Horror Part 2
Horror. Arguably the most challenging project I’ve ever done, and not entirely because I took on a big role. Being someone who has never been interested in the genre, I was soon able to realize how it is so simple yet surprisingly complex as I began studying it. We first started by asking ourselves what we were scared of, which led us to make sense of the driving question given horror is a direct representation of our fears as a society.
Why is horror an effective way to reflect and comment on our society?
We took a field school to Seattle, most notably visiting the Museum of Pop Culture’s horror exhibit. Upon visiting the exhibit, I was soon able to realize how many of these killers, monsters or boogey men that have been used to scare us all these years have such human-like features, yet something is still not right…they just can’t be human. This is because, typically, they are what tap into and physically represent our fears as a society, which also allows the audience to associate them with the abstract concept of evil and fear them even more. Thus, allowing the film to more effectively share an important form of social commentary.
Watching Halloween (1978) prior to beginning our production was quite effective in representing how good a film can turn out no matter how simple the story, as well as introducing us to classical aspects of movies from the genre such as the “final girl” trope. This method was also used in another popular horror saga, Friday The 13th with their killer – the all-mighty Jason Vorhees. In my previous post, I explained the kind of power that these select antagonists have held over their franchises which have led them to star in a dozen films. In our slasher movie, we adapted the tactic of de-humanizing our killer from both the movies and the horror exhibit in Seattle by not ever revealing her face and keeping her primarily mute. Drawing from outside media as inspiration has certainly improved the quality of our movie. I hope to continue doing so through extra research on the topics that we would be studying in future projects to bring in a wider range of ideas and ultimately come to a greater final product.
Now we had already made a movie before, but there were a couple new challenges that arose: we knew how to make a movie, but not exactly how to make it scary and didn’t have a story to work off of like we did in Macbeth. We also had previous experience on analyzing how certain genres acted as social commentary, as our last project had been on dystopias.
As I always look back on projects we’ve done, there’s always little bits and pieces that bug me because I wish I could’ve changed them or done them differently. I could go on and on about the things that went wrong but it would just be pointless, so I decided to talk about the things that were in my control. Being given the role of Producer has permitted me to learn and take back a lot from this project. I was quite proud of all the effort I put into organization during production and post-production, but I believe there were a few things that I could’ve done that would’ve set us up for more success. First of all, improving the communication by conducting rundowns at the beginning of everyday, especially throughout our filming days. Second, training a select few individuals to know a detailed version of our director’s vision to be able to conduct small shots without her, which would have kept us more on track. Third, doing a few more class read-throughs of the script to assure everyone would know the story fairly well and potentially take more initiative to figure out what to do. I know that I’ll certainly be able to take back several leadership lessons such as being more assertive, delegating tasks and roles rather than leaving them up to one person as well as communication, as there can never be too much of that.
Fear is a part of our basic biological makeup as it ignites primary survival instincts such as fight or flight. This genre is an effective way of presenting social commentary and topics, even perhaps taboo, to reach large audiences by igniting such fear. Being put into the perspective of a movie creator has allowed me to truly realize the appeal and point of the genre. Horror is a way for viewers to escape their personal fears and instead experience them on a screen. We based our film’s story on the idea of social media, which is just another form in which us humans use to escape our own reality.