My Horror Movie Synopsis Idea

A young boy named Matthew had always had an imaginary friend. At least, that’s what his parents thought, that Katey was imaginary. When Matthew was growing up, any other person who tried to get close to him would end up harmed or worse, dead. His younger sister was amongst the fatalities which put a rift between Matthews parents, eventually leading to a separation. Initially Matthew was living in the house he’d always lived in, with his Mother until his father tried to get custody claiming his wife was unfit for full time parenting after the loss of their daughter. Katey didn’t like this idea. Matthew wasn’t allowed to leave the house. She traps his parents in the house, tormenting them yet unseen to their eyes. Will either of them get out alive, or will Katey succeed in what she thinks will allow her to have Matthew to herself , forever.

Horror Trailers

This trailer is for the 2008 film The Strangers. Overall I do not feel that the trailer is very good but there are some elements of it that I think work well. The part of the trailer that I like the most and feel that would work well in the horror trailer that my group produces is the part with the swing swinging on it's own with the sound the swing is making high in the sound mix after the swing is no longer onscreen. This would work well in our trailer because we are planning to do one that is based on the paranormal ie. Ghosts.

The above trailer is for the 2004 film Hide and Seek. The element of this trailer that I think is really effective is the girl counting towards the end of the trailer and the pace of the trailer increasing as she counts, with fast cuts to different shots. I also like how after each shot there is a fade to black effect used. I feel that this increases tension whilst watching the trailer and the girl counting is creepy itself because she is playing hide and seek and the counting is being used in a creepy way so it is turning something innocent it to something scary.

The above trailer is for the 2012 upcoming film The Cabin in the Woods. Elements of this trailer that I like are the shot of the girls bare feet walking because I feel that this is a creepy shot and we could perhaps work a similar shot into our trailer. I also like the shot where one of the guys is holding a camera to his face and we see a close up of his scared face. This is quite a common shot used in horror movies. Other parts of this trailer that I like are when the 'monster' grabs people from behind of above and we cannot see the monster clearly. The fact that it is hidden makes it much more creepy and we could do something similar in our trailer.

Mood Board

The above mood board features things which I myself find scary in horror movies. Things such as ghosts. paranormal activity, dolls/dummies, clowns and also dark places. These are things that would to me make a horror movie scary. I feel that if we used some of these in our horror trailer they would work well.

Narrative Theory

We applied the theories and ideas of 4 narrative theorists to the 1980 film The Shining.

The first theorist we looked at was Vladimir Propp whose thoery after examining hundreds of folk tales was that all stories somehow followed a structure with 8 character roles, like the villian and hero, and 31 narrative functions fitting into 6 sections of preparation, complication, transference, struggle, return and recognition. Propp's ideas do not fit very well with The Shining. A few of the character roles and narrative functions do fit with the film although they cannot be simply applied and require a lot of push. Many of the character functions could be applied to numberous characters, eg. The Hero could be either Danny or Wendy, or even Halloran to some extent as if it wasn't for him Danny or Wendy wouldn't have made it away. The obvious character for the villian role would be Jack but it could also be the Hotel itself. Danny and Wendy would also fit into the role of the princess (the sought for person) and her father  which doesn't really work if they are meant to be the heros. There also doesn't appear to be a false hero in this film which shows that the film doesn't have every character function. The narrative functions that Propp suggests fit even more loosely to The Shining than the character functions do. The last two sub-headings of the 31 narrative functions, return and recognition, do not seem to fit with this film at all and the film ends at function 19 'The initial misfortune or lack is set right' being the last function that fits with the film chronologically. This would be when Danny and Wendy are able to escape and Jack freezes. One of the narrative functions is 'The villian harms a member of the family.' which in The Shining would be when Danny get hurt by an old woman/apparition in room 237. There are a lot of the 31 functions that do not fit with this film so this makes Propp's theory not work very well and doesn't help a lot with our understanding of the film.

The second theorist we looked at was Tzvetan Torodov who put forward the theory that all stories being with an equilibrium, which is then disrupted by an event and causes a series of events to occur, and the story ends with the problems being solved and the equilibrium returning. This theory does fit with The Shining. The initial equilibrum would be Jack, Danny and Wendy living a normal life. We see Danny and Wendy at home at the start of the film. The disruption to this equilibrum would be when they move to the hotel and Jack evntually goes mad and tries to kill his family and they cannot get away, aswell as the apparitions which appear. The story does not return to the initial equilibrum but at the end of the film the problem of Jack trying to kill Danny and Wendy and them being stuck in the hotel is resolved by them escaping from the hotel and Jack freezing. We could assume that Danny and Wendy would then get back to the initial equilibrium of the film when they get back to there home. At the end of the film we see a picture from the 1920's and Jack is in the picture. This goes away from Torodov's theory as something is left open and closure isn't completely reached. This theory fits more closely with the film The Shining than Vladimir Propp's theory.

The third theorist that we looked at was Bordwell and Thompsons. They defined narrative structures for film as "a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship, occuring in time and space." and even though this isn't a full theory it does provide interesting ideas. They said that a narrative typically begins with one situation and then a series of changes occur according to a pattern of cause and effect. Then at the end a new situation arises and brings the end of the narrative. They also said that there are three distinctions of time within a film: Screen duration, plot duration and story duration. This theory could be applied quite well to The Shining but not perfectly. The screen duration of The Shining is 1 1/2 hours, the plot duration is 6 months and the story duration is around 60 years. Time is a big part of the film. Many things that happened in the past come back and have effects on the present, but not in ways that would be normal. For example, the caretaker who killed his family and himself in the 1970s appears to Jack and tells him to kill his family. The event that sparked this cause and effect sequence would have been the caretaker killing his family and then killing himself. However when the caretaker appears to Jack he seems to be from the 1920s which is strange as he died in the 70s. Time in this film is quite confusing and the apparitions from the past make it more so. Throughout the film we are given title screens saying the day and how much time has past. At the beginning of the film the screens say time periods such as '3 months later' but by the end of the film they say days of the week so that we cannot really keep track of the time passing. Overall I feel that this thoery does fit quite well with The Shining makes us think about the time element of the film and things that have occured in the past having an effect on the present.

The last theorist that we looked at was Claude Levi-Strauss. He looked 

at narrative structure in terms of binary oppositions, which are sets of opposites that reveal the structure of media texts. For example good and evil would be an example of binary opposites. There are a number of binary opposites that could be said to be present in this film. They are past and present, cause and effect, good and evil, natural and supernatural, community and isolation and lastly sanity and insanity. As a whole this theory does work well with helping to understand the media text. It gives insight into what the film is about and allows us to think more about the film. In The Shining the good is Danny and Wendy and the evil is Jack and the hotel. The theme of sanity and insanity would be that jack was sane at the start of the film and he becomes insane, also Danny and Wendy are sane throughout the film. There is the supernatural element of the film because of the apparitions that appear. This could have been a figment of Jack's imagination however Wendy also sees them and Jack somehow gets out of the food storage room so we know there must be some form of supernatural element to the film. We also have Danny who can, in the words of Hallaran, "shine".

Overall the theorys that work the best with The Shining and help us to understand the film the most would be Claude Levi-Strauss' and Bordwell and Thompsons. These two theories provide more insight into the film itself.

Freud and his concept of "The Return of the Repressed"

Sigmund Freud was a neurologist who founded the discipline of pshychoanalysis. One of the theories he is most known for is his theory on repression. Something that he looked at was the return of the repressed. He said people repressed certain rages and desires that you had at infancy and they sometimes would slip out. The desires that were theorized to have been repressed were such things like the desire to kill the father as he meant attention was taken away from the child by the mother and given to the dad or when a second child is brought into a family and the first child feels strong resentment towards them. Whilst studying horror movies this theory could be useful for a couple of reasons.

One reason would be that in horror movies, such as slashers, the reason for the killer to be killing is that these rages and desires were not repressed. For example, in the movie Halloween, Mike Myers killed his sister when he was a child. The doctor in film said that this was because he was evil, however if you take Freud's theory of repression into consideration it could have been because the desires and rages from infancy were not repressed.

The main reason the return of the repressed theory by Freud might be useful in the understanding of horror movies is that when people go to see horrors, it could be argued that this is to let these repressed rages and desires out. Although I feel that this is not the case with most people. Many horror movies are also about something returning from the past. This could very easily be linked to Freud's theory about the return of the repressed as they are both about something returning. The repressed could also be something that is said to be from the past. Reasons for people seeing horrors would be to be scared and to see how much gore and scariness they can take, which is something quite strange as usually being scared would be a bad thing. Freud's theory suggests another reason of why people might go to see horrors however the amount of truth in his theory could be argued with as it doesn't fit with most people. 

This is a trailer for the horror film Friday the 13th (2009). The trailer displays uses of a number of conventions of the horror genre. The opening shots of the trailer are of water and there is a voiceover of a woman saying "Did you know a young boy drowned here? He was my son, and today is his birthday."which tells us that something that happened in the past is a part of what happens in this film. This fits with the convention of past events coming back and events occuring on anniversaries. A lot of horrors are set in isolated places in the middle of nowhere, this film is set in large cabin with more than one floor in the middle of a forest so it definitely fits with this convention of a horror film. A lot of this trailer also takes place at night which is when the most scary parts take place in horrors and usually the majority of a horror film will be at night.


There are also some technical code horror conventions that this trailer gives examples of, such as extreme close-ups on the characters faces when they're getting attacked which show their fear. One part of the trailer, where we see the tents, looks as though it could be subjective camera work and puts us in the eyes of the killer.  This is a very common thing in horror films and is quite strange as it puts us in killers shoes.There could also be another example of this when we see the girl in the water as the camera is quite shaky and we hear heavy breathing (which is another thing commonly used in horror films). There is also use of strange angles, such as a very low one when the girl is dancing. Towards the end of this trailer the cutting between shots becomes very fast and jumpy which builds tension and even though this is just the trailer so the jumps probably aren't in the actual film it does fit with the horror conventions and there probably are moments like it in the actual film.


In this trailer the majority of the people that you see are young males and females which is a very common thing in horror films, and usually some of the people who get killed will be quite sexual. In this trailer there is a blonde female who is gliding on the water topless. She falls off and then we see the "monster" of the film looking at her which could mean that she gets killed, which supports common horror conventions of characters who are immoral and doing other things that would be thought of as bad getting killed. From this trailer you cannot really work out if the film will have a Final Girl and none of the girls in the trailer seem to be androgynous like final girls often are. Another character that we see in this trailer is a police officer. Often in films in the genre of horror police offices are usually useless and are of no help. From the looks of this trailer the police officer gets killed so this film fits with that convention.


Another convention of films in the horror genre is that weapons are usually used and they are usually bladed. In this trailer we see a variety of bladed weapons such as an axe. The end if the trailer is counting up to 13 showing people getting killed by numerous weapons and in different ways. The killer in this film is wearing a mask over his face with is common iconography for horror films. The lighting if mainly low key so it is very dark. We someone in the trailer looking behind a shower curtain which I would perhaps consider to be something that people immediately connect with horror films because this type of scene happens in lots of horror films, such as the Psycho. At the end of the trailer we here the woman who was speaking at the start of the trailer but this time she says "his name is Jason, and today is his birthday." which again fits with the narrative structure of events occurring on an anniversary of something that happened in the past.


Overall I feel that this trailer does include a lot of the horror conventions which I feel makes the trailer quite good. It fits a number of different conventions into a small time of 2 minutes and 31 seconds which leads me to believe that the film itself will only support horror conventions even more.