I've blogged previously on the growing number of made-for-fun short
horror films on YouTube (especially zombie flicks), reflecting the
ongoing impact of digitisation and the accessibility of digital
film-making today, but its worth noting
too how the battalions of Media Studies students across the land are
leaving their own legacy. As students conduct research into their chosen
genre before setting out to create their own genre piece, increasingly
they could be accessing other students' distilled research to do so!
When doing some tagging on archive posts I came across a mention of how prominent my students' work was on YouTube search results - so, a year or so on, I had another look, and sure enough, a 'slasher openings' on YouTube (Nov 15th 2013) produced the following top results:
IGS student work came top of the pile in this search
You can help make your work more widely seen by using YouTube categories and tagging.
There's always some publication/organisation publishing a 'top horror' list - the genre remains very popular, whilst also continuing to evolve; the likes of Saw are very different indeed from the 60s Hammer movies that briefly dominated the global horror audience!
The Guardian has indeed run a top 10 horror in 2013 (their horror microsite is here), part of a wider genre-by-genre series, but this is a little bit different: the countdown by one of the all-time greats of film-making, Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull etc!). Plus ... like Spinal Tap, he turns it up to 11! Great article, with trailers/clips helpfully built in; his selections are firmly of the old school...
Easily the most difficult aspect of trying to create your own slasher: your earnest efforts can end up causing laughter instead of chills unless you're very careful about framing, editing, mise-en-scene/SFX and sound. Try watching almost any slasher kill/violence scene with the sound off (repeat with no pictures, sound only) and you'll quickly appreciate what a difference sound can make. That includes unsettling diegetic sound (often exaggerated), not just non-diegetic music.
This is just a placeholder post for now, something I'll add to at a later date. There's no substitute for viewing (though reading the likes of Stephen Rebello's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho [1990], or any of the many journal/web articles devoted to this topic will certainly help) examples to boost your understanding of how filmmakers maintain verisimilitude in this central feature for slasher audiences.
Sometimes, though, there's an intentional degree of campness, even before Scream made postmodernism part of the slasher mix. The vid below (a daft vodcast ... with over 175k views) contains some examples, but its not hard to find many more on YouTube.
NB: The following vid features strong language and clips from 18-rated films featuring strong violence.
