The sound in the animatic starts just after the flashback, at the point where the main character approaches the broken fence.
I used the jaws theme in my animatic and hopefully in my final theme, because it is useful for generating tension and extracting fear from the audience. Because the audience will have most likely have watched Jaws then when they hear this they know something is going to happen and they also from the increasing pace of the sound know when it will happen. Yet they are helpless to do anything about it and this is useful for a horror film.
By isolating the audience you make it easier to scare them, isolation in the audience seems to be a useful tool in horror. I want to use this to increase the effectiveness of the audience, I have also been working on a rough flashback transition which will be like the character closing their eyes and then eventually opening them into the flashback. I intend to use the conventional flashback where by having the edges slightly blurred so the audience can differentiate the flashback and present day.
From what I have noticed about the Jaws theme is that the closer either the shark gets or the main character to danger because you know what is going to happen you feel like your heart has sped up in response, this in my opinion is the perfect response to have for a horror film. You want to make the audience's hearts race with fear, you also want them to try and find out what is going to happen, as well as making them feel alone and helpless to do anything about what is going to happen.
I feel that if you make the audience feel like the main character is a lamb to the slaughter, but you need to make them identify with the main character since by the audience doing this is a good way of making them fear the antagonist just as much as the main character fears the antagonist. Creating fear through more methods than just pure gore is more effective because if an audience only sees gore and nothing else to create fear it will mean the horror would be more of a thriller if it didn't scare the audience enough. its like horror films such as a American werewolf in London have since their release lost their edge due to people adjusting to the gore in the film. This means that you have to try not to rely on gore alone, physchological features must be used in balance as well.
An audience needs to be dragged into the film so that they truly feel like a part of the events of the film and not just a outsider watching through cameras. If you make the audience forget that it is just a film they get immersed in the film and want to know what will happen next and who will actually survive. If you can get the audience to want the main character to survive then if the main character gets to close to danger the audience feels like they are too close to danger as well.
I am looking to use as many methods as combinable to create the amount of fear which I want to in the audience, I will not know if this is successful until somebody watches the final film. as well as using elements of physical horror I will also use elements from physcological horror. It seems that as time as gone on for horror films unlike the other genres, the films in horror get demoted to thriller within a decade. This is understandable since people easily adjust to things that they fear when they are commonly used by other films of this genre.
The horror genre is a genre that needs to evolve so that it can still achieve what it is meant to do and that is to be a set of films which scare the audience. Which means that I will make sure that my film easily meets the conventions of horror. This is where the animatic can help, it will help me to identify if my film will meet the conventions of horror. Using a wood is a good idea since the trees help to block out light but not too much light either. It helps to isolate the audience since when you see a wood it leads you to believe that the main character is far away from civilasation when the main character could just as easily be round the corner from where the audience is.
The audience will want to know what the nature of the film is but if you keep it hidden as long as possible i believe that this makes them more open to be scared by the film than they would be if the actual film was any different.
