Audience Research (Titles)

We picked out some of our favourite looking titles and decided to ask our fellow peers which one would look the best on our horror opening. It is clear that the title "Out of the Darkness" was the most popular. We had a range of titles and did a lot of research to see which of them would suit our film best. We then asked around the classroom and asked our peers if they were able to choose their favorite. The good thing about asking our class was because their age was one of our target audiences, which meant that if our target audience was choosing the age then it would appeal more to their age group. 

Planning Costumes

 We struggled thinking for the costumes that we might be able to use for our main person. We didn't the audience to actually see his face throughout the whole opening. We were thinking about dark clothing, for example, dark jeans and a dark hoodie. At first this sounds a bit to simplistic for the film that we are wanting to make, but it might just work. If we give him a simple costume, then the audience will have less of a chance of guessing what relevance he is to the film or who/what he could be in it. We also wanted something to come out from the darkness near to the end of the film, so we needed some sort of scary mask or something that would cover most of this mans face. We thought about using a gas mask, or maybe a cricket helmet. But for this character we wanted to show the top half of his face so we could show the audience his pearcing eyes. So we thought of some of the gas masks that only cover your mouth and nose.

Audience Research (Horror Themes)

I went around my class and asked my peers what horror theme me and my partner should go with. Me and my partner picked the top five that we thought could be the best for our ideas. These were super natural, religion, madness and mystery. It came out that mystery was the most popular choice of theme to go with in our horror opening sequence. Me and my partner originally thought that this was going to be the most popular because the amount of suspense that it builds for the audience, and the fact that they have to try and figure out whats going on along the way.

Story Board

Title Planning

For title ideas i went onto the website "imdb.com" to look for the top rated horror films of all time. I went to see what thy had in common and it appears that Some of them use just single words for their films. For example, Psycho, Alien, Jaws. And a lot of the others titles start with the word "The". For example, The Thing, The Exorcist, The Others, The Shining. In our film in was thinking of something a bit different in our film. We had ideas of a few shots where something would appear out of the darkness and come into light to shock or frighten the audience. We were thinking that we could interpret these actions into the title.

Title Suggestions: 
Out of light
Into the Dark
Darkness
Revealed
Into the Dark
Out of Darkness

(Highlighted one that stand out to me)

Theme's of Horror Films

There are many different ways in which horror films are themed. For example some could be to do with psychological effects or some could be to do with a certain someone being possessed by and evil spirit. There are a lot of different themes that you can base your film around.

One of the main ones is obviously going to be good versus evil. This is the base layer for most film creators and it is normally a running theme for most horror films. A good example for a horror film with the typical good versus evil would be "A Nightmare On Elm Street". This has the typical good versus evil because of the serial killer named Freddy Krueger who finds and kills people in their dreams, resulting in their real death in reality. Although this could be classed as a psychological thriller as well it still maintains that sense of good and evil throughout. 

Another genre of horror film is "religion". This is normally based around the ways of Christianity and the church. A brilliant example of this theme would be a film called "The Exorcist". This film is all based around taking a devil spirit out of an innocent young child's body. The family then try and use an exorcist as a way of trying to get the demon out of her body. The exorcist is a priest who tries disconnecting evil spirits from human bodies. Religious films like this are horrific because of the methods that they use, and because religion goes back thousands of years ago, they use very dated methods and ways in fairly modern times. 

Another theme for a horror/thriller film is insanity. This is where either a normal person that turns insane, or a person that is naturally insane, either way they both have horrific outcomes. An example of a film based around insanity is "The Shining". In this film the father of a family of three goes insane because of evil spirits influencing anger on his personality. This goes from one extreme to another, he starts out as a nice family man and a good husband and father and then suddenly turns in to this psychotic killing machine that just wants to destroy everything. This theme always has a hard hitting effect on the audience because of the scary change that takes place in this persons mind. 

Title's Analysis

Titles are used in many different ways for the opening credits of films. Different fonts can be used and the way they are portrayed onto the clips can vary quite a lot. For example, in the opening credits of the film "The Final Destination" the whole entire clip slows down when the titles appear on the screen, almost like slow motion. They also use quite a block font with no serif but a line above and below the words, this maybe done to tie in with the theme of their film.

Another way in which the titles can be shown on the screen is in the simple form of just words on a screen for some of the credits. For example, in the film "The Dead Zone", it shows the studio name at the beginning of opening on a plain black background with white text. This method seems to be quite boring but it can show some reason behind it. The studio name is a very important part of the credits, and to show it with big letters and contrasting colours of the text and background is a good idea for the first credit because of the viability and simplicity it provides. This effect is only used on this first title and the rest of them are overlaid onto the clips. 

The way in which The Dead Zone reveals its title is quite clever and different to other openings that i have watched. The title is revealed very slowly throughout the whole of the opening credits with different black shapes that appear on the screen. It is not until the very end of the sequence that the title is revealed in a gorgeous looking font tying in beautifully with the theme of the film. I found this a very interesting method of inserting the title into the opening sequence.

Another interesting opening sequence which had decent titles in was from the film "The Teeth of the Night". In this film i found that some of the titles would be overlapped by some of the images on screen. For example, with the image above, the titles are coming out from behind the tree. It shows that the titles that are coming onto the screen are actually interacting with the environment of the images on the opening sequence.

In the film "Intimate Enemies" it fades from an establishing shot of some mountains into a page full of different words and letters. On this page of letters different words are highlighted to show titles and actors for the film. This is a good effect as it ties in with the theme of the film and because of the contrasting colours between text and background. Also it makes the audience read the titles because they are looking for the next words to appear on the screen, this means they are actually paying attention to the words that pop up on the screen.  Whilst these titles are appearing there is also different things going on in the background.

Sound

It is quite easy to forget that the fear factor of almost any horror film would decrease dramatically (if not completely vanish) if the auditory features were removed or altered to something not befitting a horror film. This might sound a huge exaggeration, but it is most definitely not. All you have to do is turn down the volume on your TV during a dramatic scene in a horror film to realise the enormously important role that music and striking sound effects play in creating a complete and truly frightening horror film experience. If this important and amazing composed music is not in some of the key scenes of this film, then the mood will definitely sink to quite a flat atmospheric feeling for the audience. 

Sometimes in different horror films, music isn't really needed for the opening credits to create tension or atmosphere. In some horror film openings, they only use sound effects to set the mood of their film. For example, in the film se7en they don't really use a set peace of music for their opening, it is mainly electro sounds and weird beats in the background. This still ties in with the theme of the film and can create an atmosphere of tension. The clips also move in time with the music and have a jittery effect, almost showing the beat of the sound effects in the clip. 

On the other hand, music isn't always needed to create tension for the film that you are making or watching. In films like "The Woman in Black", music isn't rally used when scary scenes or scenarios occur in the film. Instead all you here is either the actors heavy breathing or the objects he is interacting with. For example if he  is walking on creaky floor boards then the only sound you will be able to here is the footsteps he is taking to get to the destination. In many ways this can create a more dramatic and tense build up to the climax of the scene because of how anxious the silence can make the audience.