Messages we receive through media are subconsciously influencing us to fear life.  Fears are constructed, warped, and transferred into our daily lives through media.  Horror films contribute to this 'construction' of fear by presenting 'realistic' themes, camera work, lighting, location, language, etc..  

The original Scream is a 1996 horror film that includes a masked killer who murders numerous people in a seemingly normal suburban town.  Barthe's idea of denotation and connotation to the semiotics approach representation is critical in analyzing this popular horror film.  On the first level of denotation, this is a horror film about a killer in a suburban town going after high school students.  These signifiers of then enter the connotation level where we "interpret the completed signs in terms of the wider realms of social ideology- the general beliefs, conceptual frameworks and value systems of society" (Barthes 39).  

What links these two levels together are the construction of fear throughout the movie.  

I assume some of the characters in this film were carefully chosen for multiple reasons, one in particular being they are closely relatable to the target audience of Scream, teenagers.  Since the characters are so relatable, this movie is inflicting this certain fear upon us that anyone can be murdered, even upper middle class high school students.  

Another code which is adding to the construction of fear linked with symbolism are some of the more technical aspects.  One common theme throughout the movie was the fear of isolation and being alone.  All of the houses seemed to be in the middle of nowhere surrounded by never ending land.  The characters who were murdered were also alone every time they came in contact with the killer.  Being alone is now immediately linked with fear....

In this behind the scenes clip you can see the different lighting, camera angles, and locations.

The symbolic discourse of the killer in this movie reflects our 'fears' that are constructed daily through the media.