My chosen genre is Horror which has many different repertoires depending on the sub genres. Horror films are used to scare, thrill and entertain the audience. They do this through a number of themes. One theme which permeates all horror films is fear. The purpose is to instill fear into the audience and keep them on the edge of their seat throughout the film by the use of sound, characters and setting.
The genre Horror is split into many sub genres that have their own repertoire of generic elements. One example of a sub genre for Horror is Slasher films. These normally involve a psychopathic killer, a sequence of killing several victims, lots of violence and blood. An example of this is 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'. Another sub genre is Action Horror, this involves combining the intrusion of evil with gun fights and frantic chases. An example of this would be 'Dawn of the Dead'. Comedy Horror is yet another sub genre. This is when a film combines elements of comedy with horror fiction which can be seen in 'Scary Movie'.
A horror film is usually set in an abandoned house, a lonely forest or a ghost town in order to represent isolation as this heightens the threat and the sense of fear that the audience will feel. However, some horror films challenge this stereotypical idea of being in an isolated place and in fact are set in a normal everyday life. We see this in the film 'The Shining' as it is set in a brightly lit hotel rather than a dark abandoned house.
We can recognise a Horror film simply through costume and props used. Usually the props used are ones that indicate evil, death or pain such as: guns, knives, axes, chainsaw and different types of masks. These are used to make it more realistic for example in a gun shot scene seeing a gun will heighten the effect on the audience. Furthermore, specific costumes can be used in a horror film, for example in a vampire film the costumes would usually be black and red as they are both colours which have connotations of blood and death, they would also have capes and fangs. Whereas in Psychological Horrors costumes can be normal everyday clothing. This again shows that the signifiers differ for Horror depending on its sub genre.
This is an accomplished piece of work Marnie with some good understanding of the generic conventions of the horror genre of film. You have shown that you understand the repertoire of generic elements and used some good examples of films from the genre. You might have considered detailing the economic reasons why film genres tend to merge (i.e. to appeal t a wider audience) and that horror is a genre which is particularly good at merging with sci-fi and/or action due to its content.
ReplyDelete