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A2: Horror“Do you like Scary movies?” Scream (Craven, 1996) Horror stories are a central part of our culture. We are introduced to them almost as soon as we have learned to walk. Think about it: Hansel and Gretel are caged and fattened to be fed to a witch, Little Red Riding Hood is eaten by a wolf, Sleeping Beauty is cursed: these are horror stories as much as they are fairy tales. Infants are scared of nothing - they don't have the world experience for fear. Young children enjoy a little scare - perhaps because it reinforces for them what safety means - usually in the arms of a parent. Many older children revel in the shock factor of gory horror, and adults like to be scared too. As human beings in Western culture we have surrounded ourselves with risk-minimising safety cages. Our houses are alarmed, our cars have crumple zones, our shopping centres have security cameras, and our wild animals are either extinct or in reserves where they can't reach us. What is left to prompt our primal 'fight or flight' mechanism - what is there to really get our hearts pumping? Wes Craven (Scream, Red Eye) put it like this: "Horror films don't create fear, they release it.' For him, confronting nightmares in a safe environment like a cinema or the home allows the audience's pent-up anxieties to be harmlessly. It is cathartic. Is it any wonder that sex, drugs and horror films are so popular? Of course, the things that scare audiences change over time. In part, this appears to be because we become desensitised to 'horrific' visual stimuli. Tod Browning's Dracula scared the bloomers off its audience in 1931 - today it seems naive and pedestrian. Horror films also play with contemporary themes - what else was going on in society that frightened people at the time the film was made? However, the core of what it means to be a horror film - the essential signifiers, the audience response - recur repeatedly. Studying horror as a genre will allow us to see a) how society has developed, b) what people have been scared of and c) how media producers use our fears, and our expectations of the genre we now thing we know, to manipulate our emotional responses. Studying Horror as a Genre The AQA A Level study of genre requires that you take in the following:
We will explore these ideas through a selection of the following horror texts:
This year, this section of Allisonmedia will grow to include a history of the horror film and introductory notes on many of the texts we study. In the meantime, our study of the vampire sub-genre is already represented here (see menu, above left) and you may find some of the links (above right) useful as you begin your study. |
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