The Knife (improved)

The weapon of choice for my antagonist is going to be a knife, as is with most slasher films. This is to get a shock from the audience with the slow death and the amount of blood a stabbing wound create. I have seen prop knives that use pumps to transfer fake blood to the blade so it looks like blood is being drawn from the victim. I have found tutorials as well as websites that sell these props.

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Create-A-Realistic-Bleeding-Knife-Effect/

I would prefer to buy them, but they may cost too much, so I fear I may have to make my own.

Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th

The killer will wield a large knife, almost the size of a machete. This is because it has strong links to popular slasher films (Friday the 13th etc.) and is commonly associated with brutal murder. As the killer has remained feral for 2+ decades, a modern kitchen knife would not be accessible to him. although it has been used in slasher films (such as Halloween and Psycho). It is possible that the killer could wield an old rusted kitchen knife, which would add to his feral background, but it depends if I can source the machete.

Mike Myers of Halloween

A pocket knife isn't shocking or large enough and is associated with petty crime, nor would it be suitable for several of the death scenes. An option is a bowie knife, but these are more military thriller (such as the Rambo series) than horror. This may be an option and it is large enough, but I feel that a machete style blade is more terrifying and is more commonly established in similar texts. A meat cleaver is as terrifying, but does not stab, instead it chops, so would not be suitable. The meat cleaver is only featured in one notable horror film I am aware of, which is the meatcleaver massacre, a bad example of slasher                                                                                      films and by no means a classic.

Identifying Genre: Film

My brief is to create a short film, and I have chosen horror as I enjoy the genre. To create a successful horror film, I believe that I have to provoke fear in the audience, either by jump scares, terrifying concepts or shocking imagery. At the heart of the genre, the sole purpose is to scare the audience. Other conventions include:

• Isolated setting such as a wood or small urban town.
• Amplified diegetic sounds (e.g. footsteps) along with unsettling non diegetic sounds (e.g. protagonist's heartbeat).
• Editing not in bias of the antagonist. The horror from these films is usually achieved from the unknown, and we therefore don't see much of the antagonist, but when we do, it is sudden and gruesome or we see a shadow move in the background which builds suspense. There are examples of films that break conventions, for example, most zombie films have zombies in the main focus.

Within the genre however, there are many sub genres, all that have there own conventions. As my film will incorporate conventions from found footage films and slashers, I will focus on those


Slasher film often revolve around a person who has either been succumb to trauma or been abused as a child and as a result is insane. A typical storyline of a slasher is a person returns to their hometown and kill those that he thinks deserve it, this is usually a group of teenagers, as they would deem them immoral. The killer succeeds in most murders but may fail and either be taken into custody or killed. An example of this is the franchise 'Halloween' in which a killer institutionalised since childhood escapes from his psychiatric hospital and stalks his sister. His psychiatrist expects his movements and tries to follow him. He kills teenagers as they commit 'immoral' acts and eventually attempts to kill his sister, when he is repeatedly shot and supposedly killed.

The Style of Film

My film's plot revolves around the group creating a documentary, so the found footage format was always a certainty. I did originally plan to have some conventional film shots within the piece, but the more I thought about it, the more I doubted the idea. First of all, I don't have the equipment to film scenes of a quality so much better than the found footage shots that they would be distinguishable from each other, which could lead to confusing the audience. Also, the point of a found footage film is to strip it of it's cinematic aesthetic and a lot of the horror is the reality, which my idea of adding conventional scenes would nullify.

The slasher genre is usually filmed conventionally as the deaths are the integral part of the film, and they need to be filmed. However, there are found footage films that also have extreme violence on camera, especially the first ones, Cannibal corpse and Man Bites Dog. They both depict extreme violence and death on camera to suggest the sub-genre also has the convention of violence on screen.