Evaluation of coursework movie: Part 4) Making meaning

Our target audience would be young teens that like to let their mind play tricks on them. The psychological horror genre should relate to ages around 15-18. Most teenagers should like this sort of movie as a young mind will easily scare them as they are naive. I think we attracted our audience by bringing in the dead body straight away. I think this would have drawn the audience in quickly as they would get restless and would want to see something interesting happen quickly. 

With the audience in mind, I responded to the initial brief that nowadays most teenagers are into horror movies

 as they enjoy a good scare. I also thought that we would have to make the the movie originally different to regular horror movies nowadays but using the same sort of ideas as original psychological horror movies.

Our analysis and research into the type of film we selected helped alot. This was because we could see what people wanted out of the horror/psychological genre. The questionnaire especially helped our research as we could see what people personally prefe

rred out of the horror genre. This meant we could follow those guide lines of peoples preferen

ces and like/dislikes of the horror genre. The questionnaire also gave us a long range of ideas as people had put lots of different answers to each other giving a nice contrast to the creative process in pre-production. 

In filming and editing, we ensured that the meaning would be apparent to the audience as we used obvious signifiers, such as the dead body with blood running down her head, and titles in a blood red colour. this signified to the audience that it is going to be quite a bloody movie.

We had creative ideas that we made during planning, rehearsing, filming and edit

ing that were influenced by our sense of the audience and possible layers of interpretation. We had the idea of there being a fork in the path as when we were filming, we came across a fork in

the path in the forest. We decided to use this idea to show that on person is walking to safety and the other is going towards danger. We also had the idea while rehearsing to see who would go which way. We thought that using the left hand side (which can be implied as an unlucky direction to turn) would be the perfect way for the victim to walk, even if it was a subtle idea. It is up

 to the audience to decide if that could be part of the movie and also to see if they pick up on the idea that the unlucky character is turning left.

The audience responded positively when we trailed aspects of our film as they enjoyed the hints of subtle horror that a psychological genre should include.

There is a variety of possible interpretations of our opening sequence that will depend on the cultural situation of the viewer. The main interpretations would be about where/how/when and why the psychopath got around and started murdering people. This is because it is not explained in the two minute opening sequence. This easily draws in the audience as the would want to know everything about this killer and why he does what he does. Another interpretation could be about whether the victims brother will do anything to find this psychopath and bring him down or whether he is connected. Once again it draws the audience as they would want to know what the brother has got anything to do with the rest of the movie.