Why are stories that 'aim to scare their audience' so popular?
The horror genre is a highly successful genre, with films that aims to scare their audience being immensely popular. Films that do cause a fright are most probably so successful due to the thrill that the audience seeks for when watching the movie; the sudden rush of fear makes the film more exhilarating to watch and more fully grabs the attention of the viewers.
What insight can the study of horror monsters give?
Daniel Cohen observed that our culture creates meaning to the monsters and antagonists in the horror films, giving them characteristics that are derived from our most deep fears and taboos. An analysis of horror monsters in their cultural context can thus give us an insight into the concerns, anxieties and fears of contemporary culture. This can identify general cultural and contextual trends via the creation of monsters created for horror films.
What did Nosferatu (1922), one of the earliest horror films use the vampire as a metaphor for?
Nosferatu (Murnau,1922) was an early, pre-WW1 film and has had major impact on the representation of vampires in horror films. The vampire in the film is seen as an invader as brings pestilence to the local community, attacking his victims with penetration and the exchange of bodily fluids. This can be seen as a sexual metaphor, however the outcome is usually ending with death or infection. The vampire figure of Count Orlok has a rat-like appearance and is seen to be hunched over, which can be viewed as a metaphor to portray the starving and diseased german population after WW1, where there was mass poverty and disease after Germany’s loss in the war, with the vampire invader representing the invading forces of the allies causing infection and poverty for the country.
Read to the end of the article. Make notes on how there are different readings of horror based on socio/cultural contexts of the decade
- Psycho (Hitchcock,2012) reflects the impact of Freudian theories on culture's understanding of the human psyche, with the ‘monster’ in the film being a man whose family dynamics created an abnormal psychology.
- At the start of the 1970s, enormous social and cultural changes had occurred, with previously having no black male leads in films, but in the Night of the Living Dead (Romero,1968) this did happen.
- Further on in that decade, the human monster became more sadistic, with films such as The Last House on the Left (Craven,1972) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hopper,1974) which included sustained graphic violence and gore.
- The Exorcist (Friedkin,1972) also gained a large amount of attention, as the film depicted the secularisation of society that had occurred after WW2, dealt with the unease that was caused by devils and demons and also addressed the post-war changes to the structure of a family.
- In the 1980s there was a sudden influx of slasher films that became a staple of the home video market, with the audience growing used to the genre’s visceral assaults leading to ore graphic violence. However this sub-genre was overdone, and in the 1990s it was mocked with the comedic film of Scream (Craven,1996) using an ironic approach to the genre.
- Many older films have been remade to be updated with improved CGI and SFX, however in these remakes the sense of cultural context is often lost and focus more on the visual spectacle rather than outlining the cultural fears.
- A notable development in contemporary horror is the sub genre of ‘torture-porn’ which focuses on extreme visceral violence, nudity and sadistic torture. Saw (Wan,2004) is a long-running film series that utilises CGI to maximise the extreme nature of violence and gore.
- More recent ‘feral youth’ human monsters highlight the over-stimulation of audiences to highly graphic and visceral violence causing somewhat desensitization, thus culminating to villains such as the monsters in Funny Games (Haneke,2008) wearing masks and thus creating an impersonal nature of the violence, causing a lack of clear motivation other than the desire for killing. These monsters are selfish, nihilistic creatures of the culture itself.
In the final paragraph, why according to Hendry is horror still relevant to audiences?
The genre of horror has the ability to adapt to suit each generation’s concerns and metaphorical approach can be used to deal with ideas and issues that appeal to a wide variety of audience groups. Traditional conventions can also be re-worked, with various notable film ideas being re-invented to suit a different audience that demands a more modern concept or adaptation. Horror continues to a highly popular genre since 100 years ago when it was first in celluloid.
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