Screenshot Evaluation 7: Genre and how trailer suggests it

This shot is from the final act of our trailer, showing our 2 main protagonists watching our news broadcast at home before the killer turns up and switches the lights off. We set this shot up so the focal point of both the audience and our characters (the TV) was in the centre of the shot. This makes it more significant when the TV suddenly switches off, signalling the arrival of the antagonist.

This is the shot in our trailer that is most suggestive of the trailers genre by including several conventions. One of these conventions would be the 2 female characters who act as 'damsel in distress,' in the film purely as victims for our villain to hunt. Having female protagonists has become a convention of horror films as it attracts both female audience members and male audience members according to Laura Mulvey's 'Male Gaze' theory. The second convention would be the diegetic sound of a knife being sharpened off-screen. The third convention is the power cut/ all lights being turned off by the antagonist to create fear. The final convention that ends our trailer would be the scream from one of our female characters. From all of these the audience cannot mistake our trailer as being anything other than a horror film.