JR - Evaluation Question 1

The opening sequences that our group made was based upon the forms and conventions of the stereotypical Japanese psychological horror. Our opening sequence has no ideologically destabilizing forms or conventions. Our product has a female protagonist to which is a convention of our chosen genre. One of the openings which had a female protagonist was the original Grudge film made in Japan. In this opening the introduction to the protagonist was very similar to ours.

The Grudge                                                                       Our Product

The plot that our group created was conforming to the stereotypical forms and convention of a Psychological Horror this being the storyline of the protagonist being possessed by a spirit or demon of sorts, to which they then take a journey to remove and in the end come out defeating the spirit. A classic example that our group research these convention was The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Derrickson,2005) this was where we got our primary ideas for the plot. The forms of this genre is not gore or much action packed fights, but the scary themes to which make the audience think, also these plots are open for interpreting differently and do not need special effects to make them horror-stricken, this makes the film in general personal to the audience and scares the individual.
Our plot is based upon these convention, we based in upon the idea of using Ouija Boards and how the protagonist is possessed by a spirit. In the 1950 the craze of using Ouija Board was at its highest, mainly in teenagers as it was a 'trendy' and rebellious thing to do at parties. From our research we pieced together several key trends in what happened when using one, and recreated these for our plot, and showing what the consequence of playing with the spirit world could lead to.


We used the main convention of having a young female lead to have the most screen time, this was due to females are generally seen to be weaker than men and vulnerable character, therefore me made the killer unknown until the very end, to which it was a male. This is a convention of our chosen genre several examples where this is true to real films; Paranormal Activity ( Peli,2007) and The Ring ( Verbinski,2002)


You're introduced to the characters of our opening from the first opening shot of a group of girls mucking around having a laugh, this enforces the ideology representing girls as being innocent. The main protagonist is not known throughout this opening section as all the girls seemed to be effected by the Ouija Board. This wouldn't have been as effected if we'd used male characters.

Our villain was a male character to which we other showed part of his face to show his identity as the whole plot is to find out who this person was. This is conventional in the horror genre as men are always seen to be the evil character as they are stronger and more likely to scare the audience due to being more convincing for the villain role.



We only used a few props through our opening scene as we had a small budget, so our main props which we used in the first primary shots was the Ouija board which was hand made and the glass. This gave a naturalistic  atmosphere to our opening as they were just everyday materials. Another key prop was the coat which hid the camera in the ending shot, this was effect and one of our best shots.

With our Mise-en-scene we used a house as our set, this is a true to a real film in which we studied as most of them were set in household environment. In the bedroom we placed a few socks and props around the room to show a stereotypical teenage bedroom being messy. The choice in Mise-en-scene we had was either a house or woods, we chose a house as lighting and sound was of a better quality and the shots we could use were a lot better than those of the ones we shot outside.




Our titles in our opening scene do not come into action until the story has set in mainly, they stated the role and names of our group members and a made-up production company. Our title follow the convention of the horror genre as they are black and white and do not stand out to take the important of the action away, they were clearly seen and were not to distracting. We used a technique of sliding screen to show our titles, we had one title different as we saw an opportunity to use a flashing technique which we used to turn the light on and the title flashed on with the light.

The name of a film did not appear until the end as we wanted to create suspense and on edge, the font we used was similar to that of the Ouija board and we called it Gateway as a Ouija board is what's known as the door to the spirit world. We left it until the end as we wanted it to cover over the new reporter voice.