The cliches of horror films

There is many cliches in horror films but the most common are often the most effective and/or liked by the audience although some are over-used and some horror fans prefer films without them.

Some of the most popular include;
The false alarm, this often happens in slasher films but does also frequent other movies in different sub genres. The moment when you see the characters back which ques some eerie music followed by a hand slowly making its way to the characters back all for it to be their best buddy, this is in almost all horror movies especially from the slightly older movies but it is effective. A similar scene is included in paranormal activity 3 in the mirror scene when they call out bloody mary 3 times.
Antagonist cannot die, this is true of the Paranormal Activity films, no matter what the protagonists try nothing will work to rid the demon from them or destroy it. The only horror films where the antagonists die are zombie films and creature features, although it generally takes a huge amount of effort to do so.
Adult authoritive figures are useless, in the real world it is adults and authoritive figures like policemen that you rely on to protect you, especially for teenagers (horrors target audience). If the film shows the antagonist easy dispatching characters that are similar to those that protect you, the film is likely to be much more scary to you as it gives you the impression no-one can save you.

These are three of the most common cliches and two of the three we could include into our trailer, although some will be harder than others. Our idea is to have one character in the trailer, so unless we change the character to an adult man it will not be easy to show an authoritive figure being useless. The false alarm could be very effective although it is not what you generally see in trailers, so to overcome this we could miss out the climax or use a similar scene to the one in Paranormal Activity 3. Showing the antagonist as invinsible could take a bit of planning and some trail and error but we could do it.

whatculture.com made a list of over-used horror cliches and looking through it the majority we would not have in our trailer although some may be used. The fact no-one ever belives the protagonist until it's too late is a cliche that although still effective, is un-original and boring. Having only one character we could have it set as though he doesn't believe but that may be difficult to do in a trailer. 'The trip' is another one that features in almost every horror film that features a woman running away, it seems as though it is inevitable that women trip wheneer they run from something, i agree with this being over-used and I would not wat it in our trailer.