Genre, Exploring the Horror Genre

For Stalker, I decided to focus on the psychological horror subgenre. This choice was influenced by my desire to create a sense of dread and discomfort in the audience, without relying on jump scares or excessive gore. Psychological horror is all about creating tension through atmosphere, subtlety, and the mind games that characters play, and this fits perfectly with the themes I wanted to explore in Stalker.

Key conventions of this subgenre include:

A slow building sense of dread and paranoia;

Uncertainty about what is real and what is imagined;

Often, the fear comes from the mind of the protagonist rather than an external threat;

I drew inspiration from films like Se7en and The Sixth Sense, which use psychological elements to slowly unravel the story. The idea is that the audience should feel uneasy right from the start, unsure about what’s really going on until the very end.