So in my most recent blogpost I talked about the horror movie we created for our horror unit to try to answer the driving question of the unit: How does horror reflect and comment on our society? And while if you read my post about the movie you’d know we didn’t succeed in answering it, through the unit we did answer it in other ways.

This unit was really cool, we got to watch horror movies, read horror novels and we even got to go on a field school to a haunted house! Leading up to Halloween, and in the weeks after, our class was all horror, all the time. We even got the watch Halloween on Halloween.

We actually did learn quite a bit about horror, what makes it horrifying and how it is a reflection of our society, despite not being able to prove our learning through our film.

One of the first things we learned about in the unit was the The Elements of Aversion, described by Elizabeth Barrette. We ended up using these elements throughout the rest of the unit, up until the last horror assignment.

Along with that we watched both The Exorcist and Halloween (1978), and had to write reflections on the movies and what made them horrifying. In these reflections we could talk about what creates the fear in the movies, the motivation for the killings, the styles and techniques used when making the movie and the historical context. Along with that we could compare the movies to Frankenstein and talk about how they used horror in similar ways. In these reflections we were expected to go deeper than how the movies made us feel and what our opinions on them were. They weren’t movie reviews, but rather short analyses used to prove our understand of horror.

Halloween Reflection

Along with these analyses our other writing assignment was a synthesis essay between Bird Box by Josh Malerman and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I honestly enjoyed writing this essay because of the schedule. The first step was to create either a chart, or a vent diagram, or whatever we wanted really to organize our thoughts on the novels. We were given an outline that we could fill out as homework. In this outline we were to include our thesis, points and quotes to back up our points. I spent quite a bit of time trying to make sure my outline was ready so when it came to writing the essay I would be ready. Then came the actually writing. We were given three class periods to write it and weren’t supposed to write anything outside of class. This challenged me to write quickly and not get hung up on one part for too long, but timed writes are always good practice. There was nothing stopping us from writing outside of class, and doing that only hurt ourselves, so I stuck to writing in the given class time. In the end my essay was decent, and I successfully synthesized Bird Box and Frankenstein.

part of my chart, comparing the 2 novels

First body paragraph of my essay

So those were our main writing assignments this unit, but I’m sure you’re all dying to hear about the field study and the haunted house I mentioned earlier. My class went to Seattle, only for a night, to go to the new horror exhibit at the Museum of Pop Culture, along with a haunted house, Georgetown Morgue.

The horror exhibit was really good. There were different sections, each talking about various genres within the horror genre. For example, there was a room all on the history of vampires, another about zombies, monsters and more. Along with that there were little spaces each playing different videos which were interviews with famous horror directors, writers, producers etc. and they were talking about the horror genre.

The Haunted House was really fun! I found if I told myself it wasn’t real it wasn’t scary, but if I let myself believe and get immersed in the experience then it was quite terrifying. That’s the thing with horror, you can just remind yourself it isn’t real, but where’s the fun in that? You get out of it what you take into it, so to enjoy horror you have to allow yourself to be scared.

In this blog post I’ve talked about what we did to learn, but I still haven’t fully answered the driving question of “How does horror reflect and comment on our society?” Horror reflects and comments on our society in many different ways. The horror genre shifts as the fears of society shift, but all in all, the horror genre is a mirror of our society. Horror utilizes societal fears to create the most horrifying product possible. Think about it, why would we find horror horrifying if it didn’t reflect society at all.

I challenge you, next time you watch a horror movie, think about what it’s commenting on society. Think about why you find it horrifying and what it says about our societal fears. Thinking about that will add a new depth to the genre you never before realize existed.

3, 2, 1 Action…or not.

That pretty much sums up my class’s horror movie production in one phrase.

In term 1 in PLP one of our main projects was to create a horror movie answering the question “How does horror reflect and comment on our society?” Unfortunately, throughout the production of the movie this goal was lost, and we went a different direction. The class kind of forgot why we were actually making the movie and the social commentary aspect got dropped, as we got wrapped up in the actual film making.

So let me start this story by telling you a bit about the story of the movie.

Our movie was about 4 high school students who got sent to detention after spreading around a picture of another student. These four students were Leah (Alanah), Damien (Spencer), Brad (Michael S.) and Eddie (Jayden). During detention they were supposed to be helping the Janitor out with cleaning the school. While cleaning they all receive texts saying the sender knows what they did and each text ends with a different emoji. They were all kinda spooked, but figured it was just Rachel (the girl whose picture they sent around) playing a joke on them to get back at them for what they did. They didn’t worry too much about it until later they realized all the doors to the school had been locked, and they couldn’t get out. At first they were thinking it was still Rachel, but the logical side of them knew she couldn’t pull off locking all the doors. Meanwhile, they had all been seeing weird, masked figures around, but didn’t mention it to each other, all four of them thinking they were just seeing things. When they split up to try and find a way out (NEVER SPLIT UP) that’s when things really started going downhill. Remember those texts from earlier? Well, things, wearing masks of the emojis in the texts came and killed each character. By the end, Damien, Leah and Eddie had been killed, leaving Brad alone, to reflect on his mistakes.

The 3 masked killers

Sounds scary, right? Maybe not…also, where the heck was the social commentary? I guess it had to do with fear of invasion of privacy, but that wasn’t as clear as it should have been. Especially because in the actual movie it was never explained what they did to get into detention, and it would have helped if it had been more clear who Rachel was.

Here’s a list of some issues I had with the movie:
It’s never clear what the heck they did to get detention
The janitor was supposed to dismiss them but he went home early or something??? Did he expect them to stay there and keep cleaning or???
Pronunciation of Leah is not consistent
Not enough blood…there was blood left over at the end of production and death scenes with like no blood, or barely any.

Anyways, that was how the movie turned out, but what was production actually like?

So for this project our teachers got us all to apply for the roles we wanted and then interviewed us for these positions. They ended up choosing who they thought would be the best fit for each role and what configuration would make the production run the most smoothly. Finally, after a lengthy process they came up with this list:

So we went from there, doing our roles and trying our best to complete the project by following through with our responsibilities. As you can see up above, I was assigned the role of co-producer. My job was to make sure production went as smoothly as possible, everyone was completing their jobs, and we were responsible for coming up with a finished product.

Everyday during class time and filming I’d go up to people with questions like “Do you know what you’re working on?” “Is there anything you need right now to be able to do your job?” “Do you need anything from anyone else?” etc. I went from their answers and helped make sure everybody was able to do their job. Along with that I helped create a timeline and kept each role accountable for sticking to the timeline. For most roles this wasn’t an issue, for example script was right on top of it, and all the other roles followed along…except for the directors.

The directors meant well, I know that. They just wanted the best possible product. They just did that by taking everyone’s opinion into account, even when theirs was the only one that mattered. I don’t think they had a clear vision of what they wanted, which made filming take much longer than it should have. They’d spend much too long discussing angles with everyone, even though they should have known what they wanted doing into filming.

Another issue I had was, though I asked the directors many times if they were looking at story boards, and they assured me they were, it was pretty obvious they weren’t. The story boarders spent hours going over the story boards, hoping that these would help make the Filipino process easier. And the story boards were good. But for whatever reason, during filming they were often ignored.

An example of a story board

As filming went on this did become better, but it was still a lengthy process. Despite this, by the due date we had a complete film, although as you can tell from what I said earlier, it didn’t exactly meet the criteria.

My main issue with this project is the roles that we were all assigned. I fully understand that these roles are the only reason anything got handed in, and they held everyone accountable for their own job. And I even understand why my teachers instructed us not to step on each others toes and let people do their respective jobs. I agree with this request to a degree, but you see, it’s hard watching other people do their jobs and knowing you shouldn’t step on their toes, but really wanting to step in and suggest some different. As a producer I was responsible for everything that happened, yet after we all gave our initial ideas to the script writers we weren’t supposed to even give them critiques. When they had started the script I asked one of them what it was about and they responded “that knowledge is on a need to know basis.” We just had to follow their script and had no say over the matter, which is fair…but it’s quite hard to make a horror movie if the original script doesn’t have much social commentary. Our teachers told us specifically not to bother the script writers and to let them do their thing so I did, but the final script made it hard to meet the criteria of the project. Maybe I was supposed to tell them to fix this, but that felt like stepping on their toes which I also wasn’t supposed to do, so I’m still confused about that whole situation.

The script was good, and it did hold some social commentary so I’m not trying to call them out, although I completely am. The social commentary in the script was actually quite good, but it was hard to capture on film which is where it got lost even more. For example, it was hard to make it clear who Rachel was and what they 4 main characters did to her. Also, the main commentary was in the texts which weren’t incorporated into the movie very well. I’m just using the script as an example of how the roles didn’t work out as well as they were supposed to.

I’m not trying to blame the fact that we didn’t answer the question on the scriptwriters, not at all. It was a class project and we were all equally responsible for answering the question. I just don’t like the concrete roles and no stepping on toes rule, because that means only certain individuals have control over wether or not there is social commentary.

If its anybody’s fault the project didn’t go so well it is for sure Teva and me. Also, I didn’t mention this earlier but partway through production I got fired.woot woot (rip). When I got fired though my teachers called me the scapegoat so I think that means they know it wasn’t fully my fault? I hope? But roles aside, everyone was responsible for creating a final product that answered the question, and we should all feel equally to blame for not answering the question.

Also, while our movie didn’t answer the question, it wasn’t actually terrible. I mean, I’m personally impressed that a group of grade 12s were willing to spend hours a day working on a project and were able to pull off a movie in 17 days. Our teachers were too disappointed to even comment on the movie and give us their thoughts, but I think that’s unfair because, despite it not exactly fitting into the horror genre, at least we completed a somewhat decent movie that has a followable storyline.

Anyways, that’s the story of “Locked In.” Take from it what you will, and if you want, watch it and comment what you think!

https://youtu.be/KwD8aCgTo30