Evaluation: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The conventions of a psychological horror are that it reflects a character's fear, guilt and beliefs. Also eerie sound effects and relevant music. There is emotional instability to build tension and further the plot.
Of these conventions, we have used character's fear as she is constantly seeing things and hearing things and is constantly paranoid. The fear that she goes through is seen by the audience as they watch how it effects her and they wish that it never happens to them. We also used eerie sound effects of quiet chatter and whispers to represent the voices in her head. The emotional instabilty of her mental illness is portrayed in the film fitting with one of the conventions and we hoped it would build tension but the story of our film makes it hard to build the tension. Psychological horrors such as Saw builds tension a lot and therfors makes our film very different to conventional psychological horrors.
After my audience feedback, we could see that our target audience worked quite well because the ages that we aimed for quite liked the film and understood what the film was about. Using a vulnerable woman in a horror film is a very popular convention as woman mostly play victims in films and stereotypically woman are seen as being more vulnerable than men and more likely to suffer. Horrors that use women as their victims are very popular, e.g. The Shining, The Others, Insidious, The Babadook.
Our film is not a typical cliche horror film with gore and this reflects what Cynthia Freeland said in her representation theory that 'graphic violence and gore are so over the top and exaggerated that they create a 'perverse sublime'. They are so far-fetched that we can enjoy the film on an aesthetic, entertaining level. This explains why a lot of people don’t like horror ‘too real!’. This is because our film does not use violence and gore but more of an aesthetic weird film that is not like a conventional horror that you see all the time.
Our film goes against the primitive style as the primitive style say that:
Techniques include frontal staging or a tableau style, exaggerated gestures, hardly any camera movement and no Point-of-view shots.
Our film goes against this styles as we have a lot of camera movement and also Point-of-view shots which is exactly what the style is not.