Evaluation - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

To start of with, the setting in any horror film is crucial, as this plays a large part in why the victim can't escape from the killer. Over time, there have been many different settings which make the victim feel isolated, for example in Shrooms, the setting is some Irish woods, which is an isolated place and also a stereotypical place for a murder in a lot of films. The reason that this particular setting was probably chosen was due to the title, Shrooms, which links to magic mushrooms which then links to the woods. As our film opening is also based in the woods, we looked at why this setting is so relevant to horror films, and the conclusions we came up with was that it is a dark, isolated lonely place, that you don't often visit at night.

Another film setting we looked at because of its isolated setting was Creep, as it is situated on a railway line at night, which is stereotyped as a dangerous place, due to the accidental deaths because of trains. In this film however, they have turned the stereotype of dangerous trains into a good thing, because it would mean civilization, which the main protagonist is looking for, due to being chased by a creature.

Another key trend a lot of films use it to show in some way where their film is meant to be based, so that you can get a clearer idea on how people there might speak. For example, at the start of Bride Of Chucky, you see an American flag over the top of a building, which anchors the audience view that it is either set in America, otherwise it is an American based building. With our film, we used a clear Yorkshire accent and set it in the forest to signify that it is based in England.

For our cast, we chose to go against the common stereotype of having a male killer, instead we had a female killer, although we changed it by having her being stalked by a male victim, which links back to some common stereotypes. The key change we made was that instead of her being killed by the stalker, she actually killed him. A television program which has the same sort of scenario is Buffy The Vampire Slayer, where the girl is the hero, but kills the vampires. We followed this counter-type for ours to shock the audience, as they would expect a blonde female to be killed, and not to be the killer.

In our film we also decided to include a voiceover to describe the narrative, as it can be quite confusing, so we did this to anchor down the preferred reading of the film.

For our production titles, we decided to use the idea that originated from Halloween, which is to make the titles glow red, which can signify danger. Here is an example of a video created to show how ours looks compared to the original Halloween.