IH: Production and Distribution of Horror Films

Discuss the ways in which horror films are produced and distributed.

Production of Horror Films

Independent Horror

• The codes and conventions of the horror film genre mean that the films can be produced on a low to micro budget, sometimes producing huge amounts of profit depending on the success of the distribution. For example "Paranormal Activity" (Peli,2007) tells the story of a young couple who are haunted "by a supernatural presence in their home". The conventions of the genre meant that the film could shot on a micro budget of $15,000 yet made $193,355,800 in the box office, making it a huge success as it generated over 150x the original budget on the opening weekend alone. "Paranormal Activity" was originally an independent horror film but was bought by Paramount Pictures after being screened in 2007, when it was then modified and released in 2009

• Advances in the popularity, power and accessibility web 2.0 mean that independent filmmakers can extensively use social networking to gain the public's attention and even offers new platforms from which to release content, such as Vimeo, YouTube or other personal websites. Furthermore with the advancement in popularity and notoriety of crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter and Indigogo as respected means of gaining funding, filmmakers can now fund entire productions with money gained from the public. An example of this is "VGHS: Video Game High School", the webseries launched by world-famous YouTube filmmaker "FreddieW" who used his fame and popularity to draw the public's attention to the VGHS Kickstarter page which got $200,000 more than originally pledged. The team then used the further popularity from this series to release "VGHS: Video Game High School Season 2" which once again received hundreds of thousands of dollars more than originally pledged on the Kickstarter page. While both seasons were extremely popular, the public could watch the episodes on the YouTube channel (where a YouTube partnership advertising scheme is used to generate profit) or a week earlier on the RocketJump website, where an even more profitable advertising scheme generated money.

Industrial Horror Films

• As with all industrial films the size of the budget available to industrial filmmakers is significantly increased. This means often films are more visually impressive, contain extensive visual effects or have Hollywood A-List actors as they not only potentially offer better performances, they hopefully provide a reassurance of the films quality to the audience. An example of an industrial Hollywood horror film is "The Cabin In The Woods" (Goddard,2012) which had a budget of $30 Million, generating a disappointing $66 Million technically making the film a failure. Given the success of certain Horror films, often sequels, occasionally prequels, and a host of spin-offs are made. An example of this is the previously mentioned "Paranormal Activity" film which since became a franchise, with six films in. The films become less well celebrated as the franchise continues, however despite the lack of critical acclaim the films manage to remain huge successes.

Distribution of Horror Films

Industrial Horror

Mainstream industrial horror films are distributed much like any other industrial film: with an advertising campaign involving trailers, posters, websites, billboard adverts and TV adverts etc. For example "The Conjuring" (Wan,2012)  first released posters introducing the stars' characters, followed by a teaser trailer which was released at Comic Con (many of the attendants were the target audience). As with "The Blair Witch Project" (Myrick/Sanchez,1999) the film based its advertising campaign heavily on the idea of the film being "based on a true story" as it follows the tale of real life paranormal activity specialists Ed and Lorraine Warren who inspired "The Amityville Horror" (Douglas,2005). In the final weeks leaving up to the films release the real-life Perron family made appearances on talk spots, which was finally followed by a featurette entitled "The Devil's Hour" which showed the real-life Lorraine Warren explaining some events in the film. The film was a huge success at the box office, with a budget of $20 Million making $316,700,141 at the box office.

Independent Horror

As with all independent films distribution is generally significantly harder than it is for industrial films. The constrained budget mean that TV trailers and billboards etc cannot be afforded, so the filmmakers have to use more ingenious ways to create buzz about the film. With the total availability of web 2.0, things such as free software, social networking, advice forums and videos have never been easier to access. This means that those with the skill and ability to innovate have a greater chance of distributing horror films than ever before, for example raising "buzz" through social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and the video sharing website YouTube. Essentially developing technologies have democratised the film industry and made the life of the independent filmmaker significantly more viable than ever before.