Choosing our genre

Choosing our Genre

For our film opening we could have chosen any genre we liked, however, from the outset, my group already knew which genre we wanted to create a film opening for. This was horror. 

The reason for this is because, as a group, we had all watched many horror films together so felt confident in the traditional elements and tricks that are used in them. We therefore thought we would be able to make a successful and believable horror opening, because of our knowledge of the genre. 
We then had to decide which aspect of horror we wanted to look at specifically. We did this by watching existing, popular horror film openings in order to inspire us and give us ideas. We watched the openings of "Halloween", "The Woman in Black", and "Hostel". This allowed us to see three different types of horror film in order to get an insight into the different techniques, mise-en-scene and cinematography used. After watching these openings we finally decided that we wanted to create an opening to a psychological horror film.

Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror fiction, film, and video games (as a narrative) which relies on the characters' fears and emotional instability to build tension.

 This was partly because the genres of slasher horror and the paranormal would be hard to film and still create a sense of realism because of our lack of equipment and special effects available. We as a group are also extremely interested in psychological horror films because it includes a sense of depth to it and completely captures the audience, making them completely involved in the narrative while at the same time making them terrified. Therefore, we wanted to be able to create this emotion in our audience with our film opening.