creatures.

Trailer: Dark Skies