Iconography: We challenged typical horror iconography such as using typical murder weapons, for example knives, by using our own kind of murder weapons, such as broken drum sticks and guitar leads, which also symbolizes our themes. We thought by challenging these conventions of horror, we would be able to have this as a unique selling point.
Protagonist: In a lot of horror films villains are the protagonists, through the use of enigma codes, the protagonists are often kept hidden in trailers. An example of this is saw. Our trailer also makes our villain look big and blacked out, even though saw itself doesn’t do this, a lot of other horror films do, for example Halloween.
Sound: The non-diagetic use of sound in our trailer, adheres to typical horror trailers, this is used to create a tense atmosphere, which is typical to the horror genre. The soundtrack we chose is used to go with fast pace shots, so that the tempo of the trailer would be fast, which is also a convention of horror trailers, we see this in trailers such as Friday the 13th, Halloween and I spit on your grave.
Setting: We chose to shoot most of our scenes in the void, we thought that the void would be good because it adheres to conventions of trailer because it is shot in a place that is far away from society, which bring up themes such as isolation. This is done because it makes the audience feel as though they’re not in touch with the real world, examples of this are not only from recent films, such as Friday the 13th, but also from older horror films such as Psycho and The Shining.
Stock characters: our trailer challenges burtons theory as we do not have all the usual stock characters that are shown in most horror films, for example, our trailer doesn’t have a jock and popular girl, we chose to challenge the conventions of a horror trailer because these characters are primarily used in American films. Our trailer, however, does adhere to mulveys male gaze, this happens when we see the girl who is about to get killed looking vulnerable and maybe slightly under-cloathed. We chose to do this because our target audience was made up of mostly makes and we thought this would help promote or sell our trailer.
Themes: The main themes are shown through binary opposites, such as success vs failure. These are clearly shown in our trailer with the x-factor like footage and which is also shown through our tagline “if you can’t be famous, be infamous”
