Conventions of our horror poster

Through conducting research on existing products we found there were 5 main similarities:

• 1 main image - darkish background
• colour scheme - black, red, white
• 1 main font - sell your soul
• Tagline - 2 short sentences, gripping, mysterious
• Release date

We then incorporated these five conventions into our own final product, however also challenged some conventions to make our product unique.

Images
We took a range of images varying from a close up of one of our actors faces, to shots of the woods to a close up of the necklace featured in the film. We then conducted a focus group where we showed all ten people these images and received their feedback, 8/10 preferred  the close up image of the hand holding the necklace due to it "fitting the horror genre" and it being "creepy and mysterious so makes you want to watch the film" but also liked the shots of the woods. Therefore we decided to use both images for our poster, use the hand as the focal point and the woods image as the background. This challenged the usual conventions of horror posters as our researched showed most posters featured a close up of the main character, however we didn't follow this due to our findings in market research/focus groups and the want to make our product unique.

Colour Scheme
After our findings from the market research we decided to stick with the trend of using red, black and white as the colour scheme as these colours represent the horror genre and allow the audience to easily identify the type of film we are portraying.

Font
We downloaded a range of fonts that we felt reflected the horror genre, such as Sell Your Soul, Bell MT and    Face Your Fears,these fonts were all quite simplistic but looked effective when placed onto a poster/magazine. We took these fonts and placed them onto a mock poster and showed them to the focus group, the group then unanimously agreed that Sell Your Soul was their favourite. Therefore we have used this font throughout our products to try and keep the font as a part of brand/product recognition.

Tagline
We found that most taglines were either one or two short sentences, that featured mysterious language which kept the reader guessing, which in turn makes them want to watch the film. We decided to go for 'You think you know the story. Think again' we used this as it makes the reader want to know more. We also incorporated these lines into our horror trailer itself.

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