Analsis of The Conjuring Opening

How does the title sequence establish genre, character and narrative?

Newspaper articles show that the story is about a haunted house, showing that the film is a horror, more specifically, supernatural horror. Black and white images along with music instills a horror feeling within the audience. Black and white indicate a reference to the past, again showing that the events have already occurred.

Character is established at the very beginning of the opening where the two families, the Perrons and the Warrens, are shown by family photos. In the second frame shown above we can see the Warrens giving a lecture, showing that they are the ghost hunters and that the Perrons own the haunted house. The children of the Perrons are shown many times in the opening but, with different people. A newspaper article also shows that the Warrens got rid of a possessed doll called Annabelle. This links the film to its prequel, Annabelle.

Narrative is established by newspaper articles which, sets the scene to show that ghosts are haunting a house, which is shown by a frame showing the house. The newspaper articles indicate that ghost hunters arrived to tackle the problem. These articles along with pictures are placed in front of the audience by an unknown person, indicating that the events have already happened.

How does the title sequence attract an audience’s interest?

The music itself generates a horror feeling and the newspaper articles begin to set the scene and build up tension, making the audience want to know the entire story. The font used seems to be a commonly used one, possibly, times new roman or verdana. This tricks the audience into letting down their guard as the film actually contains many shocking scenes.

What do you consider to be the target audience of the film and why?
 

The target audience appears from the opening to be for a Group A, B and C1 audience as the opening seems to show an old fashion style of life of the characters, which tends to appeal to the higher class audience more. I would rate the film as a 15, as it contains many shocking scenes which are unsuitable for the younger audience. There are no sexual or violent scenes making it appropriate for under 18s. The actual age rating of the film is 15+.

Who has produced the film and how is that evident in the title sequence?

 

The Conjuring was produced by New Line Cinema, The Safran Company and The Evergreen Media Group. This was evident as it was written in the title sequence following the seventh frame above.

It was individually produced by Tony DeRosa-Grund, Peter Safran and Rob Cowan. This was shown in the second frame at the beginning of the post.

Representation feedback - 21/10/2014

Resulting Action: I will use different formats to present data and analyse representations and Mis-en-Scene in more detail. I will also add extra detail to my other posts, use more pictures, videos and Prezi.

Conventions Of Psychological Horror

Conventions Of Psychological Horror

I used Horror on Screen to provide information on different sub genres.

Our sub-genre for our main task is going to be psychological horror, more specifically - madness and paranoia. This sub-genre tends to be closely related to slasher horror, as often the mad antagonist kills many characters. The difference is that in psychological, the film does not focus on the deaths of characters, but rather on the madness of the antagonist. Psychological horrors create unease in the audience by using common psychological and emotional fears to generate the most tension possible. By playing on peoples' fears, people can relate to the movie more, making them more sympathetic. Madness and paranoia genre films tend to contain battles inside people's minds or attempt to link events in the real world to how they are feeling mentally.




The Black Cat 1934 was one of the earliest psychological horrors.



Psychological horror developed from the early version s that it could create a greater effect on the audience. New techniques such as caring parents or previous tragedies increases the audience sympathy of the character. In The Conjuring, there are many scenes showing the parents playing with their children, making it more horrific when something happens to the characters.

Analysis of Fonts

ANALYSIS OF FONTS



A font is a style of writing. Fonts can be italic, bold or underlined. Common fonts that are used everyday include; times new roman, verdana or arial. In this post, I am using the courier font, this is larger than arial and I thought it would be suitable to use a different font for a post on fonts. Different fonts are used for different applications. In the media and more specifically, the filming industry, different fonts are used to create different effects on the audience depending on what type of text is being shown. For a romance or a family film, a flowery and neat font would be used. In a horror, which is what I will be analysing, the font needs to give a scare factor. The type of font almost gives an inside glance at the structure and style of the movie.

This font, known as Poltergeist Regular has cuts in the letters giving a slasher horror feeling. The dots around the letters could be used to indicate blood, making it ideal for a slasher or psychological genre. From my own perspective the style of the letters gives me a feeling of looking at the past or chase scenes. I believe that this makes the font ideal for an action horror. This could also be useful in a psychological horror as the cuts in the letters could connote missing memory, thereby making it useful for a film such as identity or a film were the plot is about someone who has a split personality or is trying to find out the truth regarding an event, he needs to fill in the gaps/cuts.



This font, known as Tricky Treat Regular has patches and holes in letters gives a feeling of emptiness ideal for the supernatural genre. The writing style also looks as if little time has been spent showing that either the antagonist is very gruesome in the way he kills, or that he must catch his victims quickly, making him unprepared and creating room for error. The letters are of different sizes giving an eerie feeling that would be ideal in a supernatural or psychological genre.




This font, known as Gloss Regular has a dripping look as if blood is dripping off the letters making it suitable for action, as blood is often linked with danger, this font thereby involves the audience from the beginning of the film, or psychological genres. The writing is also somewhat neat, giving a feeling that in the film, something has been carefully planned and that someone is very precise and swift in how he acts. This makes the audience feel that the protagonist is trapped and unlikely to escape thereby challenging the audience intellectually to try and figure out methods of escape for the protagonist. The unnatural style of the letters gives a more psychological rather than action horror feeling making it more ideal for a psychological movie.

Horror Audiences Part 2

Horror Audiences - Part 2


Below is the results of a Questionnaire that I handed out. This questionnaire was designed to explain horror audiences.
For my bar charts I used www.onlinecharttool.com


Q1. What Gender are you?
 A1. 30 males and 30 females.

I chose an equal smaple of males and females to make the questionnaire fairer.

Q2. What age group are you in?
A2.  I selected an equal number from each age group.

Q3. Do you enjoy Horror movies?
A3.

I was surprised to find that more females enjoyed horror movies compared to males as my previous research would have indicated otherwise.

Q4. What is your favourite type of Horror?
A4.

From here onwards I have only included data from people who enjoy horror movies. That would be 18 males and 20 females. Many people had more than one favourite genre, these results were included.

Q5. What was your favourite Horror movie?
A5.

Most of the favourite films were spread out evenly, but I was surprised to find that Nightmare on Elm Street was nobody's favourite.

Q6. Who is your favourite Horror villain?
A6.

Results were again scattered and most girls did not have a favourite villain. It was surprising to find that people's favourite characters were not from their favourite film.

Q7. Where do you enjoy watching horror movies? 
A7. 

These results indicate that girls are perhaps more social or that men enjoy a scare more.

Q8. What do you find to be the scariest weapon?
A8.

The knife and axe were generally found to be the more scary weapons. I expected this as people generelly feel scared about cuts and amputations, which can be linked to these instruments.

Q9. What is your favourite location for horror?
A9.

 The favourite location was by far an abandoned building. This indicates that people are scared of confined and lonely areas.

Q10. Why do you watch horror movies?
A10.

Here we can see that most people watch horror movies for a thrill. This could arguably be classified as  'for entertainment', making it the most popular choice by far.

Q11. How often do you watch horror movies?
A11.

From the chart above, it would be fairly reasonable to state that many people do not watch horror movies often, even if they do enjoy watching them.

Q12. Which gender do you prefer for the villain?
A12.

It is evident from this chart that a male villain is most preferable. This could be down to the fact that it is more realistic as males are generically seen as more violent than females.

Q13. Which gender do you prefer for the hero?
A13.

This shows that males are preferred for the hero. This contradicts my previous research, where females were preferred to be the hero. 

Q14. What would you prefer to happen in a horror?
A14.

This shows that the protagonist dying is the most common preference, but apart from this, different genders appreciate different endings. This preference of ending seems to show that the female gender is more sensitive, hence they don't want everyone to die, but prefer for the antagonist to die or become good.

Q15. Do you want the opening to give away the plot?
A15.

This shows that the opening should not give away the plot, as this is the preference regardless of gender.   

History of horror feedback - 13/10/2014

Resulting Action: Will add extra description onto my post to explain how it will affect my horror opening. I will also do a post on horror audiences and will do a separate post on a questionnaire so that I can investigate horror audiences myself.

Horror Audiences Part 1

 Horror Audiences - Part 1

The current audience for horror is 15 to 25 years as the younger audience want to experiment more, making them more excitable and are not put off by gory scenes. Males are also more of a target than females, since they are naturally enjoy violence and thrills more than females. The audiences differ with different sub-genres, for example, in psychological horrors audiences tend to have a higher social status than the audience of slasher horrors. This is due to the purpose of the genres.

Psychological horrors aim to intellectually challenge the audience and as a result, a higher class watches this genre. This is done by creating cliff-hangers or by leaving the audience to work out who a complicated question in the plot of the film, such as who is the killer? Why is he out for revenge? What is his master plan? Is there a way to escape? On example is seen in Identity where the audience must figure out how the group of people are related to Malcolm Rivers and who is killing everyone. This results in psychological horrors having a group B and C1 audience as these are the people who are most likely to want to be intellectually challenged. I have not included Group A as they do not tend to watch or enjoy horrors.

However, with slasher horror, the information is  well displayed and there is no challenge to work out the plot, which tends to be relatively simple, someone is murdering people really violently because he is a lunatic and can this one person or group of people defeat him or escape from him. Zombie horror is even more simple in this sense as the audience is expecting a film, which, entirely revolves around some guys, who are the last humans n the planet, killing lots of zombies or infected people. An additional theme may be seen, such as in 28 days later, when there are family and relationship issues, none of which is complicated to figure out.

Most people tend to watch horror for a thrill or to prove that they have a stronger backbone than their friends.