We didn't use many special effects in our film as we wanted the audience to focus on the tension within the scenes. Special effects aren't very common in horror films apart from things like fake blood and injuries as it isn't needed to increase tension.
We used special effects to make Harriet look injured, which ultimately kills her. We had a friend do this as she had experience in doing horror makeup on people. It was very realistic, which made it really stand out and makes the audience focus specifically on Harriet's character and how it happened. It was effective in showing how she was killed but it also wasn't too over-the-top as this would've pushed the rating of the film over what we wanted and over our target audience.
We used special effects makeup as the primary effect in our film as horror films usually rely on small budgets to appeal to their target audiences. Makeup and costumes tend to be the reason why horror films are successful in appealing to their audiences and the genre. We would use a relatively small budget for our film, and we think that continuing to use makeup like this would be realistic and effective in expressing the genre and events within the film.
In our opening two minutes, we didn't really introduce our characters in much detail as we didn't want to take away from the suspense of the film. The characters we introduced were Harriet, Alex and Sammie's characters, however we introduced them in different ways to add a certain effect on the audience.
We wanted to subvert conventions by introducing Harriet as the main character that the audience should focus on by giving her prevalence throughout the opening two minutes. She is seen as a hard working student in comparison to her friends in the other shots, who are sitting on tables and not taking things seriously. We decided to make her character unconventional by making her intelligent, conservative and hard working where the victim is usually an unintelligent, blonde who is lacking common sense. This type of victim is shown in films like 'Scream', where Drew Barrymore's character is very ditsy and unaware of her surroundings. We decided to kill Harriet's character first as we wanted to change up the horror conventions of the ditsy and naive killed first. For example, in 'Jaws', the first people to be killed are the couple who stray from the rest of their group, and in 'Scream', the first to be killed is the ditsy girl who flirts naively on the phone with the killer, unaware of the danger she is in. We can see that it's the adventurous and unaware characters that get killed first, however by having Harriet's character - a conscientious, hard working, conservative girl - killed first, our film is showing that no one is safe and adds to the tension and intrigue of 'who will be killed next?'.
We introduced Sammie very briefly as the antagonist. It was very clear that she was the antagonist as she was dressed all in black and acted in a very ominous and secretive way. She makes the audience feel uncomfortable as they are unsure of who she is. This is because we wanted to hide her identity so that there was more tension in the scenes. This is quite conventional of horror films as they don't want to give away the villain at the very beginning of the film. This is why we decided to keep her character quite hidden in comparison to Harriet and Alex's characters.
We introduced Alex as the classic best friend who, although likes to joke around and doesn't take anything very seriously, cares about his friends as if they are his family. This is shown through the way he is joking and laughing when you first see him, but continues to ask about where Harriet is. He conforms to the best friend convention by being quite laid back and calm but is also not shown as much as the main character, keeping him at the back of our mind during Harriet's scenes.
