Narrative for Trailer

There are many different narrative structures that can be used for a Horror trailer, the narratives depicted in the trailers we have studied and analysed such as The Conjuring, Insidious and Paranormal Activity are mainly non-linear as they show rapid and frequently changing clips, cuts, flashbacks and the events do not necessarily follow eachother in chronological order. The ending of these trailers is also open ended as this does not give away the whole story or any form of closure to the audience. Therefore leaving them on a cliffhanger and persuading them to watch the full film to find out what happens, this is the purpose of trailers, they act as a 'teaser' for the audience with a sense of ambiguity about them. Which then draws an audience in to watch the film.

In our trailer we have decided to stick to the basic open ended narrative as to not give too much away to the audience and withhold information from them, convincing them to watch the full film (if there was one to be made).

We are considering doing something a bit different from the trailers we have analysed, instead of creating a trailer with a single strand narrative focusing on one character's adventures, we are thinking of using a multi strand narrative. We have three characters that we plan to represent in our trailer, a young boy (aged 8/9), a teenage girl (aged 16 as to appeal to target audience for relevant age) and Elsie (the ghost/paranormal being in our trailer). We were thinking of creating three separate parts of a trailer, each showing the three characters story and how they are relevant to our storyline. We could use point of view shots and hand held cameras to create a sense of personal narrative, this will also directly involve the audience and make them feel as though they are part of the story/film.