summing up horror
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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