My reasons for doing so are
- I am easily scared and so I have good idea of how to make things scary.
- I feel that I can put more in to how to make something scary and how to build tension within a scene.
- A Horror Movie will be more of a challenge for me and therefore my editing skills will be used in more depth, the filming will be harder and I will have lots to evaluate at the end of the project.
- I often watch Horror Movies in the cinema which means that I have a good idea of the kind of genres and the kinds of things that will scare people.
- I feel that I am creative enough to tell a story.
- I can expand my technical skills in the sense that I will have to use a boom, recording equipment and editing skills.
- Finding locations, planning filming days and assembling a crew will allow me to explore my talents as a director as its something I would like to pursue.
In order to gain a better understanding of the Horror Industry, I Have conducted some research from wider forms of media. I researched advice from film-makers, film critics and film buffs to gain a clear idea of how to make a successful movie trailer.
Below is a video from eHow who are known for providing good advice.
How to Make a Horror Movie -- powered by ehow
Below is an article from WikiHow about making films.
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Movie
Up to point 14 is relevant and it offers some good tips below at the bottom.
This is a list of films that are considered to be the scariest of all time, its from Wikipedia.
- The Thing (1982) ranks #1 on The Boston Globe's list of the 50 scariest movies of all time.
- The Shining (1980) ranks #1 on The Moving Arts Film Journal's list of the 25 greatest horror films.
- The Exorcist (1973) was voted scariest movie of all time by Entertainment Weekly and Movies.com, and by viewers of AMC in 2006. It was also chosen as the best horror film for Best in Film: The Greatest Movies of Our Time.
- Psycho (1960), the Alfred Hitchcock classic, tops AFI's list of the 100 most thrilling American films, and the top rated horror titles at the Internet Movie Database.
- King Kong (1933) is currently #1 on the Rotten Tomatoes list of the best horror movies, and topped the Rotten Tomatoes list of the 50 best horror movies of all time.
- Jaws (1975) was #1 in the Bravo network's five-hour miniseries The 100 Scariest Movie Moments in 2004.It was also ranked second on AFI's list for thrillers, 100 Years... 100 Thrills. It holds a rare 100% "Fresh" rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) ranks #1 on Total Film's list of the greatest horror films.
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991) was chosen as the best suspense/thriller for Best in Film: The Greatest Movies of Our Time.
After doing some further research, I have found that Horror Movies can be divided in to a number of different categories. I want to create a horror movie trailer that scares me and therefore will scare other people too.
Slasher horror- Scream
Stalker horror (often overlaps with Slasher horror) - Prom Night
Psychological horror/Suspense- Silence of The Lambs
Paranormal horror - Paranormal Activity
Torture horror- Saw
Science Fiction- Prometheus
Aliens (part of the larger Sci-Fi category)- Aliens
Monster movies (Cryptid/Creature horror)- The Thing
Vampire horror-Dracula
Below are some Horror Movies I have watched and their trailers and reviews of them. I feel this is helpful in my coursework because it will be easy to see how they are deconstructed and therefore will show me how to reconstruct them.
What’s it all about?Directed by Mark Tonderai, House at the End of the Street stars Jennifer Lawrence as Elissa, a young girl who moves to a new town with her newly divorced mother, Sarah (Elisabeth Shue). After moving in, the pair soon discover that their dream home sits next door to where Carrie Ann (Eva Link), a troubled young girl, killed her parents four years ago. With gossiping neighbours speculating over the whereabouts of Carrie Ann and the nature of Ryan (Max Thieriot), the family’s sole surviving son, things soon turn chilling and tension mounts when Ryan suspiciously befriends Elissa.
The Good
Jennifer Lawrence lends a star performance to her girl-next-door role in this genuinely thrilling and spine-tingling horror, confirming her role as Hollywood’s ultimate rising star and breathing life and charisma into each of her scenes. Elisabeth Shue as the troubled mother trying her best to atone for her past mistakes is also notably strong, and together with Lawrence the pair share compelling chemistry as mother and daughter.
In terms of plot, House at the End of the Street tries exceptionally hard at producing an original, twist-packed horror and its efforts are rewarded with some effective twists that sometimes steer the film into unforeseen territory. Finally, the rotating and lurking camerawork does well at lending suspense and anxiety to certain scenes and the script and score are perfectly adequate.
The Bad
Despite some heart-pumping scares, House at the End of the Street struggles to achieve true originality by its failure to avoid some frustrating horror clichés (sending its leading girl into the woods alone, when it’s heavily rumoured to be haunted, for example). Lastly, the film’s final build up is rivetingly terrifying, but its conclusive climax is a thorough and rushed disappointment, spoiling its hard-won former efforts and failing to answer some lingering questions about the neighbourhood’s perception of Carrie Ann’s whereabouts.
There is not much more in Jonathan Demme's The Silence Of the Lambs than meets the eye. But that is to praise the film rather than belittle it, since what meets the eye is an exceptionally good film, perhaps this fine director's best, in which the horror genre is elevated into the kind of cinema that can at least be argued about as a treatise for its unsettling times.
Thomas Harris' novel could also be talked about on that level. But Demme and his screenwriter, Ted Tally, take a view of the book that doesn't preclude some grisly humour, ending the whole thing on a black joke and constructing it around the premise that the relief of laughter is often as essential as the creation of tension and fear. In other words, you can take The Silence Of The Lambs as you like. There is little pretension in it, and a lot of mind-boggling entertainment. What has been heaped upon it by way of intellectual argument is not, one feels, its chief concern. Most film-goers have fixed, quite rightly, upon the extraordinary performance of Anthony Hopkins as Dr Hannibal Lecter, the profoundly mad yet seemingly sane psychiatrist to whom Jodie Foster's ingenue FBI agent is sent in order to prise clues about another serial murderer who skins rather than eats his victims. She is sent by Scott Glenn's senior agency official precisely because she is vulnerable, in order that Lecter can think that he will, metaphorically at least, eat her for breakfast. But, though forced to confront her own childhood fears and to play along with the monster's charm and intelligence as well, she hangs on like a terrier until he imparts a vital clue. Hopkins' steely-eyed psychopath, who wears even his prison uniform as if it were a suit that binds him, is both Dracula and the most civilised of men - a giant among the curiously weasel-faced non-entities who guard him. This is a performance it is impossible not to watch, carefully graded to push the audience this way and that between admiration, fear and loathing. But performance it is for all that, and you can almost sense the actor relishing it. When Lecter disappears from the film, after a daring (and none too believable) escape, something substantial goes with it, and even Foster's gutsy, obstinately credible acting and Demme's clever orchestration of the discovery of the skin tailor can't find a substitute. In a real sense, he is the film. Otherwise, what we have is a completely different kind of adaptation to Michael Mann's possibly exploitative but certainly underrated Manhunter, also based on Thomas Harris, but occupying totally contrasting territory. It is jokey, thrilling and almost obsessively detailed as the screw turns and the puzzle of the second serial killer is slowly unravelled. It is not the film's fault that so many commentators have filleted it for portentous meaning in the attempt to elevate it beyond its proper place. True, its central idea that an innocent, and an innocent woman at that, can be sent out to trap the masculine reincarnation of evil is a fetching concept. And few could fail to notice that it is a psychiatrist rather than a diabolical priest who is the personification of evil in the film. It is also true that, just by being there, the movie has something to say about our curiously decaying sense of ideals and the violence that underlies that decay. But its importance lies much more in Demme's persistent sense of almost Gothic and occasionally Grand Guignol absurdity, and his eye-catching brilliance as a film-maker, than in its themes and sub-texts. When we get films as well done as this, with a central performance as spectacular as that of Hopkins, the cinema can be said to be far from done with yet. The Silence Of The Lambs has an edge to it that's quite exceptional, but its central core is more memorable not for what it says but for how it says it. And here Demme's almost spiteful humour is at least as important as Harris' balefully brilliant seriousness.
Plot
A teenage girl is slashed to pieces after receiving a phoncall in which her killer taunts her with references to other slasher movies. Her peers have a party in which they discuss survival tactics a la horror convention, and get picked off one by one…
A teenage girl is slashed to pieces after receiving a phoncall in which her killer taunts her with references to other slasher movies. Her peers have a party in which they discuss survival tactics a la horror convention, and get picked off one by one…
Review
Now this might all sound a tad familiar: a teenage girl home alone; a telephone call that moves from sexy banter to psychotically violent threat; a Steadicam that never seems to stop peering edgily around corners; and a disembowelled boyfriend oozing offal onto the patio.
For a generation who grew up with Michael Myers and who would list Camp Crystal Lake as a favoured holiday spot there would seem to be no surprises in the crimson tidal-wave of torn nubile flesh that an opening sequence like that promises. But what distinguishes Scream from the rest of the slew of teen-slashers that still haunt the lower reaches of Blockbuster's shelving is that it's bloody. Bloody funny, that is.
The plot is pure horror hokum. A quiet town with a Mainstreet, USA feel is battered by a series of brutal murders, mostly of teenagers, which seem to be linked to some unsolved murderous malarkey a decade or more ago. The local adolescent population respond by having a party and are knocked off one by one.
But what director Craven, creator of possibly the most distinguished kiddie mangler of shock-flick history, Freddy Krueger, does with the twitching corpse of the genre is to turn it into a kind of chaotic post-modern pyjama party, with the imperilled teens constantly remarking on the similarities of what's going on to every slasher ever made - "it's like we're in one of those Wes Carpenter movies" one remarks - and even outlining the rules of such movies while slavishly following them.
In one inspired sequence a gaggle of partygoers watches a video of Halloween while one of them delivers a survival speech: "You can never, ever, have sex," he says. "Sex equals death." (Upstairs a couple of latter-day bobbysoxers are performing the opening steps of the dance of first love) "And no one should ever say, 'I'll be right back'." (Someone goes out to get more beer uttering said phrase.)
In less talented hands this could have been a lumpen disaster. The slasher movie has attracted the attention of humorists before. April Fools Day, Saturday The 14th and one with Kenny Everett in it that no one can remember are among the failed spoofs of what would appear to be an eminently piss-takeable genre.
Craven succeeds not only because of an intimate knowledge of the type of movie he created - along with the other two Cs: Carpenter and Cunningham - but because of a capacity to leap with balletic deftness from exuberant in-jokery (Ulrich as monikered Billy Loomis and watch for who plays the school principal) to ball- retracting moments of terror which are all the more unnerving for the guffaws that have preceded them.
Assisted by a young and pretty cast - Ulrich and Barrymore are standouts while Hackers' Matthew Lillard puts in a fine turn as the grinning Stu - and a pacy, intelligent script by newcomer Kevin Williamson which only flounders a little when he tries the same gag just once too often, Craven has delivered a ferocious workout that'll leave you breathless. And, a word to the wise; stay seated until the ride has come to a complete standstill...
Now this might all sound a tad familiar: a teenage girl home alone; a telephone call that moves from sexy banter to psychotically violent threat; a Steadicam that never seems to stop peering edgily around corners; and a disembowelled boyfriend oozing offal onto the patio.
For a generation who grew up with Michael Myers and who would list Camp Crystal Lake as a favoured holiday spot there would seem to be no surprises in the crimson tidal-wave of torn nubile flesh that an opening sequence like that promises. But what distinguishes Scream from the rest of the slew of teen-slashers that still haunt the lower reaches of Blockbuster's shelving is that it's bloody. Bloody funny, that is.
The plot is pure horror hokum. A quiet town with a Mainstreet, USA feel is battered by a series of brutal murders, mostly of teenagers, which seem to be linked to some unsolved murderous malarkey a decade or more ago. The local adolescent population respond by having a party and are knocked off one by one.
But what director Craven, creator of possibly the most distinguished kiddie mangler of shock-flick history, Freddy Krueger, does with the twitching corpse of the genre is to turn it into a kind of chaotic post-modern pyjama party, with the imperilled teens constantly remarking on the similarities of what's going on to every slasher ever made - "it's like we're in one of those Wes Carpenter movies" one remarks - and even outlining the rules of such movies while slavishly following them.
In one inspired sequence a gaggle of partygoers watches a video of Halloween while one of them delivers a survival speech: "You can never, ever, have sex," he says. "Sex equals death." (Upstairs a couple of latter-day bobbysoxers are performing the opening steps of the dance of first love) "And no one should ever say, 'I'll be right back'." (Someone goes out to get more beer uttering said phrase.)
In less talented hands this could have been a lumpen disaster. The slasher movie has attracted the attention of humorists before. April Fools Day, Saturday The 14th and one with Kenny Everett in it that no one can remember are among the failed spoofs of what would appear to be an eminently piss-takeable genre.
Craven succeeds not only because of an intimate knowledge of the type of movie he created - along with the other two Cs: Carpenter and Cunningham - but because of a capacity to leap with balletic deftness from exuberant in-jokery (Ulrich as monikered Billy Loomis and watch for who plays the school principal) to ball- retracting moments of terror which are all the more unnerving for the guffaws that have preceded them.
Assisted by a young and pretty cast - Ulrich and Barrymore are standouts while Hackers' Matthew Lillard puts in a fine turn as the grinning Stu - and a pacy, intelligent script by newcomer Kevin Williamson which only flounders a little when he tries the same gag just once too often, Craven has delivered a ferocious workout that'll leave you breathless. And, a word to the wise; stay seated until the ride has come to a complete standstill...
The acting was pretty weak. I despised the opening scene. If you can’t at least come a little closer to the basis of this whole stupid remake then do it another way. Not that the series is known for it’s great writing and acting, but the way this was diced up would’ve actually made the Jason I grew up with proud. Padalecki and Panabaker weren’t bad and I did like seeing the familiar face of Travis Davis, but that really wasn’t enough.
So onto what the series is known for, the kills. They didn’t skimp on them, but some of them lacked the creativity that I always liked in the movies. I’m not saying they were all just small cuts and beheadings, but they just seemed to miss this obvious way to keep me interested. I did enjoy a sleeping bag scene, but not as well as THE sleeping bag scene. Plenty of blood and impalements, but nothing too out of the box.
n the end it is really hard for me to like this movie. I mean it was hard for me to work up the nerve to just put aside my biases and sit through the movie and try to enjoy it, but when I don’t care about Jason in a Friday the 13th movie, something is seriously wrong. This Jason was not the Jason I grew up with and this was far from the Crystal Lake I dreamed of one day finding. There were moments were it seemed like I was getting cliff notes of the originals, a red barn here, a guy telling the Jason legend there, even an arrow scene right after finding the hockey mask (another poor excuse for creativity), plenty of examples of how sex only leads to death, but that wasn’t enough for me to want to forgive this movie for ever being made. Is it a good horror movie? It is decent. Is it a good retelling of my favorite series? Not even close.
