Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

There are a number of ways in which our media product conforms to real media products. We decided to include certain conventions of horror which we found in our research from other films. We decided to conform to conventions found in our mainstream  research because its clear that all these films are cheesy and repetitive while at the same time referencing other films. We wanted to include the conventions as they would make the product authentic and appeal to genre fans.

The first element we made sure we had in our opening is the “final girl” this convention is popular in many horror films. The main one which I decided to research was Prom Night in this film the final girl is the main character throughout the film, another film would be My Bloody Valentine where Sarah survives the entire film. We decided that not all of characters in our opening would get killed; all would apart from Jessica who will survive until the end of the film. We decided to keep the convention of the final girl in our product so that our product would conform to most media products. As we only had 2 minutes for our opening to a horror film we could not complete the final girl convention however it is clear in our synopsis that we would have a final girl but due to the time limit we wanted to push the convention so our product would fit into the genre better.

Another element we wanted to add in our product the “mad scientist” which is conventional in B-Movies made in the 1950’s however we didn’t want our movie to conform to these style of films as they look cheap, fake and  are poorly made they are also made on a low budget and generally have over exaggerated story lines such as “Aliens from Mars” and the “Attack of the 50ft Woman”  the reason for this is because they are outdated however they were terrifying in the 1950's whereas films today tend to play on real life fears which is why we decided to only use the mad scientist element. We added the man scientist element into our product to create a sense of realism between the teacher and stupid, the hate relationship between the student and teacher is extremely strong and probably over exaggerated just like the B-movies.


The third element we decided to include in our product is the weapon convention this is where the killer uses the same weapon throughout the film for every killing. We wanted to have Dr.Karloff as a creative killer who played with his victims so he would conform to slasher horror films such Halloween and Friday the 13th this would also create suspense. We chose his weapon to be a household item so that the student would believe that they were safe the whole time as it wasn't something abnormal such as a shotgun or chainsaw, this is the main reason we wanted to conform.


The final convention our media product conformed to was 'a safe place to die'  this is where the victims all get killed in the environment's that they believe they are safe whether it be a high school in Prom Night or a mine in My Bloody Valentine it was clear they needed to be in that place to be killed this is also reminiscent of the 'home invasion movie' such as Maniac.