30 minutes Essay on Genre

The media product that I will be writing about is the horror teaser trailer that was created by my production group. The genre of this product is horror, by creating this we were able to explore our creativity, and improve our production group. However we were limited due to the fact that we were only able to explore ideas and work within the horror genre. Steve Neale says “pleasure is derived from repetition and differences and there must be a variation in order for the audience to be fulfilled. This is where the sub genres come in. As the audience are meant to expect a horror film to be scary, but due to the different types of sub genres there is variation. My teaser trailer was within the supernatural sub genre of horror.

Films are a reflection of the society that they are based in. Christian Mets says that Genre are processes and they evolve over time. This led to the 4 stages of Genre: Experimental, Classical, Parody and Deconstruction. Meaning that the genre changes so that they can be relatable, and the context also changes. This was shown well in My horror teaser trailer as it showed the mental affect that society and situations have on teenagers, as the girl in my trailer was confronted by demonised version of herself after speaking to a therapist.

Genres in the modern day society are beginning to merge together. Abercrombie says “Genre is dismantling and the boundaries are becoming more permeable. Meaning that the conventions that will be found in a certain genre can be feature in another genre. However my teaser trailer shows the conventions of only one sub genre, which is supernatural.

Editing and Mise-en-Scene are part of what determines that audience reaction, as the editing has to edited in a certain way, in order for the audience to be frightened or scared. The Miss-en-scene is really important to drama as it effects that audience feelings and reactions to the film. Rick Altman tell us that visceral pleasure are defined by how the films stylistic construction has an effect on the audience. In my teaser trailer, the Mise– en- scene and editing helps create the visceral feeling for the audience, for example there was a point where the girls neck cracked, which would have made the Audience feel uncomfortable.

Chandler says Conventional theories of genre tend to be based on the notion that they constitute particular conventions of content" this means that genre is a construct designed by media creators in order for them to categorise their product so they can identify their audience. We used this in our product, as we wanted as we only used certain conventions to identify our audience. Our audience were for people between the ages of 16 – 24.