How to make it horror?

    Hey guys, today I wanted to talk about some elements I’m including in my opening in order to alter the mood. As I have previously established, the first scene in my opening will consist of horror elements while the following scenes will touch on the coming-of-age aspects. I have been doing some research in order to figure out how exactly to bring all the horror elements I can, so I wanted to let you know about some techniques I will be utilizing. I am going to start with two that may or may not be used; The first is when shooting the shower scene, instead of having the sliding glass shower door be open in order to get a clear shot of the characters face I may leave it closed in order to give it the feel that somebody is watching them. Obviously this is not a POV shot from the stalkers perspective but since this is a stalker piece using this technique may give it that feel. The next trick I may use is using my fog machine in order to make the shot extremely hazy, this one I am mostly unsure of because I do not know if it would make the shot look good or unnecessarily blurry. The "fog" would make sense as it could be played off as vapor from the shower and could make the shot more ominous especially in combination with the next technique I am going to mention. Lighting is obviously super important and I am going to utilize colored lighting; I am unsure of what color to use as I want this scene to be eerie but at the same time the facial expressions of the characters are important as they all just went through something traumatic. I do believe I will most likely end up sticking to red lighting for the sake of the shot but another idea I have been toying around with is giving each character a different color that best matches their personalities. Now onto the editing, the plan for going from one character to the other in the shower scene is to just have cuts that keep getting faster and faster and faster and then they abruptly stop and land on one of our characters who begins to scream out of the frustration, the quick cuts represent how the characters are feeling in that moment as they are meant to make the audience very anxious. During the entire shower scene, except for when one of our characters scream, the background sound utilized will be a Shepard tone. First of all let me clarify what a Shepard tone is, it is a sound that creates an illusion that it is constantly either rising or falling in pitch so it is great for creating suspense; Here is an example. We plan on using a Shepard tone as we think it will work perfectly along with our quick cuts in order to induce anxiety in our viewers and build up for the scream. The scream is not meant to be a jump scare or something that scares the audience at all, there are no elements meant to actively scare the audience during the shower scene but we want to create an uncomfortable environment so the audience knows that they are not watching a regular coming-of-age film. That is all for today and I hope I was able to explain a bit about different elements going into the shower scene, talk to you soon!!