A (B)yron (S)tory Media Studies Blog

How does the Les Revenants opening construct cult audience? Les Revenants deliberately targets and constructs a niche and cult audience. The first episode's cold opening throws the viewer in entirely blind to the situation at hand within the narrative and doesn't take the time to overexplain anything. This immediately alienates casual viewers that are disinterested in having to put much thought into what they're watching on the screen. Intense opening music by Mogwai, bleak and sombre, this paired with the lowkey lighting lends itself to an atmosphere of a show that you have to be in a very particular mood to watch and consume, to be drawn into.  The symbolic function of the butterfly smashing through the glass, works as a proairetic code to inform the viewer bluntly on the nose that the show is one with themes of the cycle of life and death. It could also be a reference to the dead raising.  Magical Realist and New French Extreme are two niche genres that you could argue t...

Mogwai The band hired to write the original soundtrack for Les Revenants. Mogwai is a Glaswegian Alt-rock band with a huge cult following around the world, well-known the headline festivals.  Experimental/Alt-rock genre The majority of their songs are atypical for a rock band, due to their choice to perform instrumentals lacking in vocal backing, or a lead. Including this band in particular to create the soundtrack for Les Revenants, leads the show to be viewed by a pre-existing audience. Mogwai is Chinese for ghost, its a reference to the 80's film, Gremlins. This trailer was produced for DVD physical media copies, post-release in New Zealand. Trailer sells the show on something it is not, it's misleadingly generic in comparison to the product. Themes of death is a universal experience, so this is still used to advertise the show to an audience in New Zealand. Usage of direct address, questioning the viewer. Les Revenants merchandise/ Fandom

Les revenants is about the interrelationship between sex and death Explores the concepts of grief, misery, the feeling of losing a loved one.. But yet, how did it appeal to a mass-market audience? The show, while unconventional for the Horror genre, it is greatly generic as per the standards of conventional dramas and mysteries. From an aesthetic perspective, many of the significant characters are hegemonically attractive, the cast of all ages may appeal to someone. Sort of equivalent to a rom-com.  The family drama aspect of a family trying to push through a series of tough events, when boiled down to it is deeply relatable. Binary oppositions between many characters featured, Victor and Julie. Lena and Camille, Adele and Simon. Co-financed between Canal+, as well as the French alps tourist board. Stuart Hall - Reception Theory The preferred reading for Les Revenants is clear for the viewer to enjoy the mystery narrative,, the interrelationship between sex and death as mentioned a...

Les Revenants is arguably a highly uncommercial show due to it's themes and ideologies being harder to swallow in comparison to that of Humans. - The inevitability of death   Julie as character subverts hegemonic expectations of a how a woman should look and behave, they are not constructed in an expected manner. Les Revenants presents the audience with a complicated and hard to decode set of ideologies. Notes upon the scene in which Simon confronts Adele: Diegetic sound of footsteps, then the dog bark. Reinforces the fact that the diegetic location is perhaps filled with crime, or unsafe. Adele approaches the door slowly and cautiously, whilst suspenseful, non-diegetic music plays: This increases the tension as we are given more time to speculate what is about to happen.  In this Adele is presented as vulnerable as she is alone and she is a fairly weak looking women, this vulnerability is primarily presented through costume as she is wearing a long, cream slip dress, providin...

Les Revenants 26 November 2012 on Canal+ United Kingdom 9 June 2013 on Channel 4 2 series, 8 episodes each Based on the French film They Came Back (Les Revenants) (dir. Robin Campillo 2004) Created by Fabrice Gobert  There was a failed American remake of Les Revenants that only lasted 1 season, titled 'The Returned' released on March 9th, 2015.   Les Revenants v Humans, how can we tell which is more or less financially successful?: Les Revenants needing to be subtitled immediately throws it off being popular amongst mainstream appeal.  The show is entirely based around hermeneutic codes, meaning its difficult for people to understand, and continue to follow along with episode by episode: Who killed the person in the underpass? How long have the people been missing? who is the little boy? Is Camille the only person on the bus that came back? why did the missing people come back? What's the deal with that weird bus scene cliffhanger?  like seriously... I was so co...

  I n what ways does the TV industry use specialised forms of distribution ? Make reference to Humans in your answer. [15] [25 minutes] Knee jerk reaction: Humans uses a range of forms of specialised distribution in order to maximise profit.  Plan: Distribution - Sharing a product to a number of people, how a media product is 'given out', making a media product available to an audience to consume it. Channel 4  AMC - Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Preacher. Netflix (Streaming), Channel 4(Tv), DVD (Physical media).  Cult audiences - Niche Sci-fi show Guerilla marketing -> Pop-up augmented reality event on Regent Street - Unconventional Persona TV advert diegetically situated Persona Synthetics website Viral marketing transnational audiences  Humans British Science fiction show made in 2015 as a transnational media production between Channel 4 and AMC. Curren and Seaton: Power and the media industries REMEMBER TO BRING IT BACK TO THE QUESTION. PLEASE. Don...

Marketing is the act of selling a product, whilst promotion is that of raising awareness. Circulation - How many copies of a product are given out. Many hermeneutic codes are offered to the viewer within in the first episode, who is the company producing the synths? Just how sentient and self-aware are these AI? Diegetic - In the world of the narrative, this doesn't just refer to sound. A conventional trailer often incorporates montage of clips from the show/ film they are advertising paired to non-diegetic music, the guerilla marketing trailer used to advertise Humans was deeply unconventional as per being diegetically situated. Everything from the attention-grabbing and debatably controversial trailer, to the pop-up, augmented reality event on Regent Street, paired with the unconventional approaches to advertising, leads to a cult audience forming around the show. Being a small yet intensely motivated audience, this ties in neatly to Henry Jenkins' theories of Fandom. Fans / ...