Audience Theory - Slasher Films

Final Treatment

Treatment for our chosen horror film by jada from Jada Ramsammy

Essay of Representation

For this task I have decided to analyse the trailer for 'Dead Silence' as it was one of the films that influenced my own pitch idea. Right at the beginning of the trailer we see a woman who presumably lives in the house in which she is walking in, she walks past a mirror and looks at herself in it. The radio she has turned on mysteriously begins to act funny and tunes out. The woman in this scene us wearing a nightdress which is short and shows off her body. She only says a few lines in the trailer and also does not have much screen time, from this we can assume that she is just an object for the audience to look at as well as a victim to make the show interesting. The cuts before the woman removes the bed sheets from the object that is covered on the bed, builds suspense for the audience also when she slowly reaches for the covers to pull them off. We see that she gets attacked and she is one of the first to be a victim. This could represent the fact that women are helpless and they are only there to look at. Even when she is being attacked there are flashes and loads of cuts, this could be used to build tension. In the second scene we see two men talking about this ghost that is haunting the man because of the past. The woman is the ghost called 'Mary Shaw'. For this particular woman we can sense that she has control over the men and women in the film as she inflicts fear into them. This leaves the men helpless as well as the women which is not a typical representation of men. This one man by the name 'Jamie' is represented as the protagonist and he is the only person who is not threatened by Mary. We learn that Mary was a ventriloquist and she owns a few puppets, from the way that Mary is dressed we can infer that in her time, people thought women couldn't make it as what they wanted to be. In one of the shots we see group of men searching for a missing boy, this can represent the men are brave to find the little boy. Also the time of day they are looking is when it is very dark at night, which gives us the impression that they have been searching all day meaning that they are truly determined.