This document discusses how a student media project utilized conventions from real media products like magazine covers and film posters and trailers within the horror genre. It provides several examples of how the student project took inspiration from elements of covers and posters for films like Harry Potter, Shutter, Halloween, Scream 4, The Blair Witch Project, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These elements included limited color palettes, images of killers, night shots, and silhouettes. The document argues the student project effectively highlighted many key conventions of the horror and slasher genres through these references.

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

2. Unlike some magazine
covers which portray the
characters from the film, we
used an image of our
crew/cast holding
equipment, which
symbolises that is was a
guerilla film.
We used key conventions of
magazine covers to create a
professional finish on our
front cover.

4. The similarities between our Empire front
cover and this Harry Potter cover include the
limited colours used. As ours is a Halloween
style issue, we used red, black and white
across our cover. The Harry Potter issue from
Empire uses gold and black as a main colour
for its coverlines, plugs and puffs.
The covers also differentiate in that our main
coverline uses conventions of the horror
genre (the ripped edges and scratched
typeface) to enhance the fact that it is a
Halloween issue.

5. We found that this poster for Our film poster follows the
the film ‘Shutter’ is also very main conventions of many
similar to ours. other posters from the horror
genre. They show a distorted
or slightly unclear image of
the killer, which is the effect
we tried to create too.

6. ‘Halloween’ was one of the first films to
portray a poster with a shot of the killer.
Many other films of the horror genre
proceeded with this effective idea.

7. We took inspiration from other
films from the horror subgenre
of stalker/slasher, where a killer
is hunting a female protagonist.
The screenshot below is from
‘Scream 4’ and shows the
masked killer in the
background. Another similar
aspect of our film is the idea of
having an anonymous killer, the
Scream films use a mask,
whereas we chose not to fully
show the killer’s face.

8. We also took ideas from ‘The
Blair Witch Project’, by using
night shots.
To enhance the spooky
atmosphere, we used a night
vision effect on a video
camera, which heightened
the atmosphere and realism
of the trailer.
We also shot scenes on a
hand-held camera, which
again gave a more amateur
and realistic feel.

9. Our trailer also used the ‘silhouette’ idea,
where the killer is seen from a low angle
shot, making them seem more intimidating.
The shot on the right is taken from ‘Texas
Chainsaw Massacre’ which is another iconic
film from the slasher genre. The film also
uses an iconic killer, again using a sense of
anonymity to present the villain.

10. We feel that our trailer and other outcomes have effectively
and clearly highlighted many of the key conventions of the
horror genre and ‘slasher’ sub genre.