Final Project Idea

 

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 creature itself. Because of the main “horror,” I want to set my film somewhere outside. Finding forests are not easy in the state I am in, however, so I need to be creative. Filming at night by the lakeside is NOT a safe task, so either I need to fabricate a forest- or I need to go to a public space, which raises more difficulties. This is all up to change later on, of course. One idea I have that I’m excited about is to play my film opening from the perspective of the monster. I was inspired by an indie game titled “No one lives under the lighthouse,” where all the chase scenes are played by the monster’s perspective. Indie games and films remind me that making a good horror sequence is easy on my low budget, as long as I remain creative in my execution, and choose to utilize the absolute base qualifications for my genre, instead of sticking to the most common conventions and tropes (slasher films always have a final girl, mystery films refuse to show you the monster until way later, monster films almost always over-explain the existence of the monster.)

In the end, though, I may instead choose to embrace some tropes as the film goes on- not all tropes are bad- many are popular because they work! I want to stray away in early production, though, so that when I include a trope, I do not risk relying too heavily on it to make my film enticing to the audience- because for horror, relying on troped does the opposite. The audience will not be impacted if they know exactly what to expect.