IMDB
IMDb, also known as the Internet Movie Database, despite what the name would imply, is a multimedia news feed and archive detailing thousands of movies, games, TV shows and more as well as a near unending stream of user and professional reviews.
It is worth noting that IMDb fully supports criticism and uses the majority of the votes to put together an overall rating for a film which in many cases, if the Quantcast IMDb statistics page is to be believed, is close to potentially 14,000,000 users and potential customers a month, and that is during one of the worse parts of the release calendar. With such a large, reliant audience stream visiting, its no wonder that a decent rating server side can give a show, film or game the extra boost it needs to get popular.
It is worth noting that IMDb fully supports criticism and uses the majority of the votes to put together an overall rating for a film which in many cases, if the Quantcast IMDb statistics page is to be believed, is close to potentially 14,000,000 users and potential customers a month, and that is during one of the worse parts of the release calendar. With such a large, reliant audience stream visiting, its no wonder that a decent rating server side can give a show, film or game the extra boost it needs to get popular.
If you look at a fairly recent user assembled list such as this one, you will notice that, even horror, a genre traditionally maligned for its adolescent vulgarity and distinct lack of artistic merit, has its community favorites sitting over seven stars high. However, this is only one persons opinion although all of the top three films share a common theme with my OTS in that they showcase unique serial killers possessed to kill by some dark, inherently human yet violently warped force, namely neglect, internal urges and revenge.
'Synth' will inevitably call upon this aspect with it's own unique killer, after all, the most memorable brand features of most horror films isn't the survivors or the deaths, even if they follow closely, what people remember are the killers. Friday the Thirteenth had Jason, A Nightmare on Elm Street had Freddy; Leather Face, Hannibal Lecter, Michael Myres, they all bring the viewers into their respective works with evidence in the form of 'Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch', a film that cast aside it's titular psycho, suffered both commercial and critical success, dropping to a pitiful 4.4 on IMDB against the first and second's 7.9 and 6.5 respectively, and grossing $14,000,000 in it's lifetime, barley half of Halloween 2's sumptuous $25,533,818 and tragic against the original's whopping $47,000,000. If we can learn anything from the ratings, evaluation and critiquing systems in place through things like IMDB, it's that the public speaks with its wallet, cultivating genre stagnation through an over-saturation of copy-cat content, forcing something new to drastically break the mold, perpetuating the great engine of capitalization that almost all mass mark entertainment aspires to. |
If we step down from the soap box however and turn our attention more towards the community consensus, there is a clear trend towards super natural or unearthly enemies with the likes of Insidious and Poltergeist highlighting the horror of such a threat to children. I do find it particularly interesting that super natural elements tend to merge with a very contemporary items (such as television and media in the 1988 Poltergeist or youth culture, sexuality and voyeurism in It Follows) to generate their horror, especially in regards to children or at the very least, young adults; those we'd assume to be defenseless and naturally dis-empowered.
Having looked at this, it is only befitting that 'Synth' will incorporate this aspect, utilizing the trance-like qualities the central antagonist suffers from to warp the world into something far more sinister than it actually is whilst simultaneously commenting on the exaggeration and aggrandizing of cinematic violence by cutting to a sudo-perspective of the victims who see the world through a much more saturated, shakily shot perspective. To appeal the this current trend of an omnipotent threat, the broadcasted voice of 'Layton' has been devised, a sadistically, deeply toned entity urging the killer on has taking prominence in the script, often breaking beyond the pre-recorded messages to directly address the Synth Killer and the audience themselves. |