According to the Nature of Horror by Noël Carroll, an art-horror monster is “the extraordinary character in the ordinary world”, which is exactly what my group and I set out to create. For our RIP Project we created a short horror movie: Harvey’s Final Heartbreak. The main character, Harvey, is a slasher. This idea was taken from the horror genre presentation earlier this quarter about “Slashers”. The slasher in our film follows the general expectations of the horror genre: he is obsessed with the scream before he brutally kills his victims. However, we were able to add a unique twist to the story in order to subvert the audience’s expectations of the stereotypical horror plot.

 

Unlike the Hush episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where you have to scream for help to save your life, silence is the savior in our horror film. The first victim, Iris, is a classmate of Harvey’s, whom he has been infatuated with since the first day they met. When he asked her out and and was denied he was destroyed, thus turning him into a slasher. This takes place in scene one, when she asks him “Who are you?” The fact that she does not recognize him becomes the trigger of Harvey’s transformation because he has been sitting behind her since day one. However, Iris does not scream when our slasher attempts to stab and kill her. This happened after the death of Melissa when Iris meets Harvey in the living room of her apartment. Instead, she appears to be angry more than terrified and asks Harvey, “Why do you choose to do this? Why now? Why me?!?”. Our slasher leaves the room in shock at first, but then goes on a hunt to the people around Iris to have her all to himself. There are three victims in our horror film: Iris’s roommate, boyfriend, and best friend. The ending of our short horror film is that Iris takes her chance and kills Harvey with the knife he used to kill her loved ones.

 

Everyone in my group participated in our movie. I portrayed the character Jessica, Iris’s best friend. In One clip of our video I was washing my hands in the bathroom, I screamed because I saw the slasher. In the next scene, I kept switching the lights on and off to see if someone was there. This usually happens in horror movies as the victim keeps checking until the monster really appears. This idea was also demonstrated in Closet Space, a short horror film we watched in class. The lady kept opening and closing the closet door to check if anyone was hiding in there.

 

Moreover, sound effects play a crucial role in horror movies. It helps the audience to know what they should be feeling at a specific moment. Therefore, we added suspenseful music in the clip I mentioned earlier to emphasize that the monster will appear and attack someone. Furthermore, we featured the “unknown caller” trope in our movie. In most horror films, the monster appears when things starts to get suspicious. This occurred multiple times during our movie. First one occurred when Melissa walked into her room looking for Iris. The second clip was when Iris received a call from the “unknown caller” after Melissa’s death. It should be clear to the audience that they automatically knew that it is from the slasher.

 

My group is able to subvert the audience’s expectation in this film. In most horror films, the scream plays a necessary role. It is also one of the most commonly featured tropes in the filmmaking field. The original trope generally takes place when the victim, usually a woman, sees something frightening. As a result, she screams, happening most often right before her death. In a few instances when she is lucky, she does not die right after she screams, instead runs for her life. Even though the slasher in our film sickly enjoys the scream before butchering his victims, Iris, the girl he is infatuated with, does not scream. Unlike the Hush episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the screams break the stereotype and save the victims, silence is the savior in our horror film. Therefore, we were able to twist the original trope of scream and make it our own.

At the very beginning of the movie, we decided to add narration of the slasher in order to help the audience have a better understanding of the storyline. It shows the inner thoughts of the character and what causes him to change. Personally, I think it is a different twist of the general expectation of the horror genre because there is not much conversation in most of the horror films.

 

My contribution to the creation of the RIP text was the visual effects in our short horror film. Since I was in charge of the costumes and makeup, I decided that our slasher was going to have a specific outfit for when he went to and kill people. In the film, each time he was about to kill someone, he wore an all black outfit that included a mask to completely cover his face. He always held the knife in his hand, ready for the kill. In my opinion, this would make the audience more aware of the plot of the film. They will know when exactly Harvey transfers into the slasher and turns evil because he acts like any other college student when he is in school during the daytime. The fact that he is a slasher is a secret that no one else knows until the end of the movie. I believe this makes our character dark and twisted. Throughout our movie, we focused on Harvey’s infatuation with Iris. His love towards Iris was pure but possessive. In the very first scene, he was doodling a heart in his notebook and wrote “you are mine” right next to it. Therefore, when he killed Iris’s roommate ,Melissa, at her apartment, he wrote “you are mine” on her arm with her blood. Because my group and I had limited budget, I made fake blood from scratch by mixing jello with hot water and vaseline.

 

To create our campus killer, we took advantage of our available resources.We did, however, take advantage of the available resources to film most of our scenes to create a campus killer. We used the ACC apartments, main campus, and the foggy nights in Aldrich Park to make the film based in a college setting. For the equipment, we borrowed a camera and a SD card from Ayala Science Library. We used a combination of the borrowed camera and an iphone to shoot our scenes. The balance between the two different platforms of video recording allowed us to achieve the unsteady and blurry documentary style of filming.

 

Overall, I had an enjoyable experience working with my group members. We worked really well together. The filmmaking process was actually very entertaining. However, one of the main challenges that we encountered was with the borrowed camera from Ayala. Unfortunately, we noticed the sound was not recorded with the footage, which meant we had to start all over again. In addition, we encountered another obstacle: finding an agreeable meeting time for all group members, as everyone had conflicting schedules. Because this was a difficult issue to navigate, I believe we would have benefitted from a larger time allocation to complete the project. As such, the final product would have been of better quality.

 

 

Works Cited

Carroll, Noël. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 46, no. 1, 1987, pp. 51–59. Web. 28 Nov. 2016

Whedon, Joss. "Hush." Buffy the Vampire Slayer. N.d. Television.

Closet Space. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.