Settings - Location, Location, Location (Research)

Settings

Malevolent Phantom

For a horror film you could say settings are rather limited and I would agree to some extent as in order to achieve a scary, haunting, isolated environment there isn't that many choices for location. We went with arguably the most obvious horror location - the woods when it's dark and scary, hopefully we can use this to our advantage as it was a relatively easy location to find and with extensive planning we can still create a professional looking opening.

For a horror opening the conventions are that there aren't any long shots establishing setting as they don't want the audience to become too comfortable in the environment they're in, also gruesome creatures or blood and death and predominantly featured to give the audience an insight into what's to come. Characters aren't really developed as simply from the word go it's about keeping the audience hooked and on the edge of their seat, as I said before a plot is key but in horror as long as someone's being chased or murdered then the audience seem to love it. Therefore going somewhere like London would be a waste as we would want to have low key lighting so would be filming at dusk/night and so wouldn't see he beauty of the city and without long shots of the iconic parts of London it seems a waste to go all that way to shoot when a woods would probably work just as well. This ruled out places such as Trafalgar square, Tower of London, Big Ben, Hyde park etc.

Going to an abandoned church or building could have worked but finding one we could film in and creating a plot to fit with it may have been far more difficult that it needed to be. Isolation is also key in horror settings so London or and city/town would be too populated to create the eerie setting were after and are not conventionally used in horror. 28 days later starts in a shed of some kind with low key lighting, isolated from society (with good reason) whilst the purge starts on the streets at night also with low key lighting and a fair amount of desertion on the streets (again for good reason).

So after some time thinking about different settings we could use it seems we're back where we started with the woodlands, a stereotypical setting for horror: dark, isolated, eerie and perfect for scaring the pants of the audience as the setting does a lot of the work for you. Having said that one of the main problems we will probably face is lighting, too light and it's not scary enough but too dark and there will just be figures moving slightly on a screen but not really visible. Artificial lighting could be used but placing it so it doesn't look fake and could be quite hard, street lamps should help with the roadside shots but in the woods we could become slightly stuck - this is something I'll have to look into before we begin filming.