Conventions Used

Our slasher conventions

Crow sounds

Our first convention was the sound of the crows as heard in the opening of The last house on the left we felt this would link in well as the patient escaped the mental asylum as the sound of crows screeching is recognised with horror which is why it links well with our opening. As we wanted the audience to have some anticipation to what was going to happen.

Rock Music

Another convention linked in with sound was the rock music that we used. The music comes from Red Hot Chili Peppers - Cant Stop. Rock music was used in The Return of The Living Dead which is why we used to use this convention. It also links in with the death as the music stops as the 'scream queen' is killed.

Here is the trailer for Return of the living dead you
can hear from the trailer the rock music which is used
during the movie:
http://youtu.be/wylpeAXYcBQ

POV shot

The POV camere shot was another convention we used however this convention has not been used many times in films we have seen apart from Halloween which is where we got our shot form as our killer hides behind the bushes to give the audience a sense of view from the killer

Here is a useful example from Halloween:
http://youtu.be/jCTGvDwdVNo?t=2m42s

False Scare

The convention of a false scare is not just apparent in most slasher films but in almost any horror film as well. The false scare brings up the audiences sense of anticipation to then relieve them to make the real scare of a much more significance to the audience.

From the trailer of the horror film Drag Me To Hell here is an example of the false scare convention:
http://youtu.be/BUZTybLlWKI?t=1m34s

Scream Queen

Male Gaze Theory

The final girl was a new addition to our film opening, the convention of a scream queen is in a lot of slasher movies. We took our convention from Nightmare On Elm Street the scream queen was Heather Langenkamp who played Nancy. To anchor our final girl we used revealing clothes and made it apparent to our audience that she was sexually active.
  With our final girl we also played up to Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory. She believes that audiences have to view characters form the view of a hetrosexual male. Our camera lingers on parts of the female body in context of a males reaction. We used this to appeal to a wider male audience.

Weapon

We took our convention of the weapon from Halloween the iconic kitchen knife, because its nothing out of the un-ordinary it is just a standard kitchen knife, but it becomes a lot more scarier when it is put in to context of killing someone which is the effect we tried to achieve.