Ideology

Ideologies are things that you associate with certain genres, for example many people associate Action movies with car chases and gun fights. And Romance with hearts and flowers, and the storyline being on the lines of boy and girls fall in love and dote on each other, something happens but they power through it all in the name of love. Ideology is a very important part of a film trailer as it allows the audience to understand what the actual film is about and what will be expected of it, just by the fonts, transition and pace and sound. If you look at the film Transporter 3 trailer which is a typical action film you can see the difference between action trailers and psychological trailers, in this trailer it is very fast paced and the clips are shown not longer than 3 seconds and the transition is flash, which in a way emphasises the speed of everything, even after watching the trailer you feel tired because of the pace and the amount of things that are seen in it such as Jason Statham in car chases, fist fights, gun fight and a run. Psychological trailers are a lot more slow paced because of the main objective for a psychological horror is to make the audience tense and anticipate to create fear, and this is done through slow scenes in both the trailer and the film as this enable the audience to build up the fear of what is to come. Audiences are used to certain house styles for different genres, if i went against the conventions and were to attack the ideology of psychological horror by for example including a lot of gore as well as tension or use fast pace editing it could confuse and mislead the audience, as they may think it is not the genre that it is supposed to be representing and portrayed, I shall be sticking to the conventions of psychological horror trailers one important factor being the sound both diagetic and non diagetic. Horror films are all about juxtaposition what i mean by this is opposite sounds are used a the same time an example of this is a having a non diagetic sound such as scary thumping music and then a diagetic sound such as a child laughing at the same time, this is juxtaposition as these two sounds are completely different but when put together is quite scar, eerie and creates fear, This is done in the book clockwork Orange where Horrible, scary images are shown whilst beautiful music form the orchestra is being played over it. When making my trailer i will follow the ideologies of my genre as i believe that this is important in a trailer which is representing another publication.

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”

-Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock's quote above is a very good explanation of psychological horror as the whole point of it is to create fear which is done through the anticipation of something that is about to come, and not necessarily through the action itself, as you see in Hitchcock's films he does use some gore but it is never the main focus of the film. Many horror films today are about all visual horror using gruesome images of death which gives the sense of dread. Whereas Hitchcock's films build up that dread slowly which makes it all the more tense, it has been said and is evident in his films that his suspense brings the viewers to the breaking point just before letting the audience see . and enjoy the next chapter in the story, his quote above about the terror being in the anticipation means that is is more subtle but results in assault on your psyche.

Ideology of a psychological horror is to mystify and create tension throughout, psychological films are much more intelligent than other horror films such as slasher films because it is all about the mind and it scares the audience by getting into their head to create fear.

When looking at a trailer you can tell that it is psychological because of the way it is shown and what it shown, for example the build up scenes and reaction shots, basically it is full of clips that are made for tension and not the main scenes.

In my trailer i will be taking in the aspect of ideology so i intend to show build up scenes rather than the actual action, i will also be using a close up shot of the spirit but only once and quite fast this then paints a picture in the viewers mind of what they people in the film are going through and heightens the fear and anticipation. Non-diegetic sound is key in trailers as it sets the scene an mood for the film itself, i will be using a heartbeat as this can represent both the characters heartbeat and the audience. When a heartbeat sound is used the viewers heartbeat naturally meets the same rhythm and so when it gets faster and louder so does the audiences' which gives them adrenaline and out of breath after hearing it because of the intensity of it. The heartbeat sound is essentially a trick used by directors to evoke fear into the audience using a simple sound knowing that there body will respond to it.