Horror Movie Genre - A Deconstruction essays

Horror Movie Genre - A Deconstruction essays "I've always thought that there are great similarities between directing horror and directing comedy. With both, you're building up tension and curiosity. The audience is asking, 'what possibly could the punchline be here?' It's the exploitation of tension and that's what horror is all about. You've got to create a situation that's unbearably tense and the audience knows that something's going to happen. That the guy in the black is suddenly going to leap into the frame. It's a very unifying thing in a cinema" These are the words of Wes Craven, director of the 1984 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street. Some would say he is one of the initiators of the horror/slasher genre that spurned a flurry of unnecessary sequels and myriad clones. Others would say that he helped implement a level of excellence on the teen horror flick that was only ever reached again recently. Horror films are designed to invoke our worst hidden fears and to draw out our human insecurities that lie deep within. Horror effectively focuses on the strange and forbidden side of life that alarms us. They deal with our most basic instincts of fear and survival: our nightmares, our vulnerability, our fear of the unknown, of death and our loss of identity. Whatever force lies behind the horror genre, it simultaneously attracts and repels us. We yearn to see the monster defeated and life return to its stagnant normality whilst we are terrified by the forces of chaos or horror which threaten our peaceful existence. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was a groundbreakingly important film. Until then no one ever dreamed of killing off the heroine in the first half-hour of the movie. Rarely nowadays do you see a movie's opening scene without an innocent teen in some sort of peril. Psycho paved the way for Night of the Living Dead which in turn influenced The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which culminated in the "slasher" films finest hour - John Carpenters Halloween. Without Halloween we ...