Horror is a huge genre that contains many sub genres that are actually quite distant from one another, so a vital part of our research and planning is choosing what subgenre of horror we want to create a trailer around. One thing me and my group seemed to be instantly drawn to was supernatural horror films, particularly those involving spirits, demons and possession. This may be because we had all recently watched films like the conjuring and paranormal activity that in recent years we had all found particularly terrifying. This could be because unlike slasher horrors that are filled with gore and violence, supernatural horrors tend to have an antagonist that cannot be seen or heard, its beyond rational explanation and in this way feeds on the fear we only possess about the experiences we could not explain.
we had also noticed that in recent years supernatural horror films have been some the most commercially successful films, with the likes of paranormal activity, insidious, the ring, sinister and saw, to name a few. Another thing we had noticed it that films that are that sequels to commercially successful films, for instance, films in the paranormal activity franchise and of the Saw franchise have also been extremely commercially successful because they already have a strong target audience with lots of culture capital in the films franchise.
A recent article on variety.com titled 'Five Examples of Why You Should Stick to the Supernatural When Making a Horror Movie' had also examined the recent commercial success of supernatural horrors compared to the other sub genres of horror. One that had really stood out to me was 'The conjuring' which grosses more than $130 million domestically, compared to 'The purge' (slasher/thriller) which had only grossed $64 million Stateside despite only a months interval between the release date of the two films.
Horror films tend to have a very strong target audience (often referred to as horror film fanatics) who have a lot cultural capital in the genre, and are probably desensitized to the blood and gore of slasher horrors and so the audience is able to consume slasher horror films without the increasing blood and gore having an effect on the viewer. This is a reason why I think supernatural horrors are so effective at scaring and shocking people despite the lack of blood. The themes and ideas of possession and 'the unknown' is something that is really quite creepy and quite hard to execute effectively in film, so when this technique is used well, like in 'paranormal activity' where the demonic entity cannot be seen, its very effective because it also quite unusual and something the audience is unlikely to have experienced or seen before in film.
The narrative follows two nurses, one of whom own the doll, moves into a new apartment and began to notice strange occurrences, the doll would move positions, pieces of parchment paper with messages would appear, blood would drip from the dolls hand, etc.. They soon found out a seven year old girl named Annabelle Higgins had once lived on the same land and latched on to the doll. The girls allowed Annabel to stay with them. After these incidences escalated, the Warrens took over the case, and discovered it wasn’t a ghost, but a demon that clinged to the doll, with the intent to possess the girls, not the doll.
Horror films tend to have a very strong target audience (often referred to as horror film fanatics) who have a lot cultural capital in the genre, and are probably desensitized to the blood and gore of slasher horrors and so the audience is able to consume slasher horror films without the increasing blood and gore having an effect on the viewer. This is a reason why I think supernatural horrors are so effective at scaring and shocking people despite the lack of blood. The themes and ideas of possession and 'the unknown' is something that is really quite creepy and quite hard to execute effectively in film, so when this technique is used well, like in 'paranormal activity' where the demonic entity cannot be seen, its very effective because it also quite unusual and something the audience is unlikely to have experienced or seen before in film.
This is why we have decided to do a sequel to 'The conjuring'. The storyline of the film will mostly be based on the true story of the 'Annabelle doll'. This storyline was part of the opening sequence of the original film, which is why we feel that the audience will already feel like they have significant cultural capital so the film will already have quite a big audience following the success of the Conjuring.
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