summing up horror

SUMMING UP HORROR

• What is the purpose of horror movies?

• Do we derive basic thrills from the adrenaline rush that fear triggers?

• Do horror movies serve a wider moral purpose?

Summing Up Horror

• Horror movies are usually concerned with external threats to normality.

• Horror movies usually reflect the anxieties of their time.

• Over time, there has been a shift from easily identifiable threats to those “closer to home”, or threats which are not immediately identifiable as “evil”.

• E.g - Early horror dealt with monsters, werewolves & mummies whereas later movies dealt with threats from within communities.

Not a Straightforward Continuum

• Recent horror films have re-told old stories in different ways

• The vampire sub-genre has lasting popularity and changing appeal.

• Films continue to be made on Dracula legend.

• The focus, style, techniques and values evident in the text are often radically different.

Fundamental Themes

• Repression & the revenge of the repressed.

• Desires, tensions, fears and anxieties.• Horror plots are fantastical, but not

escapist. They are an attempt to deal with repressed materials.

• Horror is a “safe” way of confronting these things - a kind of “catharsis”.

Robin Wood

• “Dreams - the embodiment of repressed desires, tensions, fears that our conscious mind rejects - become possible when the censor that guards our subconscious relaxes in sleep, though even then the desires can only emerge in disguise, as fantasies that are innocent or apparently meaningless.”

» Robin Wood, 1979.

What the *@~#?!!

• The fantasy is a symptom of something else.

• It’s an expression of the tension between social norms and unconscious desires.

• The unconscious desires that erupt in dreams and horror films are the product of social repression.

• Horror implies a critique of the social world that represses these desires.

id

superego

ego

Horror Audiences

• A taste for westerns may seem strange, but a taste for horror films is often seen as somehow “sick”.

• People tend to watch horror films obsessively or not at all.

• How might this be significant for the producers of horror films?

Audiences & Institutions

• Horror genre can be seen as a “contract” between the industry & audience.

• Genres such as horror can be seen as standardised formulas.

• Standardisation in production and familiarity in consumption.

Audiences & Institutions - Part Deux!!

• Standardisation in production enables the streamlining of the techniques of mass production.

• Familiarity in consumption makes products easier to consume because the audience knows what is coming next.

And Finally...

• “The horror genre is an object that is composed of a collection of films that are related to one another through their common possession of an essentially invariant narrative pattern in which we all know ‘how it will end’…..”

» Horror - The Film Reader Mark Jancovich