Hey, hi, and hello. Welcome back to my blog where not all those who wander are lost (J.R.R Tolkien). In this post I’m going to be reflecting on our most recent project. The driving question for this project was Why is horror an effective way to reflect and comment on our society? In this project our goal was to make our own horror movie that reflected our current society. As we worked on our project we each individually posed our own question in relation to horror. We were tasked with answering the question with the knowledge we gained from this project and any previous horror knowledge we had. You can find that blog at this link. My first thoughts on this project was that I was scared. I personally do not cope well with horror movies or the genre in general. Now onto the post.

As a class we watched a total of 4 movies. Get Out, The Exorcist, Halloween, and Friday the 13th. I only watched 3 of them as I was too scared to watch Friday the 13th.

I most enjoyed Get Out of all the movies we watched. I enjoyed that it made you think not just during the movie but afterwards as well. There are so many little details in the movie that you have to really be paying attention to it. I feel that Get Out was also the movie that really looked to the meaning of our project of reflecting society. However my opinion could be seen as biased as I am growing up in the society in which this movie reflects. I was not alive when The Exorcist and Halloween were released so I cannot say that those movies weren’t a good reflection of society. With saying which of the movies I most enjoyed I feel I need to also comment on which one was not my most favorite. I would say that I enjoyed all of them as it was an interesting experience to watch these movies but personally Halloween was my least favorite. The movie was suspenseful and there were quite a few jump scares. I also did not enjoy the lasting effect this movie had. At the end of this movie many shots are shown as to where Michael Myers could be and this left me constantly looking over my should for a few weeks. This experience is why I tend to not watch scary movies however the one scary movie I had watched previously to this project was Coraline.

During this project we went on two field studies, one to Seattle and the other to Loon Lake. On the Seattle trip we went to the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPop), and Georgetown Morgue Haunted House. The Haunted House was more terrifying than I could have imagined and I didn’t even walk through it. While waiting in the long line with my class there was a clown on stilts (named Georgie) and a zombie (which my class named Tommy) walking up and down the line scaring and interacting with people. The Art Museum was truly interesting. Many art pieces reflected our society as well. At the MoPop they had an exhibit about the genre of horror. there were many different sections in this exhibit from killers to vampires to zombies. There were many different artifacts from many different horror shows and movies. They also had little viewing pods set up with videos of different horror directors being interviewed about different horror movies. My biggest take away from this exhibit was what I read on one of the signs. “Horror movies offer more than just entertainment. They express the primal emotional of the human experience by tapping into the anxieties of contemporary culture and visualizing the unspeakable fears and forbidden desires that lie just beneath the polite face of society”. These two sentences perfectly summed up what horror is and how the genre of horror truly reflects us individually and us as a society.

After the Seattle trip we got started on our pre-production phase. After much talking back and forth and fighting different ideas we settled on a story that reflects Cancel Culture. Our horror movie is about a group of influencers that get an invite to a retreat, but when they get there it’s deep in the woods with no wifi and no cell reception. The influencers start to disappear one by one. The pre-production stage was quite quick as we had roughly 5 days to prep before we left for Loon Lake, our shooting location. Once onsite the filming began.

Filming a horror movie was nothing like I expected especially acting in one. I got the role of Fern, the Vegan Influencer. I am not the best of actors and to act like an annoying influencer was definitely a new experience. My acting was over pretty quickly though due to being the first one to die (oops spoiler alert). I found my death scene quite challenging as I had to scream. I had never screamed previously to shooting my death scene but the scary setting helped. For my death I was on a little pull-ferry in the pitch black. As for my post death scene I had to lie on the pull-ferry drenched in fake blood in the cold rain for half an hour. However when I was not drenched in blood I had the amazing opportunity to have the role of Production Designer. I was really excited for this as it is similar to what I want to do for a career.

Now back to the driving question Why is horror an effective way to reflect and comment on our society? Horror is able to bring to light the negatives in our society that we try to ignore. As a society we try to cover up and ignore the negative with the positives, horror is able to effectively tap into our emotions and fear to expose us to the true horrors in our lives.

In conclusion this has been a great project and I enjoyed it more that I expected. I had assumed last year that we would be doing this project in our final year as my brother had previously done. With not being one who enjoys horror I worried that it would limit my ability to work on this project however I found it did not. I had hoped this year to really use my strength of creativity on every project we do and I thought that with my theatre knowledge I was able to do well with my role as Production Designer. If I could hope for an improvement I would say personally I would really like to take more risks and work a little more outside my comfort zone and try new experiences. I was able to do that a bit with this project being about horror however I want to broaden my opportunities more.

Stay tuned for the next post as it is that magical time of year again. M-POLs.