Summer Homework - REBECCA

HORROR RESEARCH: BECKY

 MEDIA HORROR FILMS

Horror films are unsettling movies there to deal with the viewer’s nightmares and fears. They are there to scare us yet also to entertain us. Horrors films try push right to the boundaries getting more brutal and scarier so films we once called horror may now be seen as thrillers. There are many sub-genres within horror many which overlap with fantasy, science fiction and thriller. The sub genres would be slasher, vampire, zombie, J-horror, thriller, monster and psychological. All of these sub-genres will have typical conventions that help us distinguish between them. For example horrors have a typical convention of the victim falling over when being chased by the killer. When watching a horror, conventions like that are not surprising to us and most of the time we know what to expect.

In slasher horror films typical conventions would be a final girl. There is  almost always a 'final girl' who usually has a unisex name e.g. Sidney. She would be the good one out of her group of her friends, the one who is still a virgin, doesn't drink or do drugs and is usually is the main character, often resulting to being the survivor in the film. The 'final girl’ would be alive to confront the killer and the one left to tell the story. These female characters in horror films are treated more like decorative objects and are seen as dumb and pretty lacking in IQ and are often high school girls. The killer/monster in films especially slasher usually has a trademark characteristic weather it is the way they kill, who they kill, weapon or simply the clothing and masks. In slashers it would typically be a male killer usually with a history of child trauma and are masked, mute or have a signature weapon. The violence in a slasher would be quite high level being very graphic creating a lot of terror and gore. 

 Examples for these conventions would be films like “Scream” and “Halloween”.  Both scream and Halloween have the killers with trademark characteristic about them which would be the masks and they also both have a 'final girl'. 

Splatter would be similar to slasher when coming convention but there is not usually a final girl. In splatters you would expect extreme gore as it goes straight to the blood and guts without hesitation. These films through special effects tend to display how venerable the human body can be. Occasionally the gore becomes so excessive that it becomes a comedic device. Again in splatters a lot of the killers are covered by masks or have that trademark.

An example of splatters would be “Saw” and “Chainsaw Massacre”.

With psychological and supernatural horrors the conventions really would be possessions, dark forces and spiritual presences. A lot of it would be very jumpy and there would hardly be any violence bloody and gore similarly to J-horrors.  Its acts on the fear of the unknown so there is little violence as it’s based on that fear and superstition and the idea of evil forces existing in the world.

Conventions would be loud noises and strange things happening without explanations. 

Another sub-genre within horror would be zombies. Theses are creatures usually portrayed as either a reanimated corpse or a mindless human being.  Zombie films are generally horror films however some do crossover into other genres such as comedy, science fiction or thriller. Zombie films would have a lot of typical conventions such as the way the look and walk around. They are always in packs contaminating and changing everyone they bite. There is also usually a group of people that stick together as they haven't been turned into a zombie yet but by the end only a couple would have survived.

Examples of zombie films would b
e “Dawn of the Dead”, “28 days later

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