Alyssa's Blogosphere

  As I’ve mentioned many times before on this blog, I’m mentally set on having my film opening project be in the horror genre. This is not only due to my love for the genre, but because horror films are notoriously easy to make good on a low budget (which is very important to me, a highschool student with basically no consistent form of income.) Instead of just gushing over the genre in this post like I did in my last directly project-related one, I’m going to lay out more specific tropes of the genre I want to include (or stay far away from.)  The absolute main thing I will NOT be including in my film will be a monster. By monster, I mean; ugly CGI flesh gray monster, which, looking at well-performing horror/thrillers as of recent, is a trope I think is too expensive for too little payoff (think: Stranger Things, A Quiet Place, Spiderweb…) Instead, I want to include a more “natural” monster. Perhaps a person in an animal mask, or using an animal mask to use as a monster creat...

  I’ve been thinking a LOT about different concepts for my film. As I said in my previous post, I’m very attached to the horror/thriller genre, and my mind is pretty much set on making my short film in said genre. This does give me problems, though: the general public’s expectations for a horror film are predictable if you watch it often enough- if you stick close to the mold, your film gets boring FAST, no matter how suspenseful you make it. Predictable jumpscares don’t work. Additionally, the genre itself is so expansive there are so many ways to go about making a horror film- but anything too far away from the mold is easily considered an “experimental” film (which wouldn’t be too much of a problem, if it wasn’t for the fact I need a somewhat stable genre to be properly assessed by graders.) Despite this, though, I enjoy the versatility of the genre- you really don’t need a high budget to creep people out. One of my favorite examples of this comes from the movie “Creep.” The fil...