Original drawn plans for ancillary products.

Above is an image of the original plan for my film magazine cover. I followed the layout of this for my ancillary product, not making many changes.

Above is an image of the original plan for my horror film poster. As soon as we had taken the photo of Harry in the woods, I knew that I wanted to use it for my film poster. I also had an idea where I would put my title, by having it at the bottom it leaves the majority of the image clear of text which was important as it was such a symbolic and eerie photo.

Audience research.

Audience research for blog

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Storyboards

Photos taken at location for acillary tasks.

Main tasks - film magazine

    I chose to use TOTAL FILM for my film magazine; this genre of magazine is aimed at fans of all types of movies, not just horror. Therefore I used a still from the film as the background image that is less dark and creepy, unlike for the film poster which I made to look more scary. The photo was taken in daylight which naturally makes it less scary, however I have included the killer standing behind us with the hacksaw to make it clear that this new film is obviously a horror.
 

Initial group planning.

    At the beginning of the project, our group sat down together to discuss initial ideas for a horror film. We contemplated going along the lines of real horror films such as Paranormal Activity or Shrooms. Both of which challenge the audience, making them think about what is going on and who is making bad things happen.
    After thinking about these two films and doing our audience research, we thought about including a type of drug that would cause hallucinations and confuse the characters. Either there would be a killer but the teenage characters are two drugged up to work out what's going on. Or one of the characters would trip and kill their own friends (similar to what happens in the film - Shrooms).
    When we decided on our location (fritton woods) we decided against the use of drugs in the trailer because we thought we should concentrate more on a killer to make it less confusing for the audience.

Gender Representation Essay

    Men and women are represented very differently within the media. Men are supposedly strong, powerful and independent; whereas women are submissive, helpless and purely focus on their looks and being good housewives. Ultimately, female features are reliant on their relationships with men, meaning males are the more powerful sex. According to Jeremy Tunstall's research, women are catagorised into being 1.domestic 2.sexual 3.consumer 4.marital. Meaning they are houswives, sex objects, major consumers and contented mothers.
    Carol Clover also researches into the representation of women in a similar way, but takes time to focus on and relate this to, horror films and how they portray the female sex. I have looked at female characters from three different horror films to see how they are represented and also to see whether any horror films challenge the sterotypical view.
   
    Above is a clip from Wrong Turn, showing a perfect example of Clovers "final girl" stereotype. The girl in the white tank top is the final girl at the end of the film opposed to the other girl in the blue top who is killed. The two women here portray exactly what Carol Clover speaks about in her theory, the final girl is quite manly, independent and strong. Whereas the other girl is more scared and is a sex object earlier on in the movie. The clip here shows the characters jumping from a building, the final girl seems to look after the other and lets her go first, being brave enough to stay in the burning shack until last, before jumping out, powerfully rather than screaming and terrified like the girl in the blue top. Throughout the film, the final girl (Jessie) is shown to be very strong and confident, even when terrible things are happening and her friends are being killed and eaten by cannibals. This goes against the stereotypical damsel in distress emotional wreck that the media often portrays all women as, however Jessie does fit with the type of female that Clover believes is best to be the 'final girl'. The final girl will not be shown having sex in the film or being flirty and ditsy. In Wrong Turn, Jessie is not portrayed in that way at all, however she does seem to form a close bond with the male character in this clip. These two are the strongest characters that make it to the end. Even so, she is not seen as a sex object as the other two female characters are early on in the movie.

    Above is Esther from the horror film "Orphan", I chose to look at this character because she challenges a lot of aspects of the representation of women. She is a young russian orphan - however it turns out that she is in her thirties with a rare growth problem, from a mental hospital. The film is psychological and gorey, the storyline is scary in a psychological sense but there a slasher type killings in the film to add gore. Something that this film challenges about horror is the fact that they use a female as the killer, and also makes us believe that she is a child when in fact she is not. She punishes a family for no reason after they were kind enough to adopt her. however her reason for doing so seemed to be to steal the husband. She tries to sexualise her own character by dressing up and putting make up on, then getting close to the father when he is drunk, trying to seduce him. She plays games to make it look as if the mother is abusing her, to send the father further into her arms. It is another stereotype, that women seduce and are bitchy which is portrayed here. This film challenges codes and conventions of the average horror and adds an unusual twist to the female character.




    Above is the trailer for House Of Wax, the character I have looked at here is played by Paris Hilton. She plays the typical female sex object in this horror, a blonde damsel in distress. She is killed off fairly early on in the film; often this type of female character is killed to punish her for the act of sex. Around two thirds of the way through the trailer it focuses on each main character and shows a few short clips of them. When they show Paris Hilton we see part of the scene where she is killed. She wears a red lace bra under her jacet which hangs off her shoulder and exposes her. When she falls onto the metal grate and a knife comes up through it the camera aims straight at her chest. This supports Laura Mulvey's Male gaze theory. She says that the camera is male and when we see women in films it is as if we are looking through the eyes of the directer, who is generally male. This is done purposely, to interest the male audience. the camera see's her character as a sex object and a sex object only.

    The three female characters that I have looked at in this essay are all portrayed very differently, showing that not one theory alone is correct. Each film challeges a different code or convention of horror movies and also of the representation of women.