Researching Genre

 Hey, blog! I am super excited to be getting started on my portfolio project! To begin this process I wanted to explore some of the genres my partner and I are interested in pursuing our film opening. 

Today I researched the horror genre. As a big horror movie, I knew I had to at least look into the idea of creating a horror piece. 

Horror films are created to scare the audience and make people jump, some are meant to disgust and these movies fill people with anxiety. 

Some top production companies include Blumhouse Productions, and Dark Castle Entertainment, as well as more broad companies such as Universal. My personal favorite horror production company is A24 which is a very new production company that is creating amazing psychological horrors such as Midsommar and Hereditary, etc. 

I really started considering horror because I remembered my teacher telling us that horror is the cheapest genre of film to produce, which got me thinking that if done well we could make something really cool. I browsed on Reddit and quora under questions asking why horror movies are cheap but also stumbled across this super information website that I'll link below. 

One big cost for films is the location, horror movies don't have this problem because they usually take place in the woods, or an abandoned house, or just a regular house. Furthermore, the dramatic scenes in horror movies do not usually involve much dialogue, which means directors can hire less experienced actors. Another way these movies save money is that nothing is feared like "the unknown." Rather than having to create fancy costumes or high-tech CGI, things can simply be insinuated. The last aspect I want to mention is this comment, 

"Horror films, by nature, are allowed to be gritty, dirty, and raw"

-V Renée 

"Found footage" pieces are very popular and they include low-quality and shaky footage, films such as Megan is Missing which became very popular on TikTok a few years ago, as well as much bigger movies like The Blair Witch Project.

Now, obviously, as a student film, we don't even really have a budget and probably won't spend more than a few dollars, however, I mentioned all of this because all of these factors mean that this genre is students like myself can create very successfully. Our limited resources do not have an effect on this type of film.

All this being said I am still unsure if we want to create a horror film opening as my partner and I feel like we could have a lot more creativity and show a lot more skill with a different genre. So the search continues! And so does the research...

Sources:

https://rmlmedia.wordpress.com/top-10-horror-production-companies-rhys-crane/

https://nofilmschool.com/why-you-should-make-horror-movies (this is the website I mentioned)