Media language essay

In my group’s final horror film trailer, which focuses on a young female victim who fears leaving her own home and has failed to do so for the last 15 years, after the murder of her mother, whilst experiencing consistent unexplained occurrences, we aim to include a wide range of media language to allow the audience to break down and understand the intended meanings of our text, and allow audience interpretation.

An example of media texts we plan to include are ‘technical codes.’ This text focuses on the ways camera and editing have been used to create meaning. For example, high angle shots are typically used to depict a vulnerable victim, as this creates the feeling that the character is being looked down upon, or that they are smaller/inferior. In contrast, low angle shots are used for the opposite effect, as they present a character as powerful/dominant through the way they are looking downwards upon the viewer. This type of shot is generally used for the antagonist/ a powerful character. Close-up and extreme close-up shots are also used to create a sense of claustrophobia/present the emotion of fear. Editing also plays a role in technical codes, such as the use of fades/cuts to black, which allow connotation of death/evil based on concepts related to the colour black.

Symbolic codes relate to how colours and iconography are used to create a message in a media text. for example, red is commonly used in horror to represent blood, a link to death/violence which is a common theme in slasher/splatter movies, as well as black which carries connotations of death/evil which is contrasted with white which represents purity/innocence to create a binary opposition. Iconography of horror includes weapons such as knives, which are phallic objects, often used to give an antagonist a sense of male power/dominance over a typically female victim, as well as masks, used to hide the identity of a character, dolls/clowns which are typically associated with children/innocence, but are twisted to suggest a loss of innocence.

audio codes are used to decode meaning from the choice of sounds used in a horror trailer, for example the use of distorted music box/fairground music explores the idea of loss of childhood innocence, as this music’s original intention was children’s entertainment. Music is also used to suggest emotion such as fear, through once slow/calm music speeding up or increasing in volume.

Written codes are based on the messages portrayed via text in a trailer. This could relate to the text’s visual style : e.g. a the convention of a broken/worn out font could suggest the victim’s ‘damage’ from their experiences throughout the film’s story. It can also relate to the written words in a film’s slogan.

While the codes I have mentioned serve to carry a meaning, the theorists : Barthes and de Saussure suggests that without context these codes carry no meaning. For example, the inclusion of horror conventions must carry relevance to the theme of the text. If a film contains iconography of dolls, but fails to relate to the concept of loss of childhood innocence, the iconography has lost its intended meaning.