We intended 'Infernum' to be a Gothic horror. Our intention was to create something that used typical conventions of the genre so that it is instantly recognisable to fans but also challenging these conventions in order to be unique and attract new fans to the genre. We also want to challenge a trope in all sub genres of horror that mental illness makes people evil and reverse that into the evil is the mental illness.
Here are a few tropes of the Gothic genre:
We first decided on Gothic as a sub genre because we wanted to make a short film that was unique and allowed room for creativity where as a genre such as zombie or paranormal is more restricted on what can be included and the kind of plot they have. Many horrors in these genres have similar or borderline identical plots.
However when we began to plan our film, we discovered that there were many crossovers to psychological horror, rather than physically scaring the audience through gore or jump scares, the fear we aimed to create was internal. Mentally scaring the audience by causing suspense and dread.
Our first way of emulating a Gothic film was through costume.
This image is two screenshots from the film. This shows the costume of our main character, we looked at Gothic films such as the woman in black and noted its success we then decided on a Victorian era costume, this was done by purchasing a long black skirt and a black shirt with frills on the front. Our film is ambiguous therefore this allowed us some room with the costume meaning it does not necessarily need to be historically accurate. In terms of costume, we were using typical conventions but mise en scene on the whole is a combination of typical conventions and a development of existing ones. For example, the child's toy is not typical of a Victorian toy but would be recognisable to a modern audience.
A typical theme in Gothic is the fight between dark and light how the character transitions morally, from one to the other. These shots visually hint at the characters potential transition from darkness to light, this also ties in with the psychological aspect of our film. Our film tries to show 'Light at the end of tunnel'
The transition from the dark and crowded trees to the light and airy grass suggests the transition from being low as possible in this case suicidal to confronting and accepting your problems
We wanted our film to be unique, but even with some unique aspects its impossible to not conform with some parts of a genre. In this case we looked at our demographic. Horror fans know what they like, it would be too difficult to advertise something as Gothic if it did not have any of the features of a Gothic horror, it would turn fans of the genre away therefore, we have taken inspiration from films such as The Woman in Black and see in it what we think made it Gothic and equally successful. As well as this, I found out that many horror films reflect societal issues at the time of release. For example, found footage films deriving from fear of the rising 'big brother' age. With Infernum, we chose to highlight mental health but in a way that wouldn't stigmatise the individual. Gothic horror is typically based on romance or the paranormal and this is where we challenged the conventions on the Gothic aspect. But it fits in with the psychological genre.
When we were in the editing stage we deliberately made the film darker, this is because early Gothic horror would have been in black and white, therefore we are still keeping some traditional aspects but giving it a modern twist. The fear in our film is not physical and is made through suspense building inspired by Hitchcock's Psycho. Personally i prefer this to frequent jump scares. The image above is a close up of the main character, therefore we see her reaction before we see what is happening creating suspense in the audience and her expression suggests she is fearful evoking that feeling in the audience if the character is as relatable as we intended her to be.
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