Horror Filming

Themes and Ideas

Horror is often very moralistic
Themes in horror have the same idea, basically the bad girls who drink, smoke and have sex die first, and the good little girls survive. Of course it’s to set an example to females, but surly with all the gore and blood that’s the last thing they are thinking about!?
Also of course the idea is to scare a person, which is the whole point of a good horror film; whether it’s brutal and gruesome or mysterious and frightening either way people get a kick out of being scared.

In our own film Psychosis, we came up with the idea with the help from a previous idea in which we did film but then decided not to use most of that footage, and after some serious thinking it was decided to make our film into a non narrative piece. We thought about how to change the film, while still having the same basic idea from before, which was the 2 minutes would show a girl being haunted by her Psychosis, we came up with the overall idea by shot by shot and seeing if it could work. Of course it did and then we went on to make our film.
We thought using a different theme (mental problems) would make our film different, as there are not many horror films like this in the real world. By making the main character be the one with the mental problem we thought it would give our film a different affect instead of it being like a usual film with the innocent victim being harassed by a crazy villain.

Use of camera

In most horror films the use of camera is used at many different angles like most films. However, in horror films close ups seem to make more of an impact, normally close ups are used to show a characters expression and this is used in the horror genre to show a characters fear.
Focusing the camera is also used in all films, and in horror this is normally done to show a character in the distance, or focusing on a particular prop, this tells the audience that they should focus on this particular thing at that time.

In our film we used a few different angles, and mainly close ups, we used a lot of close ups to show the main characters crazed expression to tell the audience that this person is the one to focus on. We used sideways angles, front angles, angles that only show the characters backs, etc. We used these particular angles because we thought these gave the best affect after practising with different ones.

Lighting

Usually in the big horror scenes the lighting set down and is commonly dark, this builds tension for the audience. The music helps considerably amounts too.

In our film the lighting was of great importance, as we wanted to make it as dark and spooky as possible but so we are able to see most of the features, most of the lighting was handled when we edited our film by turning the contrast down to the setting we thought looked the best.

Conform/Subvert

Conform and Subvert are basic opposites, conform goes along with the rules whereas subvert rebels and doesn’t go along with rules.
An example of this: In a horror film the killer (conform) but is subverting as the killer is a woman as apposed to common horror films where the killers are usually butch males.

The conform in our film would be the hooded character chasing the main character in the black and white shots, this is an common storyline in horror films, however the main character subverts when she is the one suffering from the mental health issues.