making a film for an oversaturated genre...

[Absolution_Films]

Firstly....

I love horror films especially slashers. Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday 13th, Halloween, Black Christmas.... you name it ive seen it.

I would love to make a slasher film, but the one point that always puts me off is that the sub genre is sooo over saturated.

Is it ok to try and make a formulatic film... lets face it the formula is successful!
I think there are two ways to look at it... you can either produce a slasher film for example that fits the mould perfectly and is just good!
Or you can try and break the mould ala Cabin in the Woods.

What are your thoughts on this? This chat isnt restricted to Slasher/Horror films i was just using that as an example as its close to my heart

 

[Sweetie]

Well you would have write so that it works. None of the teens want to leave their houses cause they know their is killer on the loose, killing teens. So the killer decides he has to go to the teen's houses and kill them there. Since the teens and parents watching them, are smart, he would have to cut the phone lines, and jam their cell phone signals. Couldn't something like that work?

Maybe I'm not the best person to really have an opinion on this. It could work, but if someone's that sophisticated to have a cell jammer, is there really a believable chance for the kids to survive? I'm not really a huge fan of most slasher films. I've enjoyed the occasional one, but too many times, the situations that the movies portray are rather dull and boring to the point that they have been used every which way since the dawn of time. If you can find something interesting and relatively new, I'd watch and maybe even enjoy it.

Tell you what, I have never enjoyed a torture movie until I saw "Saw". I found it to be well paced, rather interesting throughout, not obvious with the right amount of misdirection. I had seen every element they used before, but never in the same combination at Saw, and it worked for me. It was also done on a shoestring budget and even had an A name and a couple TV names in it.

It's not because I haven't watched those kinds of movies before. It's that of the ones that I've watched (and it's usually friends sitting me down to watch this classic or the best of the best) and thoroughly been bored out of my mind. Don't get me started on Zombie movies!

 

[harmonica44]

That's true.

 

[Sweetie]

I'm going through something lately called the Dialogue Series. It's just a series of interviews with well known scriptwriters. Each interview is about 80 mins each.

It may be worth you watching to get an idea of their professional opinion of writing for film.