Question 2 (George Evans). 3+4 - (Callam Montgomery)

Question 2
When researching our chosen horror sub-genre (zombie), and watching films such as Day of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead, we noticed a great deal of similarities between characterisation and mise-en-scene of zombie horror films
 a female being persued by zombies is a staple in zombie horror films, for example Barbra in Night of the living dead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYR3dorshwA.
In films such as Night of the living dead it is common for females to appear vunerable via high angle shots, and frightened expressions, we have attempted to adapt this into our film 'dawn of the zombie' in which the female protagonist flees from the zombies, whilst the male attempts to fend one of them off, thus reinforcing the stereotype of men having to protect women from danger.

 we have though, attempted to make our female character challenge dominant ideologies by casting an actress with short hair, and having her wear a jacket and trousers, she also swears in the film, in doing this we were attempting to make the film more interesting by refusing to conform to all the conventions of the genre, thus setting the film appart from others.

ulike most zombie films, which generally take place in an urban setting, we shot ours in a woodland setting in order to reinforce the idea that the characters are in a secluded environment, far away from civilisation, and yet are still being perued by the threat, we drew inspiration to do this from the opening of 28 weeks later in which the characters are in a remote house setting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd9PWvrkbO0&feature=related
Another key element we have changed is the speed the zombies persue the humans, in most films (such as day of the dead) the zombies are slow moving and uncoordinated, whereas in our film, the zombies run at the same speed as the humans, we did this with the idea in mind that a fast moving threat would be more frightening than a slow moving threat, as it would be more difficult to outwit or escape, 28 days later and 28 weeks later also do this, and as a result of this the situation seems more hopeless as they effortlessly pick of the characters, the zombies themselves are, unlike those featured in mainstream cinema made up to appear as if they are insane rather than brain-dead, we have done this to make them seem unpredictable.




                                   Day of the dead zombie                          Our zombie

Question 3

User Ratings for Dawn of the Dead (2004)

 

User Ratings for 18 Days later

Looking at our research for other films we believe our film should be aimed at people under 18, both male and female. The film will be mainly watched by males by the number of voters, but females also rate the film highly so must be taken into account. People this age like the gore and chaos of a world full of undead, so we want chaos and gore.

Having a female lead role makes the main character seem more vunerable so is scarier to watch (thus making it more fulfulling as a horror film), also having a group of survivors trying to live in the undead world is a running theme throughout zombie films like Dawn of the Dead has a group inside a mall trying to survive, so we have another person along with our female lead and this is a male, as an interesting part of survivng groups is seeing how different people cope with the situations. Both 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead's 2004 remake have fast zombies that can run and chase humans down, this seems very popular with modern zombie films aimed at younger audiences so we decided to incorparate this into our film and have fast zombies.

Question 4

Our media project mainly represents teenages as the main characters a couple of teenagers. We have shown them in a very stereotypical light in that both characters swear alot which reinforces the stereotype of teenagers being anti-social, this is alot like many typical horror films in which the main character is very young and genereally swears everytime something mildly scary happens. Normally a femal stars in a horror film (Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday 13th, Scream ect.) as this makes them seem more vunerable, however she normally survives and is quite tough, this is also the case with our film as the main female is the survivor of the group, however we did also challenge this aspect as our female has short hair and wears masculine clothing, much in the same way our male has very well groomed hair so appears to be more concious of his looks which is a challenge to the dominant idealogy  of girls only caring about there looks.

In this picture we can see the male has longer hair than the femal and that is has also been straightened and hair product has been added to it, where as the females in short and slightly unkept