Newspapers

Newspapers are read by almost everyone in england they are considered to be the most trusted, responcible meduim of all, and its the smaller ewspapers that are suposadbly the most trusted ones. In the UK there are over 1,600 websites for newspapers and the uks most popular newspaper is read by almost 33 million people a week. 42 million people rely on their local newspapers for information a  month, and more than 6,100 local newspapers are sold or distributed in the UK every minute.


Local newspapers are the first we turn to raise awareness or an issue or problem, rather than going to the big national newspapers first. The local media emplys around 30,000 people a year, and an incedible 10,000 of them are journalists! supposedly 85% of local newspaper readers in Britain say its improtant that their local newspaper keeps them infrmed on local council issues. This is because even though we may not know it, our local couincil can have great everyday effects on us more than what the bigger national couincil does. Accouriding to stats a whopping 60% act on the ads in the local newspapers.


Stats:
Daily and sunday papers 89
Free dailys 11
Paid weeklys 487
Paid weeklys with free pick ups 17
Free weeklys 494
Free weeklys with pickups 35
Free pick up only (weekly) 4
Combined weekly 10


Total 1,167


Not just the papers, but regional press over stand alone magazines and niche publications. There are over 1600 websites (which has amazingly double in the last 5 years). 71% read local newspapers (figures deom April 2010 - March 2011)


Coverage from age groups:
15-24 61.1%
25-34 66.6%
35-44 68.0%
45-54 71.9%
55-64 75.0%
65+    79.9%


Regional Press has a high solus. This is when someone who reads a local newspaper won't read a national paper. 26.9% of those who read a regional newspaper do not read a national daily. Local newspapaers are increasingly becoming more local society and three quarters of people in the UK work within 10 mils from their home, and 40% of us work within 2 miles.
The top 20% of all publishers own 90% of all regional and local newspaper titles in the UK. And over 95% of total weekly circulation.


A great Website to see all the stats and facts is www.newspapersociety.com. Increasingly there are more and more ways to read a newspaper, ie websites, podcasts, mobile phones, e-editions, blogging and video streaming. This is a great contemporary way of getting the news acorss to a younger generation.


Types of newspapers:

National (eg Sun, Daily Mail, The Times)

Regional (eg Shropshire Star, Birmingham Post)

Local (eg Market Drayton Advertiser)

History Of Slasher Films

A slasher film is a type of horror film typically involving a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool such as a knife or axe. For many years now the slasher genre has been one of the most popular and most demanded genres of films. 

Slasher films are great for getting audiences on the edge of their seats, and whats even greater about it is, they have certain codes and conventions which audiences know about, therefore tension is caused when the viewer knows something bad is about to happen. For example, if you have sex, you die. This moral template is what predates the slasher genre way back.

This goes way back to a little story called 'The tail of the hook.' All filmmakers and anyone who knows about film know about this legendary story. A couple in a car, are in lovers lane, they were out there and they were making out, and a maniac was going round who had escaped from an institution, and he had a hook for a hand. The girl all of a sudden hears a noise, and it bothers her, she tells her boyfriend to go out and look what it is, so he does and he doesn't see anything. Of course everyone expects them to get killed, but instead he gets back in the car fine, the girl is so creeped out she just cant get back into it, she sits up gets dressed and asks her boyfriend to drive her home. Shes so insistent that he finally agrees and drives off pretty fast. They get home, and when he gets out the car he goes round to her door to open it and there handing is a nasty hook, which still has flesh attached to it where it had been ripped from someones arm.

The hook man was there and was about to get them, but the girl had remembered that her mum said she shouldn't make out with boys in cars.

The influence of the tail of the hook can clearly be identified in John Carpenters 'Halloween' 1978, which kicked off the late 70's teen slasher craze. Set in an apparent quiet urban neighborhood, there was Jamie-Leigh Curtis against the unstoppable Micheal Myers who killed his sister for having sex with her boyfriend. 

He then plunges his knife through the promiscuous girls in the town but then meets his match the virginal purity of Lorrey Strode. 

"William Lustig - I remember reading in oh, about 1977, or 78 in the magazine variety, that horror and slasher films were dead...then along came Halloween, and it just knocked everyone's socks off. Halloween is what fueled all of the films from the 80's to be made" Halloween was a low budgeted film, not many people expected it to do big, there was no advertising done on a large scale before it came out, but once you had seen you, you had to tell everybody to see it. After Halloween, there was about 50 to 100 films made, souly because of the success of Halloween.

Although Halloween was a fairly visually restrained film, it was followed by wave of slice and dicing films which was concentrated on the slashing's rather than the stalking, most noticeably from the hit 'Friday 13th' Directed by Shaun Cunningham. Friday the 13th was set an in a secluded area called 'Camp Blood', which was actually 'Camp Mersy Bosco' in New Jersey. The story was based on a group of sexual active idiotic teenagers who's flesh was ripped apart on screen in front of our eyes. Mostly thanks to the make up man Tom Savini. No body could of predicted the money or resoect that it had made, and once again its a low budgeted film. The team for the film wanted to make childhood fears become reality. One of these fears was, what if someone was under the bed? And they made this a killing in the film. People argue that the film would of been nothing without Savini and his make up and special effect skills.
Tom Savini "Sometimes I feel like an assassin. People hire me, I load up mu car with my tools and I go some strange place and I kill people. So here I am in Friday the 13th, and I'm killing teenagers in the woods. I'm an assassin"

When you look closely at horror movies, essentially what you see is that they are actually fairy tales, story's about places your warned not to enter. Its the interest of going into the dark room, and the door you don't want to open. Of course its always the door you didn't open that's got what you wanna see behind it. Many films often use real life serial killers as a main running theme for their film. One serial killer which the world became fascinated with was Ed Gein. Ed Gein was a farmer in a small town in America. He became very notorious in the 50s when it was discovered that for a number of years he had been digging up the corpses of women, taking them back to his farm house, dissecting them and transforming them into various kinds of furniture and artifacts. Gein put a very american face on horror, as he seemed a normal nice man who parents felt safe with letting him babysit their kids.

Joseph Stefano, Screenwriter, Psycho "I think saftey went out in the 60s. And I think that's because of Psycho, because it says, you cannot just stop at any motel, go in and take a shower. Watch it."
To many people Alfred Hitchcock's 1960s slasher Psycho, has to be one of the most inspirational films made. Its known to be the 'Granddad' of horror and slasher films, and many would argue that films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th and so on really owe Psycho for their inspiration and success.

'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' Directed by Toby Hooper. Based on the nightmare story of Ed Gein, the director never said he wanted to tell the story of Ed Gein, but he wanted a family of Ed Geins, and that's what he did. You walk out of the movie after watching it and you say to yourself "there are people like this in the world" and its the realization of that which makes the film so great, in a weird scary way. Wes Craven "everything about it just seemed to be totally real, and ah, it was a great example of what I say, the first person to scare the audience had to be the filmmaker, and it had to be crazy people". It became what the 80s feared, a killer with a masc on.

If you wanna know how famous and how badly these famous film monsters became, you only have to go to a comic store where their faces are everywhere on every wall. And it can be easy to forget how scary the characters were the first time we met them.

The Ring - Essay

The film is a remake of the Japanese horror 'Ring,' which was made in 1998. The film based on a Japanese folk tale called Banchō Sarayashiki. This is a ghost story of love separated by social class, broken trust, promises, leading to a dismal fate. The film was also adapted from the novel 'Ring,' by Kōji Suzuki.


The story of 'The Ring' begins with the very cliches horroe film opening with an establishing shot of a house at night, it is stormy outside and raining. Two schools home alone discussing scary events. Here they discuss a previous weekend 7 days ago, when one of them Katie went to a cabin in the mountains with 2 friends and a boyfriend. They move topics onto a video tape which is supposedly cursed and whoever watches it gets a phone call straight after telling them they will die in 7 days. Then 7 days later, (to the exact time) the viewer dies. In absolute shock and devastation Katie reveals she had watched a weird tape at the cabin exactly 7 days before. After a series of explainable activities going on in the house they are in, involving a tv in the house turning itself on and making white noise, Katie is mysteriously killed while Becca has the unconformable job of watching, causing her to be institutionalized in a mental hospital.

We then see Katies Aunt, Rachel. Her and her son are at his school where Aidens teacher brings it to Rachels attention hes been drawing picturres of his dead cousin in the ground weeks days before she even died. At the girls funeral her mother asks her sister (Rachel) to invensitage her neices death, and as she learns more and more she discovers the video tape. Her investigation leads her to the same cabin in the mountains where Katie and her friends had watched the tape. There, she finds the tape and eventually watches it. She revieves the same phonecall what she expected and the nextday showed Noah (Aidens father) the tape, and they relaise they have a time limit. The next morning Rachel wakes to find Aiden watching the tape, now this is became serious.

After veiwing the tape very unexplanable and weird things begin to happen to Rachel. She starts to have nose bleeds, strange nightmares and many more. Her main focus then becomes to the tape, where she discovers many distubing images. Once inventigating these thye lead her to a woman named Anna Morgan (a woman featured in the tape) who lived on Moesko Island with her husband and daughter, and raised horses. Rachel findsa out that a horrific tradegy hits the Morgan ranch, where all the horses that they breed seemed to go man, attempted to flee the ranch and when they did, they drown themselfs in the sea. No body could diagnose what was wrong with the horses, which caused Anna to become depressed, and made her take residence at a metal institiuation, then commited suicude. Rachel then goes to the Morgan Ranch, where she finds Richard Morgan who is still alive, he refuses to talk about the video or his daughter. Rachel goes to see the local doctor to ask about the Morgan family. The old doctor tells her that Anna wanted a child more than anything, but was never able to successfully fall pregnant. One winter Anna and Richard left and returned with Samara who they adopted. But after some time Anna started complaining about visions that only happend when Samara was around, so she sent them both to a mental institute on the continent. Meanwhile Noah sneaks into the insitiute and finds Anna Morgans fil and discovers that a video is missing from there. Rachel then returns to the house and questions Richard about the conversation Smara had with the doctors on a tape she watched, and Richard finally stated the girl was evil, then kills himself infront of Rachels eyes.

Noah arraives and him and Rachel go into a barn when the horses used to be kept, and discover a room where Samars was kept by Richard. Behind the wallpaper in the bedroom they find an image of a ree from the video tape, and Rachel remebrs seeing it in the cabin she visited. They return there and discover a well underneath the floor. In which Rachel is led to where Samara was killed, at the bottom of the well under the floorborards. When Rachel falls down the well she finds Samaras body. Samara then somehow shows Rachel that her mother killed her, and Rachel tells authorities and the now dead Samara is given a proper burial, presumblyputting her spirt to rest.

Rachel now thinks that everything is ok as she has survived passed her 7 day mark, and informs her son Aiden then everything will be okay as Samara is now at rest. Aiden quickly tells her that her spirit has been relasied, shown by the bruises shown on his arm, the same as Rachel had. Next we see Noah at his flat, and we watch him go through the same as what Rachels neice, Katie did. We see Samara crawl out of the TV and she stares directly at Noah, we then see Rachel find Noah's body in his flat. Rachel is scared and worried that Aiden would die too when she realizes that the only way to escape Samara after watching the video is to make a copy of the tape and show it to someone else, this means shes continuing the cycle. The movie ends with Rachel helping Aiden how to make a copy of the tape so that he can then pass on the curse. As they make the tape copy, Aiden asks him mum,  who was to see the tape?













Tense music plays a vital part in the film as as soon as we hear it we feel the mood that the director is trying to convey. Throughout the film the music is deep, slow, but when the visual climax is close, the music seems to be a lot more upbeat and racing. It creates an emotional roller-coaster with the audience but manages to create the fear intended, no matter how cliche it is. These types of films always give you some suspense and then leave you hanging with something that isn't scary, and when the music stops and all the sound is diagetic, that can be the most tense moment created. 
Not only tense music but of course the visual is the most important part of the film. Having bright colours and sunshine would be totally the wrong thing to do to create the dark mood intended. Hence the reason why throughout the film dark colours are used. Even the clothing, make up, setting and scripting was conveyed and intented to have a 'dark mood' cast over it.