How does the concept of Genre relate to your summer trailer?

How does the concept of Genre relate to your summer trailer?

The Genre in which I am going to talk about is Horror which is the genre of what my summer trailer was on. The meaning behind Genre is that it means type; the genre allows the audience to be familiar with the characteristics. I will be talking about the conventions in the genre of Horror and why it is so important for Horror trailers.

Chandler’s theory explains what genre is. Each genre is familiar and has recognisable characteristics for example the themes or settings which the audience recognise. In my horror trailer we had two stock characters which are typical for the genre Horror, the villain and the final girl. Even though my trailer has these stock character they are not developed well enough. The villain/antagonist uses a phallic object which represents male power and dominance over the girl in addition to this it symbolises penetration however in our trailer we didn’t make it clear.

Altman’s theory argues that genre offer’s audiences a set of pleasures. There is Emotional pleasure, Visceral pleasure and Intellectual pleasure. In my horror trailer this is what we didn’t really include.in the trailer there is a bit of emotional pleasure when the protagonist is screaming as she is being attacked by the antagonist; some people may like jump scares so this would intrigue them into watching the film and also it’s an emotional pleasure which is makes the genre horror scary, I still need improvements to explore this even further. In addition to this the lighting for our trailer didn’t suit the genre of horror, one of the conventions of horror is to have low-key lighting. Which represents fear and the unknown.

Steve Neale’s theory is that Genre depends on it’s ability to change or adapt in order for it to survive in other words be relevant, an example of this could be that 30 years ago in Horror films you didn’t have an unknown number calling your mobile phone with a creepy voice saying you were going to die in 24hrs however now because mobile phones are modern and used day to day by more than half of the population, this theory evolves over time. In my film trailer we changed the stock characters; we had two female protagonist’s both being final girls however it wasn’t clearly presented. The concept of this idea helped the trailers idea to be different and not predictable but consequently it wasn’t presented correctly in the trailer because we didn’t shoot the correct scenes we shot scenes that were interesting for the trailer or that added up it looked like our trailer had two different storylines.

Abercrombie’s theory was the dismantling of genre. In this century it is more common to fit two genres into one movie e.g. Horror and Comedy. The boundaries for Horror now are becoming more permeable and it’s new and gets the attention of different target audiences. Which could help the films gain a larger audience which could help with there box office numbers and reviews. In my horror trailer we did not include this theory, our trailer stayed in the sub-genre of psychological. If we had included this theory it would have been post modernism which could get more attention from other target audiences.

Burton’s theory was that he argued that films from a particular genre in this case horror films contain recognisable conventions of key elements. In our horror we did include some of these conventions one of them being stock characters, the protagonist antagonist; the antagonist being dominant and fearful and bad whilst the protagonist is more of a fighting character which the audience tend to root for more this is what the audience is expecting. In addition to this we had the weapon (the stump that had come from a tree). The stock situation in our trailer wasn’t really clear because we had two separate parts of the film which didn’t really correlate.