1.) In what ways does your media product use/ develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

‘The Chain Mail’ both uses and develops conventions of horror films. At first we decided that we wanted to challenge the modern conventions of gore and stick to the suspense and supernatural elements like in Halloween II. We therefore brainstormed and created the clown character and considered him being a supernatural figure rather than a conventional serial killer. However after looking at the footage that we first filmed we decided that our film fitted the thriller genre more than the horror genre, which is not what we wanted. Our film was lacking the sense of gore that modern audiences associate with horror films.
The conventions of both films that we looked at, Halloween II and Saw VI are different in the opening sequences, with Halloween II creating suspense and a supernatural feel and Saw being a modern horror film with lots of gore.

We decided to use red paint as blood, creating gore within our film. This succeeded us in making the film a more modern horror film. Using this modern convention helped us to create a sense of horror rather than a thriller. We then developed them in post-production editing, mixing the two different conventions from the two films to create a new horror.

Our film uses the conventions of; blood, death, killing and victims as that are what the audience wishes to see. From our questionnaires we decided to include these conventions as that is what the target audience described as their ideal horror film would include.