Assignment 3 - Trailer analysis

The Visit Analysis

The genre for this movie is horror, and has it’s own style and iconography which fits in with the genre. This can be seen by the use of dark and light, young people, sound effects, hauntings, religious beliefs and jump scares, which are all used to scare the audience.

Like all horror movies, it starts out in the daytime as seen in the image below, and later turns to night for a dark setting – this gives off a frightening, eerie sense to the film, and excites the audience as it prepares them for what's gonna happen next.

All the characters are seen wearing day-to-day casual clothing.

The story is told through a ‘found footage’ from the girl to show the audience how they are trapped by the perspective of the person holding the camera. The girl and her little brother film most scenes for the film using a camera.

The trailer reveals location because in the trailer, the children talk about going to stay at their Grandparents house for the week, and they also show snippets of the children entering the house. The movie is set in an isolated area, to show the audience that it's difficult for the children to escape.

The teenage girl, Becca, is portrayed as a very confident and sophisticated girl. Throughout the movie she is unaware that her Grandparents are strange people, and constantly blames it on the fact that they are old. Her little brother, Tyler, is seen as a character in the movie who likes to have fun, as seen in the trailer, where he has the camera with him and he is messing around. He's the first person in the movie to notice a change in his Grandparents. In the trailer, the Grandma shows two sides to herself. One where she's very kind and normal and the other where she's demonic and comes across as a psychopath. The Grandpa is a very secretive man in the movie. In the trailer, we mostly see him inside his shed, however don't know what he's doing in there. In the movie we end up discovering that he enjoys keeping old tissue papers with blood all over them. The Grandpa also, denies the fact that their Grandma has something wrong with her, and blames it on her being old. An example of this would be when their Grandpa tells the kids to go to sleep at 9 every night, and they are awoken to their Grandma doing strange, abnormal things. In the image below, you see the Grandma carrying a knife. 

The Grandparents are represented this way as it fits in with the conventions for horror movies. Examples of this would be : unexplainable noises, unusual things happening and jump scares.

There aren't any voice overs in this movie, there's only the girl who takes you through the movie by using her camera to film all the events taking place.

The trailer for this movie reveals parts of the story, as it shows the kids leaving their home and going to stay with their Grandparents. The trailer also reveals the two different sides to the Grandparents. All of the captions for this movie trailer is written in red. This connotes danger, anger and death which links in with it being a horror movie. The captions used have an effect on the reader as it prepares them for the kind of movie that they'll be watching - a horror movie.

Quick cuts which are fast paced are used in the trailer to give the effect of a scary genre for the horror movie. The pace of the trailer also gives the effect of a tense atmosphere for the trailer.

At the start the music is very lively and as the sun goes down the music starts to become a lot more scarier. This reveals to the audience that the movie's quite creepy.

Different shot sizes like the close up shot, can scare the reader at times, when it is used for jump scares. The trailer is filmed at different angles, for example, mid shots are used a lot as it makes you focus on the face of the character.