Evaluation questions - 1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In many ways, our media product is quite typical of the horror genre, and of real horror films. Our product seems to have many typical conventions that are seen in other products out in the market. This was our intention when we were creating our film, we wanted to create a teen horror film that had similar conventions, but to still have an original and unique story.

The product we have created can be compared to quite a few other horror films, such as Scream (which is set in a high school), and a more recent film, The Cabin In The Woods (which is also a horror film aimed at teenage audiences). The plot of our film is more related to the Scream films, because our film is also about a serial killer who is killing school students. The setting and characters therefore are fairly similar to the Scream series.

It is quite typical for a teenage slasher film to be set in locations such as high schools, so we wanted this adapted into our own film so that our audience would obviously feel a relation to the setting, so that they could also relate to the characters in our film. The target audience for our film would be teenagers aged 15+, so we decided to set our film in a high school so the audience could relate with the characters and setting. I think this will enhance the scariness of our film, and this would be good for our horror film. It could even create a sense of paranoia in our audience, due to the realism also incorporated into our film.

The intro of our film is also similar to teen horror films in the past, we were mainly inspired by the intro of Scream, in which a school student is chased by the serial killer. However, in our opening there are many significant differences, because the teacher is also murdered and also because our main antagonist is quite mysterious.

The way our film differs from typical teenage slasher films is that our main villain isn't revealed in our film. The main villain in our film won't be revealed by the audience, so there will be this certain mysterious factor associated with this character, and this emphasises on the audience's fear of the unknown. We believed that the audience would be more scared of a villain that isn't fully revealed to the audience, rather than a serial killer who you can see in the whole camera shot. This character makes our film unique, and changes the views of the audience about serial killers. Our product can now be associated slightly with a psychological horror, because we don't really see the whole villain in camera shot.

Overall, our film tends be quite conventional of the teenage slasher genre, but there are still a few factors that can also challenge the genre. Factors such as our characters and plot will also create twists in our film, making it unique and original.