When choosing fonts for the title of our film we wanted to incorporate the horror aspect. We did this by looking for fonts that where clear with a blockish look to them. For instance the bubble affect used on fonts such as comic sans would not be appropriate for a horror film, as it would confuse the message we were trying to put across.
Delusion- Comic Sans = Too bubbly and childish.
Delusion-English157 BT = Not very clear and too elegant/ flamboyant.
Delusion- Zolano Sans BTN = Looks plain and technology inspired.
Delusion- Bauhaus 93 = Not appropriate for horror as it is bubbly and friendly.
Delusion- Times New Roman = We liked this font but is looked a bit too old fashioned for when our film was set so we had a look at similar styles with a modern twist.
Delusion- Courier New = We felt this was a good match for our film with an old fashioned undertone it looks bold and clear with out being bubbly and childish. We liked the details on the end adding design and depth to the font.
DELUSION- Courier New = Making the font all in capitals makes the title stand out and make a statement with out having to underline or add any details. It ties in with the urgency of a horror film.
For our opening we used American Typewriter, which is very similar to Courier New. As we edited in the titles on iMovie, the program has default Apple fonts and American Typewriter is almost as if it were Apple's version of Courier New.
After creating mood boards, we pooled our ideas together to create a rough outline of what we wanted our opening to be like and some specific features and ideas that we wanted to include.
My mood board largely revolved around the idea of a schizophrenic main character, inspired by the film, The Black Swan. I also liked the idea of games being a tormenting feature for the main character and the audience. From this I thought of playing on the idea of what is reality and what is a game, making the audience question the sanity of the characters involved.
After doing the title sequence analysis of Se7en, I researched into what were some of the directors influences and found out about the photographer, Joel Peter-Whitkin. His photographs were disturbing as they had parts of the body scattered around in the photos.
To gather information for audience expectations we created a survey and sent it out to years 7-13 in the school. Our aim was to see what people expected from the horror genre, and their likes and dislikes of it.
We chose 10 questions to ask and then put it on Survey Monkey:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/MX7F3VC
1. How old are you?
2. Do you like to watch horror films?
3. How often do you watch horror films?
4. What interests you about the horror genre?
5. What type of horror film do you like?
6. What is your favourite horror film?
7. What do you like about this particular film?
8. What age rating do you think a typical horror film would be suited to?
9. What do you expect to be featured in a horror film?
10. What do you dislike about horror films? The results from this survey and feedback from the showing of our opening to other media students are included on a later post titled, 'Test Audience Feedback'.
Hitchcock used cinematic devices such as
suspense, the audience as voyeur, and his well-known "MacGuffin," a
plot device that is essential to the characters on the screen, but is
irrelevant to the audience so is therefore always hazily described.
A central theme of Hitchcock's films was murder
and the psychology behind it.
Psychology of characters
Hitchcock's films often feature characters struggling in
their relationships with their mothers.
For example, In North by Northwest (1959), Roger
Thornhill (Cary Grant's character) is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother
for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him.
In The Birds (1963),
the Rod Taylor character, an innocent man, finds his world under attack by
vicious birds, and struggles to free himself of a clinging mother (Jessica
Tandy).
The killer in Frenzy (1972) has a loathing of women but idolises his
mother.
The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his father, but has an
incredibly close relationship with his mother (played by Marion Lorne).
Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Notorious has a clearly conflictual relationship
with his mother, who is (correctly) suspicious of his new bride Alicia Huberman
(Ingrid Bergman).
Norman Bates has troubles with his mother in Psycho.
Inspiration for suspense and psychological thrillers
In a 1963 interview with Oriana Fallaci, Hitchcock was asked
in spite of looking like a pleasant, innocuous man, he seemed to have fun
making films which involve a lot of suspense and terrifying crime, to which he
responded,
“I'm English. The English use a lot of imagination with their
crimes. I don't get such a kick out of anything as much as out of imagining a
crime. When I'm writing a story and I come to a crime, I think happily: now
wouldn't it be nice to have him die like this? And then, even more happily, I
think: at this point people will start yelling. It must be because I spent
three years studying with the Jesuits. They used to terrify me to death, with
everything, and now I'm getting my own back by terrifying other people.”
Modern day 'Psycho' trailer:
'Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho as embodies "the fear of the
boy next door".
The terror lays in the fact that the killer "could be
the person sitting next to you"
Anthony Perkins's maternally obsessed misfit in Psycho who
most perfectly distilled the modern fear of the monster who looks just like
you.
After half a century of terror, Psycho is still ensuring that
no one feels safe in the shower.'
Wes Craven
Wes Craven, the 'Master of Horror' left behind a legacy of genre-defining films that have shaped and satirised the horror movie:
'Romero directed and co-wrote Night of the Living Dead, which became a cult classic in the horror genre and a defining moment for modern horror cinema.
His ‘Dead’ films were a heavy influence on the Resident Evil video games, and as a result the film, despite the company rejecting Romero’s script for the film and choosing Paul W. S. Anderson’s instead.
Some critics have seen social commentary in much of Romero's work. They view Night of the Living Dead as a film made in reaction to the turbulent 1960s, Dawn of the Deadas a satire on consumerism, Day of the Dead as a study of the conflict between science and the military, and Land of the Dead as an examination of class conflict.
Romero ranked his top ten films of all time for the 2002 Sight & Sound Greatest Films Poll. They are The Brothers Karamazov, Casablanca, Dr. Strangelove, High Noon, King Solomon's Mines, North by Northwest (a film on which a teenaged Romero worked as a gofer), The Quiet Man, Repulsion, Touch of Evil and The Tales of Hoffmann. Romero listed the films in alphabetical order, with special placement given to The Tales of Hoffman, which he cites as "my favourite film of all time; the movie that made me want to make movies." Romero has also cited Carnival of Souls as an influence on his work.
Other inspiration for Romero's filmmaking, as told to Robert K. Elder in an interview for The Film That Changed My Life, was the film The Tales of Hoffmann.
"It was the filmmaking, the fantasy, the fact that it was a fantasy and it had a few frightening, sort of bizarre things in it. It was everything. It was really a movie for me, and it gave me an early appreciation for the power of visual media—the fact that you could experiment with it. He was doing all his tricks in-camera, and they were sort of obvious. That made me feel that, gee, maybe I could figure this medium out. It was transparent, but it worked".'
