Directed by Alex Colonna, Black Mask (2014) is a short film about a young daughter who manifests a dark entity, mysteriously being linked to her father's dark past. Upon initially viewing the poster, I immediately though that it was very conventional. It attempts to recreate certain conventions that make up traditional Horror movie stock-characters. one of the most significant is the use of a young girl being used as the catalyst for the 'dark entity' to animate and use to terrorise the father.In intertextual terms, one of the most culturally striking movies in which this is done is The Exorcist (1973) which pushed the psychological boundaries on the relationship of the father and daughter, the father witnessing this entity destroying and tormenting her daughter's body.
What intrigued me about this product in particular is when the image of what girl was drawing in the trailer was revealed, it wasn't accompanied by a loud sound effect to create a jump scare, it was a slow build to the reveal and then the reveal left the audience with an eerie sound, which I feel creates a more sinister affect than using a loud sound to simply scare the audience. The child like scrawls on the canvas in Black Mask was similar to the book used in the Babadook (2014), when upon first watching this movie, the way it is incorporated into the narrative, creates a simialar tone of unease and tension.
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