Research on horror

"Horror films are movies which strive to elicit the emotions of fear, horror and terror from there audience"
-from wikipedia

The earlist forms of horror were genarlly based on gothic books such as "Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde"and "Frankenstein", both of which have been made and remade a great deal of times. These films, due to being based on gothic fiction, tended to play on the fears of the supernatural

Post world war more forms of horror have emerged, at this point it could now be split into three sub categories.
-the personailty ("american phsyco")
-armagedon* ("28 days later")
-super natural ("constantine" )

*Due to the development of the atom bomb during world war and in the insuing cold war their was a fear of a nuclear armagedon. This fear of waking up one morning and the world ending or finding your country occupied by a hostile force, naturally spilled over into the horror genre and armagedon does become quite a previlant theme, examples can be seen in "the mist" which mixes armagedon with the super natural along with most zombie films especially the works of George A Romeo, zombies, in this context, being compared to an invader. Docu-Dramas such as The War Game also fead this perspective, with its horrific depiction of a post nuclear war britain, while not intended as a horror film, a modern audience could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, contempory audiences where band from even watching it as the bbc deamed it too horific especially while a nuclear attack was a feasable senario.

Another way horror can be sub catogarised is:
-Psycological - which relies on mind games and suspence to scare the audience ("the others" or "I am Legend")
-Gore/Slasher - use's exagerated violence to scare the audience ( "Aliens" "Grudge")


These traditional horror elements are frequently mixed with other genre, most notably
- "Alien" , which mixed traditional elements of supernatural horror with science fiction
- "Shawn of the dead", is a fusion of gore horror and comedy

Lastly their is the more saddistic natured films such as "Saw" and "Hostel" which have been dubbed "horror porn".These films tend to be gory to the extreme and feature people usually being graphicly tortured to death. The film "Vacancy" uses this kind of "horror porn" in its plot showing the two main characters checking into a hotel where a group of me try and kill them for pornographic film which they sell to saddistic people. This is considered quite a new sub cultures compared with the others listed emergencing post milenium compared to the other kinds which have existed post world war two.

sources: wikipedia , IMDB, www.videosift.com