I hope our final product communicates the many intricacies of ‘Post Horror’ in comparison to the horror many people are more familiar with. Our film includes aspects like social commentary, psychological horror and a lack of focus on jump scares. All tropes have become very common in the recent wave of ‘post horror films and I hope our short film is able to successfully emulate these.

If I could redo my work on the film, the main thing I would do differently would be to ensure we filmed all possible scenes, as during editing the hardest thing in my opinion was cutting around missing footage as there were often jarring cuts due to us forgetting small scenes that were surprisingly vital in the editing process. Along with this, I would also completely change where the opening scene of the film was shot, as the RMIT kitchen had an extremely loud fridge that while recording did not sound nearly as bad as the exported clips. This loud background noise caused dialogue to get pretty overwhelmed at times, with even noise removal not helping due to the sheer amount of noise. Apart from these, I believe myself and my group all did quite well considering it was our first time working on something of this scale, and next time I work on a short film I will have far more experience and knowledge when it comes to the many different aspects that go into creating a film.

A key challenge of this studio for me was writing a horror script for Assignment 2. Horror is a genre that can very easily verge on cringe if the writing isn’t strong enough, and as this was my first time writing a horror script I often found it hard to maintain a steady tone and atmosphere. It didn’t help that many of the ‘post horror’ films we discussed are of such high calibre, films like Get Out, Midsommar and The Witch are all masterpieces of the genre and writing a script meant to inhabit the same space as them was quite intimidating. In the end I think my script managed to toe the line without becoming a parody of itself in the process, though i’m sure if I had to write another script it would end up being much higher quality.

Another challenge was fully differentiating between ‘post horror’ and classic horror films, as they share just as much similarities as they differ. For example many older horror films contain just as much social commentary as modern ones, though the older ones may be far less subtle in their messaging. The reading ‘Defining A New wave of Art Horror’ helped with narrowing down a definition, stating that post horror has far more ‘ambiguity’ in it, with the more classic horror films often ending in one final jump scare, where as modern horror tends to have more open endings, often not providing answers to every question raised. In the end I believe a key factor that differentiates Post Horror is its ability to elicit conversation and theories based on its plot and themes, leading to greater discussions after viewing that continue for years, causing these modern films to already have great legacies that rival even the greatest classic horror films.

I think our finished films major strengths are the performances of our actors, combined with what I believe is strong evocative shots and sound design, helping keep the audience in the mindset of our protagonist, Sarah, throughout the entire run time which was an important goal for my group. A weakness is, as mentioned before, the sometimes rough flow of things due to us overlooking some scenes while filming. Though filming these scenes would have definitely helped the flow of the film I believe we did the best we could with what he had and I am proud of our final product.