Genre Research and Intertextual Links

As we were making a horror genre production we researched books and films of the horror genre. One book that I looked at was Legacy Of Blood by Jim Harper. From this book i discovered a lot of useful information and common conventions of horror genres and we were able to apply some of them to our production. One common convention is for the main protagonist to be a girl. These protagonists normally have the characteristics of a "final girl" - strong willed, brown haired, not sexually active/ virginal and intelligent. There is normally a binary opposition of these characters "scream queens" the characteristics of "scream queens" are blond hair, stuiped, sexually active and busty, these "scream queens" are often killed off during the film where as the "final girl" normally survives and defeats the killer/antagonist.

Some common conventions of horror genre films include blue tinted lighting which gives of a supernatural chilling feeling to the audience. this effect has been used in almost all the famous horror films e.g. Halloween, Scream and Friday the 13th. Dutch tilt shots which give the audience a hint that something is wrong or out of place. Another very common convention in horror genres is to use a jagged cerif font in red which connotes to the audience that the film has some horror aspects to it.

Our production has intertextual links to films that involve teenage cast and stalking such as A Nightmare on Elm Street this film is about a stalker character who kills teenagers and the heroine is a typical "final girl" who is in the film from the start.