Horror films

In a good horror movie we expect to see it set in a scary location (usualy in the middle of nowhere) and loads of silly mistakes that dump the characters in trouble, but their are many more cliches used in horror films, some are obvious whereas some are a little more subtle. I used the opening couple of minutes of  'jeepers creepers' and straight away the most obvious cliche is used, the main characters are in the middle of nowhere, and to make things worse the characters themselves are cliched, they are both defenseless teenagers. People love watching teenagers get into these situations mainly because a large proportion of the horror market is teenagers, it is much more effective for a teenager to watch someone they can relate to getinto these situations than watching an old lady get into the same ones. 'Did i just see that?' moments make the viewer extremely nervous and scared for the character, a good example would be a zombie darting across an aisle in an abandoned super market, they make us want to shout out to the charcater in a pantomime fashion they're behinf you but we just cant and we know that the character is totally oblivious and will proabably die as a result. In the opening of jeepres creepers we see the camper van turn off the road through the cars back window they do not notice however and we as an audience are wondering what they know that we don't. After seeing the caper van turn off we see a truck in the distance speeding toward the car but it takes a while to reach and every second that goes by without a reaction, suspense is building and then finally the protagonists notice the truck. This is a good example of a climax/anti-climax. In alot of horror movies we expect to see lots blood and gore, films like saw show massive amounts if this and this helps us get involved in the film as we are now feeling a bit ill and scared of the people responsible. One of the biggest cliches in horror is the lonely situations, like when your car breaks down in the middle of a spooky woods adn nowhere but a creepy house you could find help, these really make the film scary as all of us have been to a woods we find spooky and the thought of being stuck there at night al alone is a freaky prospect. With our film being similar to paranormal activity and following some of the same conventions we need to make sure that our film is full of jumpy seens that will really freak out the audience. We will also have to ensure that our trailer reassures the audience that our film will be packed with these type of scenes, but we must be careful that we don't ruin it and that we keep the audience guessing.